We do not know very much of the future, except that from generation to generation the same things happen again and again. Men learn little from others' experience, but in the life of one man, never the same time returns, sever the cord, shed the scale. Only the fool fixed in his folly may think he can turn the wheel on which he turns.
It's Monday, October 28, 2024, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover's Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today, and I am happy to report that I'm joined by our full complement of GoodFellows. That would include the historian Niall Ferguson, the economist John Cochrane, and former presidential National Security Advisor, geostrategist, historian Lt-Gen H.R. McMaster. Niall, John and H.R. are Hoover Institution senior fellows.
Gentlemen, we're going to do two topics today. In our B block, we're going to look at the elections. This is our last show before America goes to the polls next week. So we're going to talk about issues that we wish had been discussed but didn't come up. But before that, we're going to take a look at the world. And we have a very special guest today. I know one of our viewers is going to be pleased to see him because not too long ago we received the following email. It came from a gentleman named Mark in Northbrook, Illinois, who wrote the following quote: 'Please invite Walter Russell Mead, it would be a fascinating discussion.' Well, Mark, your message has been acknowledged, mission accomplished. Joining us today, Bard College professor, Hudson Institute Distinguished Fellow, the Wall Street Journal's Global View columnist, the one and only Walter Russell Mead. Walter, welcome to GoodFellows, and I guess you have a fan base out there.
Well, Grant, it sounds like Mark is one really smart cookie.
[LAUGH] It's long overdue, Walter, great to have you here.
So, Walter, we're going to look at Israel and Ukraine and let's start with Israel. Over the weekend, the Israelis responded to the Iranian missile attack with an attack of its own. It was not a shock and awe demonstration necessarily. What they did do is they hit several targets, reportedly a building that was a part of Iran's defunct nuclear weapons development program. The Iranian regime quickly said that we could expect a, quote, 'appropriate response.' I'll leave that to General McMaster to describe what that might look like. But let's talk about the timing of what this says about the US-Israel relationship. Walter, and here I want to turn you to Niall Ferguson's rather brilliant column in the Free Press. And here's what Niall noted: The White House told Israel, don't go into Gaza, and Israel went into Gaza. The White House said, don't send troops into Rafah, Israel sent troops into Rafah. The White House said, don't send troops into Lebanon, Israel did so. And now here we have Israel launching an attack ten days before the election when we could probably assume that the White House would like to have peace and quiet in the Middle East to help Kamala Harris. Walter, let's talk about what this says about the US-Israel relationship. Is this just a byproduct of the odd dynamics between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu? Or a decade or so from now, are we going to see this as something of a turning point in how Israel and the US get along?
Well, actually, I'd say one thing you realize is that this is part of a pattern in the sense that Joe Biden says don't, and people do. That's not just some unique Israeli phenomenon. He says to Putin, don't invade, Putin invades. He says to China, don't mess with the Philippines, China messes with the Philippines. There's a general decline of American sort of dominance, or at least a Biden administration dominance. And it's a little bit more like getting a message from the European Union saying don't than a message from a traditional president of the United States saying don't. I think it's always easy in the US-Israel relationship to sort of take events, put them in sort of just this unique context, and then we miss the bigger picture.
One of the things I asserted in my piece for the Free Press was that the Biden administration or the Biden-Harris administration's lack of influence over Israel reflected the decline of US aid relative to Israel's economy and defense capability. But then having written that, I read a report that got published just the other day arguing that actually US military aid to Israel is at an extremely high level right now. And so I now feel a little confused and wonder what your take is on that.
Yeah, and I think the US-Israel relationship is one of these things that because it's so politically prominent, so many people in America follow this relationship closely who don't follow very much else in foreign affairs. There's always sort of two faces of the US-Israel relationship. There's the president and others using statements about Israel as a way to signal their general attitudes. If you want to look tough and move to the center, you say Israel has the right to defend itself. If you want to look accommodating and moving a little bit to the left, you say Palestinians also have a right to live. Neither one of those involves specifically a change of policy. But you're able to really get a lot of attention for your statements about Israel in a way you're not, say, for your statements about Sudan or Bangladesh or a whole range of other things. So you've always got a lot of political noise when people are talking about Israel.
But if you look at the strategic situation, it looks to me as if US-Israel interests are not 100% aligned, but more closely aligned than they often are. What the Biden people really don't want are two things in the Middle East. One is a war that drags the United States into it, and the other is an Iranian nuclear bomb or a conflict that just shuts down oil flows. And so the United States, if it doesn't want a war with Iran itself, it needs for Israel to be active and strong and not to be defeated, say, in the war in Gaza or the war in Lebanon. So the Biden administration has been caught with a strategic unity that leads to actually quite high weapons deliveries and aid, and a political signaling problem that causes it to emit mixed signals. In fact, the United States is not giving Israel weapons for Gaza out of the goodness, or if you prefer, out of the badness of its heart. It's giving those weapons to Israel because it wants Israel to win, needs Israel to win.
I'm glad we used the word win, which has been missing from a lot of foreign policy. So I'm kind of optimistic, I want to run my optimism by you. The attacks over the weekend were spectacular, zero losses. I mean, compare the Iranian missile attack to this one. Once again, it shows something that like we learned in the Gulf War, the amazing superiority of Israel and American weapons and abilities of our soldiers, especially Israeli. And the other lesson is, so Iran is a paper tiger. I guess there's some S-300 anti-aircraft systems that will be for sale real cheap soon, [LAUGH] exposed. And a lesson, a bigger strategic lesson, here's what happens if you actually fight back. What the US and NATO could do in Ukraine if they chose to. Maybe we should just outsource our foreign policy to Israel, [LAUGH] people who actually know how to get things done.
Yeah, there's a lot there and obviously, this was an incredible demonstration, as were its attacks on Hezbollah, of just unbelievable mastery of intelligence, of the integration of different military arms. And it is brilliant, but I would check my optimism if I were you, because really, since 1948-49, Israel has had one incredibly brilliant military victory after another. And yet it was Napoleon who said, or I guess Talleyrand said it to Napoleon, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. And so military victories that don't lead to the desired or a desired political outcome are kind of a fact of life in the Middle East.
I know it's H.R.'s turn, but I want to follow up, so what is the political outcome? Clearly, Israel is sick of 70 years of being surrounded by people who want to destroy it, and that going back to that status quo, as the Biden administration wants to do, is clearly untenable. Vast swaths of territory run by terrorist mafias with missiles, where is the political outcome? I know that's the big question, but you're the big thinker. [LAUGH]
Well, I think probably a lot of people in Israel, and this should be especially true in Netanyahu's Likud Party, don't actually believe in permanent peace in the way we do in the US. This kind of instinctive American approach to questions of war and peace is: something went wrong, now you have a war, and then at the end of the war, you build a stable structure that will produce peace. Because, of course, peace is the natural situation of human beings. Remember, years ago, I was visiting where Troy used to be in northern Turkey, and you're standing on top of the ruins of 13 different cities built on that spot, all destroyed by enemies. And from the hill, you can look across the straits and see the Gallipoli monument. So, the idea that somehow the outcome of war should be a nice legal peace secured, sort of kind of like after the war in Europe, will be the European Union, just may not be on the table in the Middle East.
H.R., let's turn to the question of the appropriate response from the Iranians and tell us what you're looking at next in this chapter. Are you looking at another exchange between Israel and Iran? Are you looking at Yemen, are you looking at Hezbollah, are you looking at Gaza, what has your attention right now?
Well, I'd love to hear what Walter thinks about this. I think what has changed, and it's significant, is that Iran's been able to get away with it since 1979, it being its use of Arabs, Palestinians, others to fight a proxy war against Israel. And to insulate themselves from any kind of costs associated with the use of those proxies, up to the point in which Iran attacked Israel with the massive missile and drone attack in April and followed up with a subsequent attack. They've been able to get away with it in large measure because I think of the encouragement of the United States not to escalate, this kind of mantra or folly of de-escalation. Well, that changed in April, but the Biden administration said, you'll take the win, and encouraged just a very meager, really, demonstration by the Israelis, which foreshadowed the second attack in which they took out an integrated air defense system in the interior of the country. You've seen them do this again along their whole path into these strikes of about 100 aircraft, all of which returned without any damage back to Iran. So, Iran knows that it's extremely vulnerable. I think Iran will try to get back to the way it was, where they can continue to expend every Arab life, every Palestinian life, in their effort to destroy Israel. And the question is, are we going to let them get away with it? I think what Israel demonstrated is any team that just plays only defense doesn't make any kind of progress or doesn't really have any kind of effect in the competition. Israel went on the offense in a number of ways against Hamas, obviously, after October 7th, against Hezbollah and against Syrian, Iranian proxies in Syria, against the Houthis and against Iran directly. So, I don't know what you think, Walter, but I think what Iran will try to do is escalate this, maybe horizontally, you might call it. I think Iraq is vulnerable now, I think that's where they could try to create a lot of problems with us. They'll continue to use the Houthis, they'll continue to use this proxy army in Syria, but I don't think they're going to try another direct attack because they got nothing left, I don't think. And so you'll see, I think, more attempts at assassinations, more attempts at these indirect attacks through proxies. But I think that's the course it's going to take until Israel decides, which I think is going to happen in the next few years, which is to strike Iran's nuclear and more of their missile facilities. Russell, what's your take on what the trajectory is from this point on?
Yeah, I think I agree with you that Iran is going to sort of look for asymmetrical and horizontal ways of responding to this. That's where they've had the most success anyway over the years and there are lots of vulnerable targets. If you think about all the Israeli embassies around the world and because the Iranians are insane anti-Semites who identify every Jew everywhere with the state of Israel, synagogues, schools, there are just lots of ways that bad things could happen.
Even I'm thinking of the attacks in the 90s in Argentina.
Yeah, exactly, all of those are possible. The other thing I would say, though, is that by teaching Iran that it has a permanent inferiority in conventional war fighting capability, you're sort of increasing the strength of people inside Iran who say, well, it's time to go nuclear. Because if Iran had nuclear weapons, then the question of whether you bomb Hezbollah becomes a little bit more complicated and certainly the question of whether you bomb Iran becomes a little bit more complicated. So I would not be surprised to see inside Iran the people who've been arguing all along, we ought to go ahead and do this, we ought to go ahead and do this, might not be winning a few more debates right now.
And then we should understand that that would put both Israel and the United States in an extremely difficult position because as I understand it, and H.R. may have better information than I do on this, Iran's nuclear program is pretty well protected even against very powerful attacks with conventional bombs. And you might, to really be confident that you have done what you needed to do, you might need to have kind of tunnel battles like you have in South Lebanon and so on. And that's at the end of a very long air supply line where you have to keep your forces on the ground supplied and ready to evacuate when the job is done and you're in the middle of somebody else's territory. Whether the Israelis can do that without American help, whether they want to do that without American help. Whether if you're an Israeli faced with the prospect of an Iranian nuclear bomb that you cannot deal with with purely conventional methods, and the Americans aren't helping you do it, do you then think, well, maybe I've got enough. This is why I have my own nuclear weapons. So, I think we're moving into darker territory where everybody's options are getting uglier. But people, so far as I can see, neither the Iranians are losing their will to fight and the Israelis aren't losing their will to survive. And as long as we're in that place, escalation of various kinds seems to me to be more likely than not.
I'm going to join John in the optimists' camp. Rather unusually, I think we're underestimating Israel. We've been consistently surprised to the upside in recent weeks and months by what Israel has been able to do. And it has eviscerated Hezbollah, it didn't just decapitate it three times, it's completely eviscerated its organizational structure. Hamas is essentially buried in rubble in Gaza, and Iran can't defend itself against Israeli airstrikes at all. Now, I think the thing we're missing here is that Supreme Leader Khamenei is at death's door. And when Prime Minister Netanyahu went on air and addressed the Iranian people saying that he anticipated change in Iran, he wasn't entirely engaged in wishful thinking. I think Iran is the weak link in the axis that we face, and it's much weaker than we thought. Without its proxies or with its proxies very compromised, it's wide open to attack. My expectation is that Israel will continue to attack Iran and that this will have disproportionate success. So, Walter, I'm going to take the other side of this. I think we're in a much better place than any of us dared hope for a year ago when, if you remember, we were reeling from the horrors of October 7th.
Well, I hope you're right, Niall. What is it they say, an optimist is someone who thinks that things are as good as they could possibly get. And the pessimist is someone who's afraid the optimist is right. And I do think that everything that you just said, if I'm an Iranian official, makes me think I really want those nukes and I want them fast. And if I'm Putin and I'm worried about the weak link in my chain collapsing, then maybe there's some information I could give the Iranians that would shorten the time between where they are now and what it would take to actually weaponize weapons-grade uranium into a deliverable bomb.
In a minute to miniaturize the device.
Walter, I think they're already doing it. I think the Russians are already doing it. What did the Iranians get for the Shahed drones and the missiles? What did the North Koreans get for that matter for what, 6 or 8 million artillery rounds and now troops that are going to be employed in Ukraine? I think Russia's given them, certainly both of them, assistance with their missile programs, but I think that they are also helping them with their nuclear weapons programs already.
And I've seen no evidence about that. It's like kind of a gut feel. I'd like to add another slightly pessimistic question.
We keep focusing on Iran entirely, as if this is just an Iran-Israel war. But Arab terrorists have been trying to kill Jews and get rid of Israel since the 1920s. Fatah was around in the 1970s. The PLO was in the 1970s when Iran was still under the Shah. The various terrorist groups are getting plenty of financing from Qatar, from the European Union, from the United Nations. There's lots of people willing to send them money and finance reconstruction of the tunnels. So is this all entirely about Iran or is this, even when Iran stops being the central backer, are there not forces? And Iranians are Shiites, the others are Sunnis. They can't wait to start tearing each other apart as well.
Well, again, I just think about the ruins of Troy, and I don't think that we are on the brink of the age of permanent peace in the Middle East.
But I will agree with Niall, though, also Walter. I think we could actually agree on all this that Iran is extremely weak, but Iran has been able to compensate for that weakness through the use of proxies. And its weakness, its profound weakness that the Supreme Leader and other leaders recognize will provide additional impetus to race to a nuclear weapon, I think that's the situation we're in. And I think realizing that Israel will feel as if it must act, even if it's imperfect, to set back the timeline for Iran to have that nuclear weapon. And so I think in the next couple years maybe at the outside. Now, you're going to see even more direct strikes against Iran and actually strikes aimed at their nuclear program, as you know, which is dispersed, it's protected. But like any of these systems, there are critical points or a critical path that could be attacked from a military perspective to at least with the intention of setting back the program in terms of time.
That's right. And we should not forget too that the Israelis have very good connections deep into Iranian society. Ethnically, I think only about 50-some percent of the inhabitants of Iran are ethnic Persians. And while some many Azeris are integrated, not all of them are happy with the status quo. The Arabs in the oil-producing province feel that the wealth of their province is being sucked out and pumped into Ayatollah projects they don't necessarily go for. And the Kurds in Iran are no happier with their situation than Kurds in other parts of the Middle East. So it's a volatile entity, Iran. And if you're looking at long-term possibility of economic isolation and continuing poverty, it's one thing if you think, well, the Ayatollahs are building a mighty war machine with all of this money and so they're going to make Iran great. It's another if every time you come into actual contact with the enemy, they humiliate you. So it's one of these situations nobody really knows how all of these forces play out. But you can be sure that people in Jerusalem are staying up late at night trying to think this stuff through and game out different scenarios.
Walter, since H.R. mentioned North Korean troops deployed to Russia, let's spend a couple minutes on Ukraine. That war last week with very little fanfare entered its 33rd month. Tell us if you see an ending to this and more to the point, if you see a good ending to this.
Well, it's interesting when I go back and I look at the early months of the war, there was a lot of talk in the West about should we or shouldn't we offer off-ramps to Putin to end the war. I think now the West is hoping that Putin will give us an off-ramp. And by that what I mean is that he'd be prepared to accept a deal where Ukraine loses a chunk of territory but gets admitted into NATO and the EU. And if that happened, that would look, for the West, like kind of a face-saving solution. People are talking about it like the North Korea, South Korea approach. East Germany, West Germany, not perfect, but we save what we can and build for the future. I'm not actually sure that Putin is in the mood to be so generous and that in fact humiliating NATO and testing NATO, that's as much of his war aim as a few more square miles in the Donbas. So, I would say I don't think our side in the West has yet fully grasped the seriousness and the reality of the situation that it's in.
Hey, Walter, I was going to say, look what he just tried to do in Moldova, they're pulling out all the stops from Moldova, you've got the elections coming up in Bulgaria that they're very active in. They've been successful in Georgia, not a NATO country obviously, but in Slovakia, for example, so I mean, he's not diminished in any way his efforts to break apart the cohesion of NATO and the EU. And Ukraine is kind of the linchpin, I think, from his perspective.
And you look at the elections in eastern Germany and you look at where anti-West parties have had a majority in some places. And you look at what people now think could be the outcome in the elections in Czechia, and you can look at the growing strength of the far right in France. The West is not getting stronger as this war goes on, not that the war is the primary force driving this splintering, but we are not winning. 33 months into this war, we are not winning. And go back and replay some of the contemptuous things that people in the West said about how weak Russia was and how stupid Putin was and how wonderfully skilled and purposeful and powerful we were. And think about how that looks against the background of the last 33 months. We need to pay attention here, we need to up our game significantly.
I think it needs to be said loud and clear that this war is being lost. I was in Kyiv, what, six weeks ago, and there is very considerable bitterness in Ukraine about the big talk and the grand speeches that have been made by Western leaders. The large sums of money that have been pledged, but the significantly smaller sums of money that have actually been turned into hardware that Ukrainian troops can use to defend their country. And there's a special bitterness that the Biden administration continues to place limits on what Ukraine can do, for example, with Storm Shadow missiles that Britain provided. They can't use them against Russian airfields, the location of which we know, from which the Russians launched their attacks on Ukrainian cities and electrical infrastructure. The Ukrainians know that this is not going well, and they are well aware that they cannot sustain this military effort indefinitely. They are outmanned and outgunned, and you don't need to be H.R. McMaster to know that that's not a good situation to be in a war. And yet, Western leaders talk insouciantly about this conflict, seemingly unaware of the reality that Ukraine is losing. And if we carry on on the trajectory of the Biden-Harris administration, Ukraine will lose the war, and the consequences of that for Western security are really horrific. It's hard to get this thought even into the heads of German leaders, who are a lot closer geographically than the GoodFellows are to the front line.
But if I may, never in history, and I say that with trepidation because I have my historians with me [LAUGH], has there been a greater difference between capability and outcome. What the US and NATO could do if we decided this is our war, we're going to apply the principles of the 1991 Gulf War, which I said we should have on the first day. This will not stand, we run back to the Russian border in not one instant, we could do it in an instant or in a week, with the kinds of results that Israel is now showing. It's just amazing that the only reason we don't do that is we don't regard that as an important lesson to learn again, and we don't want to do it. And it seems like we're not learning the lesson of Vietnam, when you say things are off or when you want to just play for the status quo, you lose. Isn't there a certain momentum to war that victory and advance builds its own momentum, builds support for the war? If you say we're just going to sit on the defensive for year after year after year, eventually morale crumbles, even if you have the capability for overwhelming success.
Yeah, I mean, I think the key in warfare is to seize, retain and exploit the initiative, as you're getting to, John. And then I think that Walter, I'd like to ask you what you think. But I'll tell you, when I hear this mantra of de-escalation and escalation management, it makes me think of the war managers during the Vietnam War. And it sounds to me like it's oftentimes [LAUGH] Robert McNamara, or John McNaughton, or William Bundy throwing their voice.
Why aren't they worried about us escalating instead of us worried about them escalating? [LAUGH]
Well, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of war.
I noticed that we're down to using body counts as the chief measure of Ukraine's success in the war, everybody's saying, it's not going that well, but if you look at the body counts. I'm old enough to remember that's what they were saying during the Vietnam War, that was the metric of choice, and this is—
I will say, though, that we just talked about Ukrainian weakness, but I think the Russians are extremely weak, too. I mean, we saw that obviously with the Wagner offensive, we saw it again with the Kursk offensive. And even though they're making grinding progress, and I agree with Niall, from what I've heard from Ukrainian friends, there is sort of a crisis of confidence at the moment among some, but not really a lack of determination yet. And there's anger and resentment, I think as Niall mentioned, it's building, but—
So if the West said this will not stand, it would not stand.
Right, but the West doesn't want to say that, okay? Look at public opinion, not just in Germany, not just in France, but in the United States of America, and there is no support for this.
Walter, you've made this argument in your great essay about the growing dangers, and we're just shrugging at these dangers. What argument do you think that an American leader should make to the American public?
Well, this is the thing. I think the thing that I personally find impossible to forgive the Biden administration for is the absence of the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats.
The American people need to understand the world situation, they need to understand why these things are happening. And it's not an easy thing to talk about because, for one thing, the average American, while they don't follow foreign affairs in detail or whatever, they have this sense that all the smart people told us that bringing China into the WTO was going to make China democratic and America rich. All the smart people told us that bringing Mexico into NAFTA was going to stabilize democracy in Mexico, reduce immigration across the frontier, and create a burst of prosperity in the United States, etc. And so what you have is a generational failure of American strategy. And I would love to say, well, that was just the other people, and I was over here alone and pure in my corner the whole time. But all of us are implicated to some degree in a period that I think future historians are going to look back to and compare to the 1920s and 30s as a period of strategic collapse and failure in the West.
Walter, that's a nice segue into the exit question for this segment. And I would like to read you something you recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, I want to get the panel's thoughts on this. And you said the following, and I quote: 'World War III is becoming more likely in the near term, and the US is too weak either to prevent it should war come, or to be confident of victory. A more devastating indictment of a failed generation of national leadership could scarcely be penned.' Well, Walter, we're going to get a 47th president in the next few days, or next few weeks. Is the 47th president going to change this?
Well, of course, we don't know who that is, but I would say that at the moment, I don't see either candidate being ready for the test that history is about to pose. But on the other hand, what I will say is that sometimes people, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. So the next president may be like Malvolio here in Shakespeare. But another thing they say is, was that good times create bad men, bad men create bad times, and bad times create great leaders, so it may be that we're just going around this cycle. But whoever the next president is, they're going to face an international environment that is far more challenging than either, I think, either candidate or the American people are prepared for.
