Panelists discuss the latest updates regarding the conflict in the Middle East, the risks of wider escalation, and the role of the United States.
PLEASE NOTE: This meeting is part of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Term Member Conference. All CFR members are invited to attend this session virtually.
BODURTHA: Well, good morning and welcome back to the twenty-ninth Conference of the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program. I’m Nancy Bodurtha. I’m the vice president of meetings and membership here at the Council. If we didn’t have a chance to meet or to catch up last night, I hope to see you around the conference today and I look forward to speaking with you. As Mike Froman mentioned last night, we couldn’t be happier to welcome you to Washington for this annual conference. This is our largest term member conference to date, with over 450 people coming and going throughout the day. And many of you have traveled quite a distance to be here with us.
A little known and fun fact about the Council is that the plurality of our members hail from outside the greater New York and Washington, D.C. areas. And the national representation here today is impressive. We have geographic diversity in the house, coming from Arkansas, Indiana, Hawaii, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington state to name a few, as well as term members who’ve traveled from Japan, India, Mexico, and the U.K. In the program book, that I see some of you are holding, there’s a list of conference participants. But there’s also a QR code that links to everyone’s biographies. And it was a very humbling experience to read through those bios last evening.
This is in the spirit of what Nate Fick said last evening about you all being an intimidating audience. You are an incredibly accomplished group, and there is expertise here in everything from AI, to interfaith relations, to transnational crime, to space policy, to venture capital, and so much more. You’re an amazing community and I hope that your takeaways from the conference come from both the content of the sessions that you’ll be participating in today but also from the connections that you make with your fellow term members. We’ve very intentionally built in a number of networking breaks. I hope you’ll take full advantage of the opportunity to get to know one another throughout the course of the conference.
Some thank-yous are in order this morning.
First, I want to thank Andrew Gundlach, a Council member, and the Kellen family for the generosity of the Anna Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation in supporting the Term Member Program. The program is an important way for the Council to further its mission to develop talent and to cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders. Andrew and the Kellen Foundation make this possible.
I also want to recognize my colleagues Meaghan Fulco and Sam Dunderdale for their outstanding leadership in producing this event. So let’s have a round of applause for Meaghan and Sam. (Applause.) We should also thank the teams that have supported them in the planning, and now the execution, of the conference. And that includes our mighty Meetings team and my colleagues on the Events and Facilities teams. Thank you. (Applause.)
For this morning’s plenary, in addition to the 300 or so who are here in person, as Stacey just mentioned we’ve got another 150 term and life members joining us by the magic of Zoom. Given the focus on the Middle East and the expertise of our panel, we wanted to make this session accessible to the broader Council member community. My colleague, Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars, and, most importantly, the author of The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present and Future in the Middle East, will introduce our speakers and moderate the discussion. But before I yield the floor to Dr. Cook, we’re going to take sort of a commercial break to share a brief video about the Term Member Program with you.
And as you watch this footage, please think about any friends or colleagues in your circles who would benefit from and contribute to the Council and the Term Member Program. You are our best recruiters. And the next application deadline is coming up on January 10. The video and information about the application process—which, by the way, you all aced—is available on the Council’s website, CFR.org, so it’s easily shareable with prospective membership candidates. As Mike mentioned last night, Managing Director for Membership Vera Ranola and I are always happy to speak with prospective candidates and offer guidelines on the application process. So please feel free to connect us.
All right, so let’s roll the video. And then our speakers will join Stephen on stage for a discussion on conflict in the Middle East. And I look forward to seeing you all around the conference today. Thanks so much. (Applause.)
(A video presentation begins.)
TORRES: A few years now.
PESTEL: I have been a term member since 2021.
SHENAI: From 2018 to 2023.
RACUSIN: I’ve been a term member for three years now. And I would describe CFR as the leading young professionals’ organization that’s focused on foreign policy.
TAN: The Term Member Program does three things. Number one, it allows you to be informed. Second, it allows you to have impact. And the third is, it gives you access to an incredible network.
PESTEL: What really drew me to CFR was the span of topics covered in the programming. While I have spent the majority of my career in military intelligence and in the Army, the access to topics that I wasn’t familiar with gave me a chance to really stretch myself intellectually.
WANGU At the age at which you’re eligible for Term Member Program, that’s kind of really what you need. You need to learn as much as possible. You need to be exposed as much as possible. And you need to meet as many great and interesting people who are interested in helping you, and who you can help.
TAN: My term member cohort, of about 120 or so individuals, are among the most accomplished and impressive people that I’ve met. So what’s valuable about this network is that it is truly cross cutting.
FROMAN: I think one of the core functions of the Council is to really make sure that the next generation of diverse foreign policy expertise gets access to information, gets trained, meet each other, and become part of a community.
WANGU: Every year there’s a Term Member Conference. And it alternates between New York and D.C. It’s a day and a half of amazing, relevant programming that was just kind of expertly curated.
DENNING: I was struck by how many term members attended, the shared interests that the term members and I had, and the relationships that I was able to grow and develop through that Term Membership Conference.
SHENAI: I think trips are one of the key features of being a term member.
RACUSIN: And our trip was going to Miami and Key West to really learn more about the Coast Guard.
TORRES: I visited El Paso Texas. The Council worked with organizations on the ground, including nonprofits, NGOs, also government entities, to give us sort of the full-range perspective of everything that was happening on the border.
WANGU: A bunch of us in D.C. traveled to meet some term members in New York. And we spent the whole day touring the United Nations. What was most memorable was we had a lunch meeting with the current ambassador to the United Nations for the United States Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
TORRES: One of the highlights of my experience as a CFR term member has been my pairing with my mentor.
SHENAI: I was paired with a former U.S. Treasury Department official. And he and I maintained a great conversation—how I navigate my career serving in the International Monetary Fund is a new father.
FROMAN: The Term Member Program had a big impact on my career. First of all, it really helped me do my job. I was working at the White House and then working at the Treasury Department on international economic. But beyond that, of course, it exposed me to the Council itself. And so I can definitely say I would not have been president of the Council on Foreign Relations if I had not started as a term member.
SHENAI: Many of the Council’s scholars served in the highest levels of government. Almost all of the Cabinet-level officials in any administration have some connection to the Council. You have the opportunity to engage in a community that actively shapes the U.S. role in the global system and, critically, uses American power for positive ends.
TAN: What’s very important in this day and age is that no one lives or works in their silo anymore. It is incredibly important to understand what is going on in other sectors of the economy, in other parts of the country, in other countries around the world, and the interactions going on between them. And wherever you work, whatever you do, having that breadth of insight is something that will benefit you in the judgments you make and how you think about the world.
PESTEL: The NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, came to speak to CFR. He shared a story from his experience while in orbit around Earth. He talked about the gratitude that he felt in realizing that we’re all in this together. That really crystallized why coming together and talking about foreign policy is so important. Because, just as he said, we really are all in this together.
FROMAN: I’m hoping to provide even greater energy and support for the Term Member Program going forward. Very grateful to the Kellen family, and Andrew Gundlach, and others for making sure that we have all the support we need for this program to exist.
RACUSIN: My advice to someone who’s considering applying is immediately applying. Don’t think about it anymore. Just apply, apply, apply.
PESTEL: You may be thinking, is this for me? Am I an expert in my field? Do I have something to contribute? What will I get out of this? And my answer would be, you absolutely have to go for it.
TAN: Go ahead and apply. We’d love to meet you.
(Video presentation ends.)
COOK: Hey, everyone. It’s a great pleasure to be here with you at the Term Member Conference. I was getting nervous during that video. You noticed me—very quick photo of me at the end. I think I’m wearing the same tie. (Laughter.) Anyway, which is kind of embarrassing. I do have more than one, but I only take it out for Term Member Conferences. (Laughter.) Anyway, it’s a great pleasure to be with you this morning. I’m Steven Cook. Nancy, thank you very much for the kind introduction and for actually holding up the book. I want to remind everybody here, some of you may not be in this position yet, but I do have a child in college, so the book is helpful. (Laughter.)
Anyway, it is my tremendous pleasure to moderate a panel of three extraordinary experts this morning. The title of this session, the second plenary session, is The Threat of Regional Military Expansion in the Middle East. I’m going to use an expansive definition of The Threat of Regional Military Expansion in the Middle East and ask these fine folks things that I think are interesting and important. So it may or may not be about military expansion.
But let me start out by introducing the panel.
First, way to my right, is Professor Dana El Kurd, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond and the author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. She’s also a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. Let me just say that, from my perspective, Dana is one of the most interesting and important new voices on the scene on Palestine politics in the Middle East. We first met over the summer because I read Polarized and Demobilized, and I liked it so much I emailed her and I said, hey, next time you’re in Washington let’s get together and talk, because I think it’s such a terrific, terrific work.
Sitting next to Dana is General Stanley McChrystal, the CEO and chairman of McChrystal Group. Former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command and a fellow CFR member. You’ll notice, I’ll refer to Dana as Dana and Alex as Alex, but I will refer to General McChrystal as General McChrystal. When you’re the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, I want to be as absolutely proper and polite as I possibly can. I don’t want to cross any lines here with this guy, OK? (Laughter.)
And sitting just to my right is Alex Vatanka, the director of the Iran Program and a senior fellow in the Black Sea Program, many programs, at the Middle East Institute. Alex is also one of the most interesting and important voices in Washington, D.C. on Iran and Iranian politics, and apparently also the Black Sea, which is important to Iran. So let’s get started. I’m going to ask some questions for the next half an hour, and then we’ll open it up to you all.
Dana, I want to start with you. And again, folks, this is not just about military expansion. I think we need to get some kind of ground truth about what’s going on in the region. And, Dana, let’s start. You had a piece in the Financial Times relatively recently in which you were critical of policymakers, particularly American policymakers but policymakers in the West, for ignoring the Palestinians when it comes to the Palestinian political reality. I’ve seen this myself. People talk about, oh, well, we’ll do this, this and this. And has anybody asked the Palestinians about this? So if you’re sitting with said policymakers, what are the three most important things you want them to know about Palestinian politics, as we think about things in the region going forward?
EL KURD: I may not be able to stick to three, but I’ll try.
COOK: Try the three, and then we’ll—I’ll get you to work in the other ones later.
EL KURD: Right, right, of course. Yeah, thank you for having me.
So I think the first issue is that they need to understand particular solutions that they have put together in the past will no longer be relevant in the future. So the ways in which Palestinian politics has been attempted to be controlled really no longer can play out in the same way that the last thirty years has played out. So the legitimacy crisis that I identify in that piece is a really serious issue in Palestinian politics. Meaning that it’s not just ignoring the Palestinians in some sort of Israeli-UAE deal that’s being discussed for postwar Gaza. It’s for the long-term Palestinian political trajectory that they need to engage with all of the actors that are relevant in that political trajectory.
So I know that there’s a lot of, you know, kind of wishful thinking, I think, about being able to sideline particular political actors in that discussion. And—
COOK: Those political actors being?
EL KURD: Well, not only particular elements within Fatah, but also Hanas, but also other actors. (Laughs.) And so right now, for example, there is an attempt by a Palestinian civil society called the Palestinian National Conference. That has been trying for the—you know, the better part of the last year to move beyond the Palestinian legitimacy crisis and address some of these issues. But I haven’t seen any actual, you know, engagement with this kind of—this kind of initiative.
The second thing is, there have been a lot of discussions about further fragmenting Palestinians. So, for example, there’s been this idea floated that, like there could be particular mayors appointed in Gaza in the aftermath, and they can try this out, and kind of cantonments in the Gaza Strip, and it can resemble something that’s happening in the West Bank. Again, that’s not going to work. There have been many historical examples of this not working, including before Oslo, during Oslo.
And finally, I think that one thing that policymakers need to understand is that when they discuss a two-state solution, a one-state solution, whatever is—whatever configuration of a solution is supposed to get us out of this crisis, they need to understand what Palestinians mean when they say state, and what they mean when they say sovereignty. I think that that has been really downplayed in the discussions and/or assumed, and assume that there could be some sort of realignment about the fact that people mean very different things about these issues. So I can elaborate more as we move on.
COOK: Great. Thanks very much. It’s a terrific way to start.
General, I’m going to skip over you moment—just momentarily, and go to—go to Alex. Because, again, I want to get—I want to get some of the current events out first.
Alex, you wrote actually a little bit—a while ago, 2023 for Foreign Policy magazine. You wrote a piece that said: Iran can’t afford a regional war. And you identified one of the reasons why Iran can’t afford a regional war is because Iranians resent the axis of resistance. And that, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC must factor in public opinion when it comes to the conflict that has enveloped the region. But since then, Iran has fired missiles and drones at Israel. That was April. And then most recently, I guess about a month ago, fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel. And as we sit here today, everybody is wondering when and how the Israelis are going to respond. Seems like there’s kind of a regional war in the offing. So do you reevaluate? Do—they still can’t? Are they still unable to afford it? And what about Iranian public opinion and this unfolding conflict?
VATANKA: Well, first, good morning, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be with you all, and fellow panelists.
Look, I—let me—let me ask this question of myself, as a way of answering your question. Did Iran know that Hamas would attack Israel on October 7 of last year? I’ve seen all sorts of reports out there. A lot of it is misinformation. It’s disinformation. I would tend to say they probably didn’t. That doesn’t mean they don’t support Hamas. The track record of Iranian support for Hamas is there for anyone to see. But did they know on October 7 that that would happen, that attack would happen? I tend to think, probably not. And, by the way, Hamas leadership in Doha and Qatar probably didn’t know either.
What I’m trying to get at is Iran is engaged in the long war against Israel. Iran does not have the confidence for that big clash with Israel today or next month, or next year. Just listen to the speeches of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He says it all the time. This is a long war. This is a generational war. Israel has been around for seventy-six years in this—in this part of the world, but is it going to be around for another twenty-five years or fifty years?
The Iranian narrative—and I think everyone in this room knows that—the Iranian narrative, which is really hard to miss, is that Israel is a Western colonial settler project. And at some point the cost-benefit analysis for being in this region will change for the Israeli people, and will change for, most importantly, the main protector of Israel, the United States. And without the support of United States, there will be no Israel in the Middle East. That’s the narrative. That’s not me saying so. This is the Iranian regime’s narrative.
So if you believe in the long war, then what you’ve seen over the last year goes counter to that calculation in Tehran, because what has Israel been able to do over the last year? Hamas is pretty much out of business, at least for now. I wouldn’t count them out forever. But I wouldn’t count any Palestinian political movement out forever. I mean, we’ve seen over the last—since 1948 that you can’t marginalize the Palestinians. They’ll come back until they get something that they can live with, to Dana’s point.
So I think, Steven, yes. They can’t afford that war. And there are a lot of factors why they have that position. You mentioned the most important one. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a bigger enemy than Israel. It’s called the Iranian people. The Iranian people do not like the Islamic Republic. If I had put numbers out there, I’ll say probably 15 percent of the country’s ninety million people support the regime. Again, 15 percent out of ninety million is a pretty significant number. So they still have enough forces to go out there and repress to keep the regime in power in Iran, and enough spare capacity to go out in the region and keep what’s left of the axis of resistance.
And I think that’s going to remain true for now. But if there is that big war that some people are anticipating, I’m skeptical. I don’t think it’s just not Iran that doesn’t want that regional war. I don’t think the United States wants that regional war. And I think the U.S. is on good ground for not wanting to get sucked into another war in that part of the world when we—as we all know China, Russia and other issues that there should be also top of the list for the United States. So I think when you don’t have the Iranian people behind you—and you got to stop me because sometimes start ranting in the mornings—(laughter)—
COOK: I have a follow up. I’m going to stop you. I’m going to give you two more sentences, and then I’m going to—
VATANKA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. (Laughs.) Two more—no, let me—let me make one final comparison, and I’ll stop. September of 1980—September of 1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran.
COOK: None of you were alive.
VATANKA: None of you were alive.
COOK: I was. I was.
VATANKA: I was alive. I was not a soldier. So that was supposed to be the end of the Khomeini regime. A lot of people thought. Didn’t happen. The opposite happened. The regime got consolidated. And forty-five years later, here we are. So be careful in terms of the quick solutions. What can Iran also do? It can bring a lot of damage to the region in a regional war in the short term. In the long term, questionable. But the big difference between ’80 and today is rallying the people of Iran around the flag against Israel is that much tougher, because the Iranian people think this fight with Israel is a fight of choice by the Iranian regime. That if you leave Israel alone, Israel will leave you alone.
COOK: Let me ask you a question. From where do you derive those numbers about Iranian support—about the people’s support for the regime, or not? Where does that come from? I mean, you know, I’ve spent a long time working on the Middle East. And, you know, for years, people have given me numbers about support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or support for Hamas in Gaza, in the West Bank. And it rarely kind of lines up with reality. So, where does that come from?
VATANKA: You’re right. It’s a tough one. There are no scientific data here to point to. For obvious reason, the Islamic Republic doesn’t allow you to go in and do surveys. (Laughter.) So no surprise—
COOK: Well they, do as long as it comes out the right way.
VATANKA: But there are—there are lots of ways—and I’m glad you asked this question. There are lots of ways you can actually, from outside, still do pretty scientific polling. And we actually just published one at the Middle East Institute. I would urge those interested to go on our website and check it out. But let me give you two numbers that I thought were interesting. Seventy-eight percent of Iranians think that the regime’s foreign policy is making life worse for them at home. And 68 percent of Iranians believe in normalizing relations United States as soon as possible.
So you have a regime in Tehran that is engaged in a foreign policy that it’s not only not advancing the people’s livelihood and, you know, bettering their lives, it’s doing the opposite. It’s bringing war to them. And that’s not going to be sustainable. And again, Steven, how many volunteers you think the Iranian region can get to send to fight Israel in Lebanon or Gaza? So far, they’ve sent zero. And that’s because they know it’s going to be a tough challenge for them to get people excited about a war they don’t want.
COOK: Great. Thanks very much. General McChrystal, let’s assume for a second—maybe I don’t need to assume—that the McChrystal Group has a contract with the Pentagon. (Laughter.) And, you know, this is how Washington works. And the secretary of defense said—sent you out to Israel to meet the Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, and kind of get a gage of what’s going on. What would your advice be to the IDF brass about bringing the war in Gaza to end, and Lebanon?
MCCHRYSTAL: Well, thanks for having me here, everybody. And to term members, watch this. He just asked a question I’m going to answer what I want to answer. (Laughter.)
COOK: Well played, sir. Well played. And you’re allowed.
MCCHRYSTAL: So I did go out—in January, I did go out to Israel with Michele Flournoy and a couple of friends. And we met with many of the people that I had known for my time in special operations and intelligence. And so connected with them. And I was able to get—it was about two and a half months after October 7. We went down Be’eri. We went down to Gaza. And I had been there, right after the 2006 war. So I don’t claim to be an expert, but I know a lot of the players. And so I was able to have some really interesting conversations.
What I’d offer to you is, when you think about war and you see it from afar, it looks a bit clean. It looks—it’s on maps and, I mean, there’s damage and death, but still, it’s big movements. The first thing that jumped out at me in Israel was the rage on the part of the military and intelligence people about October 7, partly because of the horrendous things that happened, partly because they’ve been caught flatfooted. They were humiliated. And humiliation produces a kind of motivation that’s different from just anger. You really want to reprove yourself. So that was one of the first things.
And we went down and saw the Golani Brigade just as it came out of its first couple of months in Gaza. And it was young people. Many of you in this room have served. I’ve got some comrades in here, and thanks for what you’ve done. They pulled the track vehicles out, and they were in this recently flattened field. And they parked the track vehicles next to each other. They dropped the ramps. These young kids, men and women, literally look about fifteen years old. They were slightly older than that, but they’d just come out of two months combat. They were different people. How they interacted with each other was different.
When somebody comes out of that experience, you put on—you act like you think a veteran is supposed to act, because nobody ever taught you that. But suddenly you’ve been out there, you’ve seen the elephant, you know the deal. And they came out, and they were acting that way. Not arrogant or braggadocious, but with a—almost a feigned confidence, and whatnot. What I would tell you we were watching there, and it happens on every side. It’s not political. I happen to be with Israeli forces. That generation just became made men and women. Before they’d had to read the stories of the War of Independence, ’67, ’73, and here are the heroes and all this. Now they had been, and they had had a trial by fire.
And they didn’t have a flashy victory like before, but the point is that’s going to change Israeli society. Because they are going to be a constituency now with a seat at the table. And that’s—it won’t be obvious at first, but they will have a seat at the table because in their minds, and in the minds of other people, they’ve earned that. The other thing it will do to them, unfortunately, is wars start for political reasons and they continue for very human reasons. They continue because you lost your friends, your buddies. You can be on the fence when you start, but after you fight for a while you are for your side. You can very—you can do an analytical thing and say, well, the other side’s got an absolutely valid point. I got it. But I’m on this side, and I got to fight on my side.
That’s one of the dangers of anything like this, because once you start fighting you do—you start this binary phenomenon. And then it takes real leadership to start to break down and get it back to politics, like Clausewitz reminded us. You know, it’s an extension of politics, and into politics it must return. And so that’s the first thing. What we’re seeing in the region now is the rules have been changed. There were a number of rules for a number of years that a lot of people didn’t like, but now we are to much wider combat. We are doing things—we are seeing things done on both sides that people wouldn’t have done a couple of years ago. That beeper attack was extraordinary. It was clever, but it changed the rules. That was the kind of thing that we wouldn’t have done because of potential countermeasures by an enemy.
So I throw that out to you. So as we think about how this region is going to be, there is a military dynamic that we haven’t seen for a while. And that dynamic is going to rule for a period of time. Hopefully, not too long, but there is a momentum to that that that is going to be dominant. It’s going to be hard for politicians or societies to control. And it will take a while before things can, I think, get into a position where you start to have really rational conversations about the future, and whatnot. It just—at a certain point, it’s hard for those to occur.
COOK: Thank you, sir.
Pivoting off of that, let me go back to you for a second, Dana. The future, you mentioned it briefly in your—in your response to my previous question, about an Emirati-Israeli plan for Gaza. And there’s been so much talk about the day after. In fact, my research associate, who I see over here, and I collected every day-after plan that was produced in the months—I mean, it was—it was prolific. Washington is prolific. Everybody had a day-after plan. But none of them, as you wrote, are connected to reality. So two-part question for you. What is your preferred day-after scenario for Gaza? And what is the most likely day after scenario for Gaza?
EL KURD: Yeah. So let me respond to that question and also pivot off of what General McChrystal just said. It’s deeply concerning, some of the things that you’re mentioning, because already Israeli society was going to the right, was becoming less interested in the political solution. And when we see polling, I know you said polling, where did these numbers come from? But the Palestinians are the most polled in the world, and very scientifically. So when we see polling, for example, about what some of the fears that Palestinians have in this moment is that what happened in Gaza will be replicated in West Bank. I don’t think that that’s an unreasonable fear. There is—there are elements in the government, and now clearly elements in society, that don’t mind that level of mass violence and that level of destruction.
So I’m also concerned on the Palestinian side that—what you’re seeing emerging out of what the Cost of War Project out of Brown University said is possibly 200,000 dead, is one estimate—is a generation that sees no hope in the political solution. Not because of a buddy dying or revenge or things like that, but because of the sheer level of devastation that they’ve witnessed currently in the Gaza Strip, that they have been subject to, and what other Palestinians are facing in other parts of the occupied territories. So in that scenario, I’m thinking the kind of Yahya Sinwar of these people who don’t have grand ideological ideas. They are people who see that armed resistance and armed action is the only solution. That is going to become much more—you know, that’s going to be just much more salient to Palestinians over time, because the political solutions are closed off to them.
So my ideal scenario for any—you know, first of all, immediate ceasefire and immediate ends to the conflict. It would be to engage the Palestinian stakeholders in the humanitarian relief after and in the political process moving forward, so that you can provide some relief to this kind of level of devastation, and the sense that there are no options and that it is closed off. I understand that there were—there is absolutely no appetite on the Israeli side. But that’s why the United States is the key actor here. So the Israelis can be made to have an appetite for this kind of action, and moving towards a political option more quickly, if the United States, which is the main benefactor which is already involved in their war, changes its policies. Like, it’s just very simple. So that would be my ideal scenario, that the United States changes how it’s engaging with the Israeli side so that political options become available.
What can happen? It seems—or what is likely going to happen? It seems that, just from my discussions in the last couple of weeks, the Biden administration does, you know, has ceasefire off the table and wants to wait it out until after the election. I don’t—you know, there’s a lot of kind of ambiguity about what the—or, if it’s a Trump election—Trump is elected, that’s one scenario. If Harris is elected, there’s also some ambiguity about, you know, what the process moving forward is as well. But there’s this, like, fake Winston Churchill quote about how the Americans will exhaust all bad options and then, like, they’ll do the right thing. (Laughter.) So perhaps—but, you know, after exhausting all the Israeli-UAE plans, and seeing that this is not going to come to fruition, and that Palestinians will continue to be a thorn in the side of all of these—all of these discussions, perhaps the likely scenario is that we wait very long, but then we finally get to the political option at some point. (Laughs.) I know it’s not—it’s not very cheery.
COOK: (Laughs.) Well, yes. Not very cheery.
Alex, let me go to you for a second round here. The new Iranian president, whose last name I have a really hard time pronouncing. I had no problem with Ahmadinejad, but I have a hard time with Pezeshkian.
VATANKA: Pezeshkian.
COOK: Pezeshkian. OK, great. Now I know. My Farsi is—my Farsi extends to “death to America.” And when he was—when he was—I mean, I don’t support it. That’s the that’s the Farsi I know. (Laughter.)
VATANKA: Very good Farsi.
COOK: When he was in New York for you UNGA, he came armed with a message about peace and cooperation. Should we—and, you know, immediately the press picked this up, and there was general interest among European allies of the United States. And there are, you know, folks here in Washington who said we should take this very seriously. Should we take it seriously?
VATANKA: I wouldn’t take Pezeshkian seriously, for simple fact that in Islamic Republic the president is not really the person who decides strategic policy, certainly not on what to do with the United States and Israel. These are sort of decided at two other centers of power—the Office of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who’s been there since 1989 and he’s not going to go anywhere despite the fact that he’s eighty-five, but he looks pretty sharp from when I listen to his speeches. And the other one are the Revolutionary Guards. These are the guys who are running around in the region recruiting Arabs to fight Iran’s wars for it, essentially.
So Pezeshkian had his trip to New York. And that message, you know, when people don’t know the Iranian system, you should be forgiven for thinking, well, there’s the president of the country. He’s talking peace. He’s talking a new nuclear deal. But Iran watchers would tell you that that’s great. That’s a wonderful message. But let’s look actually what you’re doing in the region. Where’s the change? Where’s the change on your position? Look, the two pillars of Iranian policy since—(background noise)—bless you—since 1979. Two pillars. (Background noise.) Bless you, yes. Two pillars. Fight Israel, and to the extent that you can squeeze the United States out of the Middle East. It has been true for about forty-five years. Unless the Iranian regime, including the president, are willing to show some genuine movement on those issues, then I don’t see where you can take Iran’s call for détente, rapprochement on other issues that seriously.
Essentially, what, Steven, they’re trying to do is—and it didn’t work out in 2015 with the last nuclear deal, and it’s not going to work out with another nuclear deal. You cannot just isolate the issue of Iran’s nuclear deal, have a diplomatic resolution, because it will be a temporary one at best, because the problems between Iran and the West, particularly the United States, are obviously deeper than just the nuclear issue. It involves, above all, what Iran is doing in region, and that policy of squeezing the United States out or challenging us interests. That needs to be adjusted on the part of Iran for the United States to take an Iranian call—a Pezeshkian call for sort of a rapprochement more seriously.
That was—you know, I was somebody who basically defended, to the extent that I could without not being a nuclear scientist, the 2015 nuclear deal. I said, look, it’s clearly not perfect, but it’s the best thing you can achieve under the circumstances. This idea that you can get them to surrender and give you everything they have, it’s not going to happen. So take what you have. But the Trump administration’s policy of pulling out of the deal had also its reasons, in the sense that it said, well, we don’t want a nuclear deal while you guys are making money selling oil, becoming more powerful, but you’re not walking away from your two pillars in terms of policies of confronting Israel and squeezing the United States out.
And on that front, Steven, I didn’t hear Pezeshkian bring any new messages. But I have to say—and this takes me to the issue of who really calls the shots in Iran. I don’t know what happened to that previous Iranian president’s helicopter trip that crashed into the mountains in May. All sorts of theories out there. But I do know for sure that it was very convenient for the so-called “deep state” in Iran to turn that into an opportunity to suddenly present a new face to the world.
Because Pezeshkian, God bless him, he’s a nobody, essentially. In the sense of, he doesn’t have his own network. He doesn’t have a base. He doesn’t even have a base, as Ahmadinejad did. So he is very much manufactured by what I call the deep state. He is put on the stage. He speaks a very plain Persian language. You’ll pick it up soon. (Laughter.) A very, very plain Persian language. It appeals to anybody. Really appeals to anybody. So I see why they put him out there as president. But when I—as, again, Iran watcher, put my hat on, go, hmm, is it really serious? Is it another gimmick? And that’s where I kind of struggle.
COOK: Gotcha. By the way, Ahmadinejad has a great Twitter game. General McChrystal, let’s talk about the Red Sea for a moment, because this is an obvious flash point. And there’s been a fair amount of criticism of U.S. posture in the Red Sea. How would you evaluate the American effort to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea? And do the reports that the Russians have been providing targeting for the Houthis change anything, from your perspective?
MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah. Thanks. I think the U.S. has done pretty well in the Red Sea. I mean, it’s easy to be critical from afar, but it’s a lot harder to do. It’s like when we started—first dealt with Somali pirates everybody said, how hard can that be? Well, it can be very hard. And then the Red Sea, if you look at the geography of it, it’s pretty hard to stop an organization like the Houthis. And then, of course, as Peter Bergen pointed out, we said, well just bomb the Houthis. Well, they’ve been bombed more than anybody in history, and they’re really good at being bombed. (Laughter.)
So it’s really hard, unless you go on the ground in Yemen, to really—to stop. Because you can move in precision weapons now that are pretty dangerous. So I think we’ve done pretty well. I mean, the level of effort it would take to completely shut that down is probably unrealistic. The real question is, of course, outside support. You know, as long as Iran supports the Houthis and the Russians with targeting data—and I don’t know whether that’s correct or not, but it would be valuable to them—as long as they’re getting outside support, they’re likely to keep up doing what they’re do.
COOK: So then the implication of what you’re saying is that the United States should focus less—continue doing what it’s doing with the Houthis, but focus some of its attention on Iran if we want to ensure the freedom of navigation, which is a core global interest to the United States.
MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think it goes to all of them. It goes to Hezbollah. It goes to Hamas. It goes to the Houthis. The foreign policy levers that Iran has been pulling have been proxies. And they’ve done it very well. And they have been able to do that for long enough where I think it takes the world to stop them. There should be national—or, international norms that pressure them. And, of course, as Alex said, and I am persuaded by your argument about where the Iranian people are, whatever we can do to help move the Iranian population away from that—I’m not recommending that we go head-to-head militarily with Iran. I don’t see much value in that. But I do think in the short term we go after the proxies where we have to, but we pressure Iran.
COOK: Understood, OK, we’re just at 10:00, which is my moment to open it up to all of you. Let me just—as a reminder, this is an on-the-record meeting. So if you have something salty you want to say, you might want to think twice about it. I can’t believe I just said salty. Anyway, we’re going to focus our—the questions on you all in Washington. But we do have people on Zoom. And we may take a virtual question. So let me see hands. Straight back from me, yes, right there. Christina, yeah, you’re in the right place. Great. Please identify yourself. We know you’re a term member. We don’t need your resume. Just your name. Thank you.
Q: Thank you.
To Dana’s point about the need for the United States to really engage in order to change the course of the crisis in Gaza, can you all speak to the specific levers that you think would be effective? What kinds of weapons sales and what other things might be restricted, or other conversations that have been had. What would be effective?
EL KURD: Shall I start?
COOK: Please.
EL KURD: I mean conditioning military aid to begin with, beyond the thirty day, you know, possible red lines that have been discussed. I know that there’s—I mean, I’m not an American politics expert, but I know that within the Biden administration there’s like kind of an ideological commitment to, you know, bear hugging Netanyahu and, you know, not touching those issues. But actually conditioning aid when it comes to applying international norms and laws, as well as U.S. laws, I think that that’s the first step. So that would be—I don’t think the Israelis would have been able to conduct the level of war that they have without American support. So that would be my first step for that.
COOK: Do you have another step?
EL KURD: Well, I was hoping other people would speak. (Laughter.)
COOK: OK, you said first, so it made me think that you might have a second. Either of you want to take a stab at this? No? OK. Great. Right here. This guy’s hand was first, really quick.
Q: Thank you very much. Joseph Gasparro, Royal Bank of Canada.
It’s been thirty-five minutes. There has been no talk of Saudi Arabia. And if you look at just broader dominant power in the region, obviously Israel is probably one of the biggest contentious points between Iran and the Saudis. Love to get a sense of how much does that take out of your broader mind share. Is it zero? Is it 5 percent, 10 percent? Could there be a broader, you know, regional conflict with them? Thank you.
COOK: Alex, you want to take it?
VATANKA: Yeah, I mean, look, it’s a really important question, because Saudi Arabia is such a significant player, obviously. But, you know, where they are at—and I’m—certainly, I’m an Iran watcher. I spend ten days—ten hours a day watching what’s going on in Iran. That’s a whole different country and a whole different set of challenges. But from what I understand, Saudi Arabia right now, bottom line, just wants to be left out. Does not want to become a frontline state. Does not want to have to fight America’s war against Iran, or Israel’s war against Iran for it. Doesn’t want to provide even airspace rights to the Israelis.
So they are focused. They got a generational shift of power. They got a, you know, crown prince who is not even forty yet, MBS, who is committed to economic development, integration into the world’s global economy, post oil—all sorts of things that you don’t hear the Iranian side talk about, right? The Iranian side is talking about—you know, you really can’t start fixing Middle East, if you will, until the issue of the Palestinians has been resolved. Now, for some Arab countries Saudi Arabia didn’t make the Abraham Accords but, you know, the United Arab Emirates did, Bahrain did, Morocco did, Sudan did.
Before October 7 of last year, you had two sort of narratives out there, two models that you could subscribe to—Abraham Accords, the idea that you can, through engagement, integration, economically, politically, with Israel get them to sort of give the Palestinians a better deal. That was before October of last year. Obviously, right now nobody wants to talk about expansion of Abraham Accords, because it’s not seriously going to go anywhere. It’s Iran’s axis of resistance that might gain traction depending what happens in in Gaza, in the West Bank, and elsewhere.
I said earlier, the Iranian people are not backing the axis of resistance. And I’m genuinely of that belief. But I’m not sure if the Arab street out there might not find axis of resistance actually the only way to deal with the issue of helping the Palestinians. And that’s a challenge for the United States, because that axis of resistance message isn’t just gaining traction in in some quarters in the Middle East, but the Global South. In the third world, if you will, if you can use the word “third world” anymore.
But final thing, it’s interesting. You got twenty-two Arab countries that are more or less on the fence in terms of their governments. And then you got Iran, non-Arab country, that is all in. You know, if you’re not careful then you’re giving the Iranians an opportunity here to exploit what’s happening. And that’s really a challenge for the United States. To the point about—you know, U.S. needs to help Israel, for obvious reasons. There are all sorts of things you can point to—moral, political, you know, historic. But at some point, U.S. needs to go back, once the timing is right—and I frankly, don’t know when that is—and sort of try and see if you can avoid giving the Iranians something they have always exploited since 1979, taking advantage of somebody else’s mess up.
That’s how Iran has always succeeded in the region. You don’t have one example of the Islamic Republic walking into a state that’s operating normally and being able to turn things around in their favor. Iran only succeeds when there is security vacuum, when there’s a state collapse, and they can come in with a bit of money, a bit of indoctrination, to turn things around in their favor. That has to be something that should be on the radar and avoided.
COOK: General McChrystal, you want to get in on this Saudi-Iran issue?
MCCHRYSTAL: It seems to me that there’s a significant part of the region, sort of led by the Saudis, who want to move on to some different future. And they would like—to be honest, they’d like Palestine just to go off the radar screen, and they’d like to move on. And I think they’d like the Iran, you know, friction to do the same. And so my sense is we’ve got this pull between the past—and the Palestinians sort of reflect the past. At least, that issue reflects the past, because it used to be supported by Egypt, Jordan, you know, all of the other nations. And now they’re pretty quiet about it. And so I think that that’s the basic tension. And I’m not sure where they go. I’m not sure where—that I understand where the people of the region’s popular opinion is.
COOK: Understood. Dana, you want to jump in there for a second?
EL KURD: Yeah. So the latest polling from the Arab Opinion Index back in January of last year shows pretty consistent trends in where people are at regarding the Abraham Accords, regarding all these issues. So in terms of their support for the—for normalization with Israel and the Abraham Accords, it’s very, very low, less than 10 percent, depending on which country. And this was polling that was conducted in sixteen different Arab countries, and so it’s a pretty wide swath. And in terms of their support for the Palestinian cause, it’s very, very high, especially in the aftermath of the war in Gaza. And it’s only gotten higher, but still very consistent over time. And so when we say—when I hear something like Palestine is an issue of the past, I think governments in the region certainly want it to be an issue of the past. I don’t think the people think of it as an issue of the past in any shape or form. This is very much an alive issue for the vast majority of the Arab world.
Now, I know that in the United States when I speak to audiences like this the question I always get is, like, you know, why should we care what they think? These are authoritarian systems. As long as the leaders are on board with our restructuring of the region and our Abraham Accords and our—and our security arrangements, then, you know, the people will come along, or they’ll be repressed into it. But the fact is that that is not a sustainable situation because the Palestinian issue is not just an emotional issue for Arabs in the Arab world. It represents this issue of unaccountable government. And that kind of connection in people’s minds between the Palestinian crisis, what’s happening to Palestinians, what they’re seeing on—you know, on their screens, as well as their inability to even oppose particular issues that their government is supporting, or, you know, being able to just say that they’re pro-Palestinian. They’re feeling repression around that, and obviously to varying levels across the region.
That becomes an incubator for dissent. And we’ve seen it in the past. I mean, the people that put on and were responsible for the organizing that led to the Arab Spring in Egypt became, you know, politically active and motivated as a result of the protests around the second Palestinian Intifada. So it’s, I think, a very—again, just Washington not really learning any lessons from the past thirty years, which is that we seem to think that we can sideline this issue. And we seem to think that the Arab street and the Palestinian issue isn’t going to continue to impact our strategic interests in the region. And that’s just not going to happen.
I wanted to say one more thing, and I’ve forgotten it. (Laughs.)
COOK: OK, we’ll give you an opportunity. Right here. I’ll get to the back of the room, don’t worry.
Q: Hi. Chloe Demrovsky. Thank you so much for this.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the impact of weaponized interdependence. And I’m so—I’m curious for your thoughts on the interplay between economic and other financial levers—sanctions, informational tools—with our military objectives, the impact on Iranian behavior, and on the Palestinian side the effectiveness of these calls for divestment, for example. Thank you.
COOK: Who wants to take it?
VATANKA: Iran is pretty straightforward. It’s the either most sanctioned or second-most sanctioned country on Earth today, after Russia. Has been sanctioned for a very long time. So the Iranian case, you know, their military is pretty much—I shouldn’t say all of it. A lot of it is indigenous. I don’t want to give you a long history, but, I mean, out of necessity during the Iran-Iraq War, what you were seeing, the missiles, that’s all out of necessity. They were out there in the marketplace getting whatever they could get their hands on from the North Koreans, the Libyans, the Syrians. And spent the last thirty years fixing up their missile to a point where they have a pretty formidable missile arsenal today. And you can’t—you know, we shouldn’t laugh it off.
So and then in the marketplace of weaponry, their friends are the likes of Russia, China, again, North Korea, and some others. They are, I assume—I mean, they would love to get their hands on latest weapon. One of the reasons Iran doesn’t have an air force really to speak of—they’re still flying F-14, second generation, whatever kind. So they would love to get their hands on, and they might get some latest—later technology from the Russians. But overall, in terms of where they are, I think they can probably manage on their own for the kind of war, so-called asymmetric warfare, they have in mind. They’re not going to look for that big war of, you know, fighting the United States on equal terms. They know that’s not going to happen. So they’re in different place, if that makes sense.
COOK: Dana, did you want to get in on sanctions or so stuff like that?
EL KURD: So I think there is a difference, though, between sanctions that Iran has faced with, like, conditioning military aid that’s, like, from one ally to another. So I just wanted to mention that. But I wanted to talk about the Abraham Accords and axis of this resistance. So I can—
COOK: All right. Well, maybe we’ll get a question on Abraham Accords and axis of resistance. I promised way back.
EL KURD: Well, it a response to the previous question.
COOK: In the back I see one hand back there. Great, yes, terrific.
Q: Thank you so much. Kelly Trubko (ph).
I was wondering, from your perspectives, what you think the long-term consequences of the war in Gaza are for us here in the U.S.? So, General McChrystal, you talked about how fighters on both sides have been fundamentally changed. Dana, you talked about, likewise, for civilians in Gaza and in Palestine. And beyond just, you know, short electoral shadow of the future right now, but just longer-term consequences for the U.S. public and for U.S. policy. Thanks.
COOK: Anybody want to jump in on that? I know my standard to do this is I do policy, not politics. But you all may feel very differently.
MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, I’ll start on it. If you go back historically, Americans get exercised about something, and then our opinions sort of evolve over time. You know, we get—you remember, after October 7, there was all the energy to support Israel. Right after the invasion of Ukraine, there was all the energy to support Ukraine. And it wanes a lot. And so this is something that actually saddens me, because I’m not sure it wanes because people have sat down and thought it through and come, like Dana says, really decided what’s right or wrong. I think it almost goes with sort of the popularity of opportunist politicians leveraging things, deciding what’s going to be good for them at a certain point. And we have a tendency to be—to be influenced by that, and we lose interest pretty quickly, which is concerning to me.
So I think that it sort of depends upon how the future—the near future in Gaza plays out. If it sort of calms down, even if the Palestinians are not being treated well, many Americans, it’ll go off our radar screen. And we won’t, you know, make the value-driven decision. It’ll just be out of sight, out of mind. For a lot of people. Not for, obviously, people like in this room.
COOK: Dana.
EL KURD: Well, I think it—I think it will impact American politics, in two ways. One is that the American model for the international order is facing a lot of challenge right now in the—in public opinion, and in the minds of the Global South. It’s not just the Arab world. But it goes back to that question of, like, the traction of the axis of resistance. The reason that that kind of framework gains traction is because of the perceived hypocrisy and illegitimacy of the American model.
Now, with that being said, polling shows that the Iranian position is not, like, very popular. It’s about half and half, for the Arab public in those sixteen countries I mentioned. And then in the Palestinians, there’s like a 33 percent approval of Iran, because Iran hasn’t really risen to what was expected. You know, there are assassinations and things like that, and Iran hasn’t been able to engage. But the fact that the United States is seen as protecting an ally at the expense of international rules and norms has really changed people’s public perception of the United States, not just in the Arab world. And in the Arab world, it has tanked.
COOK: Well, of course, Israel isn’t the only country that we protect. You know, Egypt—huge violations of human rights, Saudi Arabia, same kind of thing.
EL KURD: Well, there—
COOK: I mean, I think it’s American partners in the region have no red lines.
EL KURD: Well, that’s—but that’s the thing. Amongst the Arab public, they see this all as one structure. They don’t see the Egyptian government as being very different from the Israeli. I mean, it’s all part of—you know, to them an authoritarian structure, American-led authoritarian conflict management. And that is, you know, I don’t think very good for American strategic objectives in the long term.
Now, in terms of the, you know, how public opinion, American public opinion might wane, we actually do have a study that shows that support for Israel waned within two weeks. But that’s not—I don’t think that’s because Americans are fickle. I think it’s because they saw the level of destruction in Gaza that began very quickly. And for Gen Z in particular, I think this is a defining moment for their generation, in the same way that Vietnam was for a previous generation. So I don’t necessarily think that we can write off the impact on American politics in the medium to long term of this moment.
COOK: We’ll have to see. Alex, do you want to get on this?
VATANKA: Well, no, you have questions here.
COOK: OK. No, I’ve got a question from the virtual world, correct? We got one question from the virtual world. Go ahead.
OPERATOR: We will take the virtual question from Charles Weiss.
COOK: Charles, you’re on the air.
Q: Yes. This is a military question for General McChrystal.
Given the facts on the ground, with the tunnels and the military use of mosques and schools and so on, and given the obligations to minimize civilian casualties and to keep collateral damage commensurate with military stakes, what is Israel’s military strategy supposed to be?
MCCHRYSTAL: Well, if the military mission was to destroy Hamas—and we can argue about whether that’s the right mission or not, but if the military is given that as a mission, then it is impossible to do that without a significant amount of damage. The tunnel network under Gaza is a hundred times greater than anyone here imagines—more modern, more effective. The use of it by Hamas is more effective than anybody here probably would ever have guessed. And so you gave the Israeli military an impossible task if you wanted them to accomplish the destruction of the Hamas battalions and you wanted them to not do significant collateral damage, to include the death of civilians. Now, we can make a decision whether they should have gotten that mission. But I’m just telling you, from a military practicality standpoint, you can’t have it both ways.
COOK: So, was it the right mission, from your perspective?
MCCHRYSTAL: Oh, I don’t think so. I would not have recommended that to them. I think that you were necessarily going to produce what we’ve seen, which, as Dana says, has a cost to it to Israel that it is pretty impossible to measure right now. We can guess what it will be long term. So I would have seen that. Now, you got to give Hamas credit. They created a system where that’s exactly what had to be the outcome. Hezbollah, to a great degree, did that 2006, and they’ve done it again now. Once you get into southern Lebanon, it is really hard to accomplish your mission and get out again.
And so when we have that kind of a situation then we have this conundrum. Do you live with whatever the situation is that you’re not addressing? Is that intolerable? Or do you accept the fact that it is going to be very, very painful? And of course, people will have different perspectives. The people who lived in northern Israel and were being rocketed probably have one view. The people on the ground in southern Lebanon have another view. People around the world have yet another view. And they’re—no views are wrong. They’re your particular perspective. But again, you can’t—you can’t pretend you can do something that’s not doable.
COOK: Understood. Right here. You’re going to get a mic. No, you can’t just project. (Laughter.) As someone who just projects, it doesn’t always work with the tech.
Q: Hi. Nakissa Jahanbani. Thank you for your remarks today.
How do you see advanced technologies affecting Iran’s involvement in the conflict, and also for countering Iran as well?
VATANKA: What was the first part, technology?
COOK: How do you see advanced technologies in the conflict and with regard to Iran.
VATANKA: Thanks for the question.
COOK: Is that a plant?
VATANKA: No. (Laughter.) I wish—I wish I could operate like that on a Friday. I can’t. But look, I sort of pointed it out earlier in terms of my reading of where Iran is. Clearly, as General McChrystal just said, there have been surprises in terms of what Israel’s thrown at Iran and the axis of resistance. I mean, we all know what’s happened in the last few months. So, yes, I think the regime in Tehran clearly has a new level of respect for the damage that sort of technology—infiltration by the intelligence services of Israel and allied countries—can do to Iran. I think that is a reality.
Will it change Iranian calculations? Is this the moment where Iran says, you know what? We’re not even an Arab country. And the Palestinians should really go and talk to their fellow Arabs to get support. We should stay out of this fight. If they did that, that, you know, is a kind of an outcome that I think Israel would really welcome. But as long as the fight is going on—as long as the fight is going on, in terms of advanced weaponry, I think the one point where they will genuinely panic and talk about maybe changing course, the way I just described, is if the regime’s survival inside of Iran is at stake.
Now, again, you have to contextualize it in terms of what kind of weapon you were talking about. But if it’s just the axis being hit in Yemen, or in Syria, in Iraq, or in—Iran, is willing to, as the cliche goes, to fight to the last Arab. But if the weapon you’re talking about suddenly turns the table, and Iran has to question can we survive as a political system, as the old man himself said, Khomeini, you can even override anything that the Quran says and Islam has to say. You can breach all the rules, survival of the regime is number one. And I think that is how I would answer the question. I hope that made sense.
COOK: OK. This guy right here in the front.
Q: Thanks, Steve. This question’s for General McChrystal.
I was going to ask you a real salty one about Afghanistan, but I thought that might stretch our definition of “region” too much. So I want to talk about technology as relates to the conflict in Gaza. On the one hand, there were some, like Audrey Kurth Cronin, who I’ve debated on this point, that will tell us that new emerging technologies allowed nonstate actors like Hamas to approximate the military power of countries, of the militaries from countries. I wonder if you could reflect on that. And then the other hand is that, you know, these new technologies—Gospell, Lavender, and other AI-enabled decision support systems, are changing the future trajectory of war, the character if not nature. So I’m curious if you could reflect on that as well.
MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, it’s changed it dramatically. We’re seeing it on the ground in Ukraine, but of course in Gaza as well. The first thing is they can manufacture—and they’re not really high-tech missiles—hundreds of thousands of missiles with a relatively accurate capability. So even a nonstate actor can act like a state actor hoped to act a generation ago, to put that kind of power out there. What Israel did with the beepers and all wouldn’t have required a state to do that. A nonstate actor could have done the same thing. Would have taken apparatus and time, but they could do it. So the answer is, technology is giving a reach to everybody. Everybody has more power.
Some of the things we’re seeing, though, is the ability to kill anybody we want to kill. Say we in the world, not the United States, not Israel. Just kind of anybody. You can find them, and you can target them, and you can kill them. And that’s got huge implications, because if you think about it in the nineteenth century there was a—really, an understanding you didn’t shoot the officers of the enemy army on the battlefield. And you didn’t do it because as soon as the officers were dead, it was a leaderless mob that wouldn’t be controlled, and your enemy would be, in fact, more dangerous. And so now we’ve got the ability to target leaders of Hezbollah, leaders of Hamas.
But it doesn’t change—we found this in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decapitation very rarely actually changes the outcome of something. It makes you feel good, but it doesn’t do it. So we’re in this movement of technology that’s going to make it more and more capable to do those kinds of very targeted strikes. And we are going to be the recipients of those as well, too, because we’re probably as vulnerable as anybody in the world because we’re in so many places that we theoretically have to protect.
COOK: Well, I guess we invest in Cyberdyne Corp. Straight in the back here. Yeah. No, not you. You. (Laughter.)
VATANKA: Terrible.
Q: Sorry. You’re next. Ben Frohman, U.S. House of Representatives.
Steven, you mentioned this up front that we’re expecting, you know, potentially imminently, in exchange or retaliation from Israel against Iran. I’m curious the panel’s views of what that might look like, the escalation dynamics between Israel and Iran. And then, kind of linked to that, there’s been discussion of that this is a once in fifty years opportunity, in the views of Israeli leaders, to reshape the Middle East. Obviously, there’s a lot that happens between now and the end of this war, but what might a future regional order look like, whether it’s from the view of governments or the citizens of these countries in the region?
COOK: Thanks. And we have four minutes. Why don’t we start with Alex and then skip over to Dana.
VATANKA: Look, I mean very quickly, you know that over the last few weeks we’ve seen reports. Israel is saying they will retaliate, they will retaliate hard. The list of, you know, things mentioned, nuclear facilities of Iran, critical energy infrastructure, and then, a last one, limited to military bases, Revolutionary Guards bases, sites—for example, missile launch sites, that sort of thing. So at this very moment, it seems that the military—the military sites are the most likely targets, from the open-source reporting that’s out there. The U.S. has made it very clear, from the president down, that, you know, Israel shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and even critical energy infrastructure, which could bring the price of oil up. So I don’t know in terms of what Israel will do, but I think obviously the Israelis will do something. And they have to do more than they did last time around in April when they took out this 300 anti-air defense system in Isfahan.
Four minutes and talk about post—what is coming in the region? I don’t know—
COOK: Well, you just took up two, so. (Laughter.)
VATANKA: I’ll stop.
COOK: Dana.
EL KURD: I’m just reflecting on the general discussion and how we’re talking about how this kind of level of technology, not only nonstate actors can become as—very powerful, but that there’s all this kind of precision and targeting and assassinations. But I think what this moment has also shown, that something like the Lavender Program, it’s also—not only can you be very precise, but you can also increase the scope of the violence to be very broad. And so the Lavender Program, you know, increasing who is even a target. So I think that moving forward—I don’t know what Israel is going to do with Iran. But moving forward, I’m just really concerned about the possibility of states to engage in mass violence at a large scale, given, yeah, how broadly these programs are being implemented.
COOK: I have time for one quick question. What about this first hand right here?
VATANKA: What about—
COOK: Eh, OK, you don’t get a second shot.
Q: Good morning. Rudy Novak from the U.S. Air Force Academy.
So I work in an organization that’s very hyper-focused on great-power competition of a possible future war with China. Can you remind all of us, and hoping my students when I bring it back, like, why this region matters? What are the American national interests, besides oil, obviously, in the region?
COOK: Lightning round, folks.
EL KURD: I mean, maybe General McChrystal can speak to this as well, but isn’t the Middle East region strategically important for American hegemony because of all the choke points, like, free flow of trade, not just oil? I thought that was the main reason the Americans were mostly interested in the Middle East. I don’t know that China is that interested, by the way, but, yeah.
COOK: General.
MCCHRYSTAL: I think world trade goes through it. I wouldn’t have used the term “American hegemony”—(laughter)—because we’re a globalized world. But, no.
EL KURD: If you don’t use it, I’ll use it.
MCCHRYSTAL: I think everybody needs it. But, you’re right, I think the value of oil over time is decreasing pretty rapidly. And I think the Mideast has got to fight to stay relevant.
VATANKA: On that point, that’s exactly what leaders in the region are concerned about. And that’s exactly why they’re talking to Russia, why they’re talking to China, whether joining things like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, why BRICS just had a summit in Kazan, because of the question they have. Will the United States stay? Are they getting bored with us? And then if they are, we—because a lot of these countries are wealthy, very wealthy. We’re talking trillions of dollars sitting there. But they’re insecure in terms of their survival and worried about larger neighbors—Irans of this world. And so I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to talk about what’s going to happen in terms of going forward. But I tell you one thing, if I was China and Russia I’ll do anything to undermine U.S. in that region, because it’s a no brainer. And that’s what exactly—just because we don’t read about what China’s doing right now in the Gaza war, doesn’t mean they’re not doing something, right? And that I’m convinced of.
COOK: Great. I’m so happy when I could bring it home exactly on time. If you’re really interested in those issues, however, I know a good recent book that came out that explores all of those things. (Laughter.) I mean, that wasn’t even a plan. That was good too. Listen, thank you all very, very much. It’s been a fascinating session. Thank you to Alex, to General McChrystal, and to Dana for their wisdom. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. The video and the transcript of this will be on CFR.org. So if there’s anything that you want to clarify or anything that you missed, you can—you can go back over it.
And now we’ll take a break until I don’t know when but you all have your program. So thank you all very, very much. (Applause.)
(END)
This is an uncorrected transcript.
