A New Middle East?

For decades, Israel has wanted American support to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. But U. S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have resisted — until President Trump. So, what changed? And what are the likely consequences of that decision? Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime diplomat in the region. He joins me to discuss recent events and how the latest attacks on Iran have changed the balance of power in the Middle East. This episode contains strong language. Book Recommendations: Master of the Game by Martin Indyk The Man Who Ran Washington by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  For decades, Israel has wanted the support of the US in bombing the Iranian nuclear program. And for decades, every single US president has said no.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  I have always said that all options are on the table, but the first option for the United States is to solve this problem diplomatically.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  As I said before, military action would be far less effective than this deal in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Biden told Netanyahu the US would not participate in any possible counterattack on Iran.

• 1:00Ezra Klein?

  And then, last week, one President Donald Trump said yes.

• 1:06Speaker 04

  Breaking news, and after days of uncertainty, the United States have completed three strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

• 1:13Speaker 05

  It's mission accomplished for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who thanked President Trump today.

• 1:20Speaker 06

  Your bold decision to target Iran's nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the United States will change history.

• 1:30Speaker 07

  Iran's response came in the form of a missile strike targeting Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military base in the Middle East.

• 1:39Speaker 08

  Experts called this attack mostly symbolic. Qatar did get a heads up hours in advance.

• 1:44Speaker 09

  Seconds ago, the president went to Truth Social and typed this: "It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a complete and total ceasefire."

• 1:57Speaker 10

  The mutual ceasefire between Israel and Iran is now officially in effect, but it appears the terms might have already been violated this morning.

• 2:05Speaker 11

  We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that?

• 2:14Speaker 12

  How much damage has been done? This is a real question. It's also a political question. The Defense Intelligence Agency has assessed that the core components of Iran's nuclear program are largely intact and that Iran's nuclear program has essentially only been set back by months.

• 2:32Ezra Klein?

  So why did Donald Trump say yes? And what are the long-term consequences of that decision going to be? My guest today is Aaron David Miller, who worked on negotiations and policy in the Middle East across four successive presidencies from 1985 to 2003. He's since written a number of excellent books on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians and American leadership. And he's a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he joins me to talk through what all this has meant for a region that is in profound flux.

• 3:14Ezra Klein?

  Aaron David Miller, welcome back to the show.

• 3:17Speaker 13

  Great to be here with you, Ezra.

• 3:18Ezra Klein?

  So we're speaking here on the morning of Tuesday, June 24. Let's start with where your head is at. What are you confident the bombings achieved? What are your big points of uncertainty right now? Give me your overview of the landscape.

• 3:35Speaker 13

  Yeah, you know, first of all, I don't believe in game changers, inflection points, sea changes and transformation. Most of what happens in life is transactional, whether it's marriage, diplomacy, business. And it certainly applies to the Middle East. Big changes have been afoot since October 7. And I would argue there are some headlines and trend lines that have never existed before. The first is Israel's escalation dominance, which I think is the most important thing that has happened. And everything that we're now talking about, Ezra, flows from the notion that for the first time in its history, Israel controls the pace, the focus, the intensity of military conflict with its three key adversaries, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The Houthis provide somewhat of an exception because of the distance problem.

• 4:19Speaker 13

  But the reality is the Israelis can escalate in ways that these three adversaries cannot, and the Israelis can deter that escalation, which I think is what we witnessed during the course of the last 12 days. So, right now, I think you see a situation where a situational and transactional president, Donald Trump, who has no real effective strategy, no grand design with respect to what to me is this broken, angry, and dysfunctional region where, by and large, American ideas on war-making and peacemaking have gone to die. But he has managed, as a consequence of Israel's escalation dominance, which he was wary about, and has been for the last six months, to ride the tiger of Israel's

• 5:04Speaker 13

  owning the skies. As one Israeli retired general put it, "We're playing soccer with the Iranians, but the only difference is they don't have a goalie." He's managed to ride the tiger of Israeli escalation dominance in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and now in Iran. And I think he now fashions himself and sees a moment, a moment that arguably is historic, and he has expectations which probably go well beyond his capacity to formulate an effective strategy in this region to turn that escalation dominance into what, transactional

• 5:45Speaker 13

  arrangements, understandings, political combinations, even peace treaties. So I think we're on the cusp of something that has enormous potential. The real question is whether or not we have the leaders in Israel, among the Palestinians, in Iran, and in Washington that know how to use that moment. Unless there is leadership designed to implement something more coherent and cohesive and enduring, you and I probably are going to be having the same conversation next year at this time.

• 6:17Ezra Klein?

  What does Israel want, and what does Iran want?

• 6:20Speaker 13

  The Israeli calculation is a complicated one. Benjamin Netanyahu, I think, high on the notion of what the Israeli military has achieved in Gaza, at tremendous cost, to be sure, among Palestinian civilians in Lebanon and in Iran, now sees a moment to emerge and to essentially realize one of his two major foreign policy goals, and that is to free the people of Israel, the state of Israel, from the shadow of an Iranian bomb. Aspirationally, I think he wants to see a different regime in Tehran, but he'd probably settle, making a virtue out of necessity, of whatever damage the Israelis and Americans

• 7:02Speaker 13

  have managed to do to Iran's nuclear program. Let's be clear, the only person I trust on this right now is Rafael Grossi, who's head of the IAEA, and even he is... Can you say what that is? Yeah, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even Grossi is unsure about the degree of damage and destruction that the Israeli and American effort has done to the program. And if Grossi is unsure, and again, I trust him more than the president's assessment, who said, I think, yesterday again, that we have, quote, "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear program. I think that's wrong.

• 7:44Speaker 13

  I think Iran, right now, as a nuclear weapons threshold state, that is to say, it has all of the elements that are required to assemble a nuclear weapon. And again, the kind of nuclear weapon that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not a sophisticated weapon, that could be a miniaturized warhead, a physics package that could actually be on top of a missile, but dropped from a plane. Whether it's six months, eight months, a year, two years, I think Iran has the capacity. The question that everyone asks is, the Iranians have chosen so far to remain, my image here, one screwdriver's turn away from producing such a weapon, and they're still not there.

• 8:26Speaker 13

  So Netanyahu would like a different regime. I think he understands that's very difficult. Had this continued, maybe he could have gotten regime destabilization, dysfunction.

• 8:39Speaker 13

  Not going to get regime change, it seems to me. So Netanyahu won't give up on the regime change. And let's be clear, the longest governing prime minister in the history of the state of Israel on trial for bribery, fraud and trust in a Jerusalem district court, five years running. The most ruthless, politically savvy politician in Israel today sits astride Israeli politics and the US-Israeli relationship, for now, like some sort of colossus. And it is extraordinary to me, given the disasters of October 7th, that there has been absolutely no accountability for this intelligence failure, no accountability for the fact that the prime

• 9:19Speaker 13

  minister, in my judgment, I'm an American here, I don't play in Israeli, despite some of my critics on TV or in the media, this prime minister has managed to prioritize, not any of the war of Gaza, in large part because of his politics and the right-wing coalition over whom he presides. He's prided, I think, and prioritized avenging the dead rather than redeeming the living. And the fate of those people gets sadder and more tragic and more fraught every single day that they remain in Gaza. So Netanyahu, I think, comes out of this, for now, extraordinarily powerful.

• 9:59Speaker 13

  An 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, made a judgment to respond in a way that's calibrated not to validate Iran's honor. It's too late for that. The Israelis have revealed its sheer vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but to preserve the regime. My friend Karim Sajipour from Carnegie, my colleague, argues that even the most extreme revolutionaries the day after the revolution become conservatives, because preserving and conserving the revolution, and that is... Ali Khamenei's objective becomes, if you're a Star Trek fan, the prime directive.

• 10:35Ezra Klein?

  To what degree are we looking now at a new Middle East? You talked about Israel's an almost hegemonic military force. You have Iran, which is seen its proxies functionally devastated, particularly Hezbollah, but also its own power revealed as much weaker than people thought, say, five years ago. And you have the Gulf states, which are in a very different place than they were 10, 15 years ago. You think about where the Gulf states were in 2000. They are richer, their relationships with Israel and America are much, much stronger. They've modernized in many ways that would have been unthinkable back then. When you think about the geopolitics of the Middle East that you worked on for much

• 11:15Ezra Klein?

  of your career, and you look at how it looks now, what makes it different and what possibilities and dangers are opened up by that?

• 11:24Speaker 13

  I mean, the one continuity between the period mid 80s to 2003, when I left government, at least in terms of how you could produce a new Middle East, I don't believe in it because in so many respects, this is a broken, angry and dysfunctional part of the world. You have five Arab states, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, in various phases of state dysfunction. You have extractive leaders and authoritarians just about everywhere. Hopes of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt have been essentially overturned, the authoritarians reign just about everywhere. You've got gender inequality, you've got the key major terrorist groups still emanate

• 12:06Speaker 13

  in the CIA's rankings from this region. I would have argued, and still do, even though Iran has been hollowed out, the following, that in the old days, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were the three prominent Arab states that vied for influence and power. Right now, in my judgment, Iraq and Syria are basically offline. They cannot project their power, although there may be some hope in Syria for. A better ending to what happens when an authoritarian is thrown out of office. I'm keeping my expectations pretty low there. And Egypt, which is burdened with many, many problems and no longer, despite its geographic

• 12:46Speaker 13

  centrality in the peace treaty with Egypt, no longer is the central actor in US foreign policy. When I travel with half a dozen secretaries of state, George Shultz, through Colin Powell, the first stop we always made was Cairo. Not the case anymore. It's the Gulf. So this fracture, this dysfunction in the Arab world has led to two important changes. The one you referred to is the Gulf. It's stable, authoritarians who can make decisions, it's rich, it's got hydrocarbons. The Emirates and the Saudis are vying to become the new entrepôts of the financial world. That's one power center that has emerged, but these are also very weak states with

• 13:30Speaker 13

  respect to geographic proximity to the Iranians. The other argument I would make is the rise of the three non-Arabes. Turkey, a member of NATO, Israel, America's closest ally, and Iran, on their back foot, to be sure, to say the least. But the three non-Arabes are still keepers. They're not going anywhere. The only three states in this region that can project their power abroad, they all have tremendous economic potential, they all have competent militaries and intelligence security organizations, and they have and can have tremendous influence for good and for ill.

• 14:14Speaker 13

  So those are the changes that I think are afoot. But again, converting what we've seen since October 7th and in the wake of the last 12 days into something that normal humans would regard as functional agreements, the end of conflict. Governing empty spaces. When things change, if you want to talk about the new Middle East in any serious way, you really need to talk about leadership. Leaders who are masters of their political houses, not prisoners of their ideologies or their politics. Leaders who are prepared to risk, but leaders who care about the security and prosperity

• 14:56Speaker 13

  of their publics rather than prioritizing keeping their seats. And the reality is, when I look around in this region, I don't see that kind of leadership. Which is why converting escalation dominance into lasting political arrangements, let alone peace treaties, cannot be done without leaders. In Israel, we do not have one. Among the Palestinians, that is so fraught. The Palestinians are faced with an unpalatable choice between Mahabharata on one hand and Hamas on the other, and they won't, they won't get to choose because the notion of elections or a coherent Palestinian governing authority right now is a thought experiment.

• 15:38Speaker 13

  There's a great dysfunction here, which isn't going away, regardless of what happens in the Lebanese, Israeli, Syrian, Iranian triangle.

• 16:19Ezra Klein?

  Your colleague Stephen Wertheim made an argument I thought was interesting. He wrote that Israel acted less to preempt an Iranian bomb than to preempt American diplomacy. A new nuclear deal would have lifted sanctions on Iran's battered economy, helped it to recover and grow. A deal would have stabilized Iran's position in the Middle East and potentially strengthened it over time. Precisely by succeeding in preventing Iran from going nuclear, a deal would have advanced Iran's integration into the region. In this telling, Netanyahu's real aim here is keeping Iran isolated and weak.

• 16:54Ezra Klein?

  Do you buy that?

• 16:55Speaker 13

  I buy the final comment, and I like and admire Stephen. I don't buy the argument, because I've been around negotiations for a very long time. I understand what is required. Mostly, we failed. The negotiations that I was a part of, with the exception of four extraordinary years under Bush 41 and James Baker. The last time, I might add, we were admired, feared, and respected as a great power. And I've not been involved during the Obama and Biden administrations in Iranian US negotiations. But the reality is, you want to make a negotiation work, you need four things. You need two parties who are willing and able. You need a sense of urgency.

• 17:35Speaker 13

  You need a mediator who's prepared at the right times to apply ample amounts of vinegar and ample amounts of honey. And you need a negotiation and an end game of the negotiation based on a balance of interest. The last five rounds of Trump administration negotiations, mediated primarily by Stephen Whitkoff, the envoy for everything, in my judgment, given what was on the table, never had a chance of succeeding. The ultimate bridge between Iran's demand, obsession, determination against every conceivable

• 18:15Speaker 13

  force and odds to maintain its right to enrich and actually to enrich fundamentally came in conflict with the Trump administration's notion that, no, Iran will have zero enrichment capacity. And forget the right, the capacity, the actual reality of enriching on Iranian soil. They never figured out how to bridge that gap. And you can't do this in six rounds of negotiations separated by a week and a half.

• 18:51Speaker 13

  You needed more time, a more serious effort, and a willingness on each side to be more flexible. And since there's no trust, no confidence, Iranians' view of negotiating with Americans was traumatized by the withdrawal. So you had a lot of odds stacked against you. And yes, there's no question that that negotiation impasse afforded both Netanyahu and the president, Trump, an opportunity to essentially deal with the problem in a different way. But I do not subscribe to the narrative that a clever, crafty Israeli prime minister

• 19:36Speaker 13

  willfully sandbagged a naive president into abandoning negotiations, which were somehow on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Trump played an active role in the fiction and the ruse that the Israelis required to implement the first phase of their military campaign, which was the decapitation strategy. Trump's insistence, right up until the night of June 12/13, when the Israeli strikes began, was that there would be a sixth round in Oman. And I think the Iranians were lulled into believing that there would be no Israeli strike until after those negotiations concluded

• 20:20Speaker 13

  and the president made a judgment that they had succeeded or failed. So, no, Trump rode Netanyahu's tiger once he saw precisely how much damage, how much skill, how much operational capacity the Israelis had. Friedz Akari had described it as FOMO, that that's what essentially motivated Trump, fear of missing out. He wanted some of that. I do believe-

• 20:48Ezra Klein?

  Wait, I think you're saying two things that feel like they're intention to me. One is that Trump was an active strategic participant, creating a ruse to allow Israel to execute an attack, right? We were, you know, it was not long ago that we saw Trump with Netanyahu. Saying you have to wait. I'm negotiating. I do not want you bombing around, right? That happened in public. It looked like a public rebuke of Netanyahu. So one version, which you've sometimes heard from the Trump White House, I feel like I'm hearing it from you right now, is this was all a ruse and Trump was strategically operating alongside Netanyahu to lull the Iranians into a false sense of complacency. The other interpretation is that Israel acted without the US's full blessing, certainly

• 21:32Ezra Klein?

  without our full cooperation, began the bombing, and then Trump, in some reports, watching Fox News, seeing how much the Israelis were succeeding in the objective, decided to jump in and be part of it. Those are two, I think, quite different interpretations of what Trump was doing. Either which do you subscribe to, or how do you synthesize them?

• 21:51Speaker 13

  Well, timing is a critically important piece here. For the last two months, Trump did warn Netanyahu off. I think the Monday before the Thursday that the Israelis struck, I think he was quite uncertain about whether or not this was a good idea. But let's be clear. Donald Trump, in the last two months, has done things to Israel and without Israel's coordination and consent that no other American president that I ever worked for, Republican or Democrat, has done. He has essentially undermined two of the three political laws of gravity that have governed the US-Israeli relationship. Number one is the no daylight policy.

• 22:35Speaker 13

  We must coordinate everything with Israel. Donald Trump sanctioned his own hostage negotiator in March to open up direct negotiations, three rounds, with Hamas, the external leadership, over and above Israeli objections or without Israeli even acquiescence. He cut a deal with the Houthis without Israel's knowledge, which essentially implied that as long as the Houthis restrained from attacking US naval assets and US-flagged our own commercial shipping, they could basically continue their campaign to launch drones and ballistic missiles at Israel. And he announced in the presence of an Israeli prime minister, probably over his objections.

• 23:19Speaker 13

  That he was initiating in April a negotiation. And then finally, over Netanyahu's objections, he lifted, quite to the Israeli surprises and most of the surprise of Washington, sanctions, lifted sanctions on the regime of Ahmad Sharar in Syria. So that no daylight policy, he blew through. The second law of gravity, which was attention to domestic political constraints. If a democratic president had done any of the things I've just identified, let alone all of them, it would probably be a move on the part of Republicans to impeach him.

• 23:58Speaker 13

  So Donald Trump, in my judgment, had the personality, had the will to say at least to the Israeli prime minister, "Look, I understand what you want to do. You've got a compelling case, but you need to give me more time. You need to give me another two months." But Trump basically handicapped his own argument by setting this completely unrealistic deadline of two months.

• 24:29Ezra Klein?

  This was two months to negotiate with Iran.

• 24:32Speaker 13

  Exactly. And the truth is, we saw it play out in the last 12 hours. He compelled the Israelis to tone down their response to ballistic missiles in Beersheba that caused the deaths of three, four, five Israelis. But in a large part, what I'm saying to you, I think, is that Donald Trump is transactional, he's situational, he doesn't have a strategy. There's no core. Biden could not bring himself, for over a year, to impose a single cost or consequence on Israel that normal humans would regard as serious or sustained pressure.

• 25:15Speaker 13

  He could have restricted or conditioned US military assistance to Israel. He didn't do that. He could have introduced a UN Security Council resolution or voted for someone else's. He didn't do that. He could have unilaterally recognized Palestinian state. He didn't do that. He could have marshaled a rhetorical campaign, day in and day out, basically questioning the fact that Israel is not a reliable. He didn't do that. Biden had a core. I'm just reporting here, so don't shoot me. Biden had a core. And the core was a deep and abiding emotional and political commitment to the security of Israel, the people of Israel, the idea of Israel. That was Joe Biden in the Senate for decades.

• 26:00Speaker 13

  That was Joe Biden's father telling him that silence in the face of evil, the Holocaust, is complicity. That's Joe Biden, who was a part of Israel's story and felt himself to be a part of it. That's not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a transactor. And if you get in the middle between him and something he really wants, this is a president who in six months has sidelined Israel, has pressured Israel, and has supported Israel.

• 26:31Ezra Klein?

  Let me interrupt this for one second. Because I think the thing, if you've been watching this, you will think hearing this is, yes, there are things Donald Trump wanted for America. He wanted to negotiate the return of a hostage. He wanted our shipping to not be endangered by the Houthis. But Donald Trump has put no serious curbs on what Israel is doing in Gaza or the West Bank, to be very clear. And he just gave Israel the thing that all these other presidents, including Joe Biden, for all of his deep-seated Zionism, did not give Israel, which is American participation using our most powerful, depth-penetrating munitions in a bombing campaign to destroy

• 27:16Ezra Klein?

  as much of Iran's nuclear program as we could. So for all the, you know, Trump does not follow protocol in the way other presidents do, he is much freer with his language than other presidents have been. But if you ask who gave Israel what they really wanted, the thing Netanyahu could not get from George W. Bush, from Barack Obama, from Donald Trump number one, from Joe Biden, it was this.

• 27:41Speaker 13

  That's my point, though. He removed sanctions on settlers. He restored the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs. He basically has given Israel a free hand in the West Bank. No, no, I'm not here to argue that Donald Trump is the new Eisenhower.

• 28:00Speaker 13

  That basically he's the only American president ever to threaten serious sustained pressure against the state of Israel, as Eisenhower did in the wake of Suez. The only one, no American president has gone beyond what Eisenhower was prepared to do. My sense was Donald Trump has no core, which is why he is the ultimate transactor. That he could do both and not blink an eye? That he could basically call up an Israeli prime minister and say, don't overreact. I don't want you, I don't know what the Israelis were prepared to do, but I guarantee you it would have been as devastating a strike in response to the deaths of five Israelis,

• 28:43Speaker 13

  which were the fifth of all the Israelis who were killed over the course of the last 12 days by Iranian ballistic missiles. It is the absence of a core. It is Trump's response to situations. It's the absence of an effective strategy. And I would have bet you that had the Israelis not struck June 12th, 13th, he would have tried to find a deal with the Iranians that would have parked the nuclear issue, parked it, a transactional deal, not a transformational one. Parked the Iranian issue until the end of his, hopefully, final term in office.

• 29:24Speaker 13

  So I understand exactly what you're saying, and I'm not here to whitewash Donald Trump as someone who is a stand-up guy when it comes to Israel. And that's not, that's exactly the opposite point I'm making.

• 29:37Ezra Klein?

  Well, the thing, the thing I'm trying to get at here is, because I'm, I'm also, I don't think you're trying to whitewash Donald Trump. That's not my view, is that there is a question of whether or not Donald Trump is trying to achieve something here, right? He's been working with Netanyahu hand in glove. And maybe it's that he wanted to set back the Iranian nuclear program, right? You could, you could see Donald Trump as acting here with a goal. And you could see Donald Trump here as making decisions day by day by day by day, without really a theory of how they're all going to work out. And I think what is worth thinking about, a thing I have been trying to think about, is Trump just gave Israel something that every other recent president, including Donald Trump, thought was too risky to give them.

• 30:24Ezra Klein?

  And is that because bombing Iran, given Iran's current state, is no longer that large of a risk? Because they cannot project power as they once could? Because Israel's decapitated so many of their proxies? Is that because Donald Trump has a higher risk tolerance? Or wants something different? Or wants something more than the other presidents did? Or than he did during his first term? Right, we have just seen a massive change in US policy towards Iran.

• 30:50Speaker 13

  Yeah, we went to war with Iran, yes.

• 30:52Ezra Klein?

  So what is that change in service of? And how do we know if it will have worked?

• 30:56Speaker 13

  Well, that's a separate analytical question. The first one is theoretical. I mean, I think Trump saw an opportunity and he took it.

• 31:04Ezra Klein?

  Was Trump right to take the opportunity?

• 31:07Speaker 13

  Well, that's another question as to whether or not what we have done, ultimately, will redown to an advancement of American national interest or retardation of those interests.

• 31:18Ezra Klein?

  What is our interest?

• 31:19Speaker 13

  Our vital interests. And it's vital regarding a situation where American presidents would risk putting Americans in harm's way. We have three interests in the Middle East. Number one, counterterrorism. Number two, maintaining access to hydrocarbons. And number three, ensuring that there is no regional hegemony with a nuclear weapon. That's not to say we don't have other interests. I worked on one of those interests for my entire career. But it was never deemed to be a vital national interest. Which is one of the reasons, I think, that in so many administrations, there was never a serious effort to look at the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab-Israeli issue as a national interest, particularly at the end of the Cold War.

• 32:04Speaker 13

  It was viewed as a discretionary problem, would be nice to have.

• 32:35Ezra Klein?

  You say one of our vital interests is preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon, probably in this case Iran, with a nuclear weapon. First, why is that our vital interest? I mean, it seems obvious, but I think it's worth spelling it out because as much as Trump did diverge from other presidencies here, not allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon has been a very, very consistent view of every recent American president. And second, when you say there can be no regional hegemon with a nuclear weapon, militarily, isn't Israel a regional hegemon with nuclear weapons?

• 33:08Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, I use the term escalation dominance. I probably shouldn't have used the term regional hegemon. Israel is not a regional hegemon the way the former Soviet Union was in Eastern Europe.

• 33:17Ezra Klein?

  But Iran wasn't going to get there either with a weapon.

• 33:20Speaker 13

  Right, but Iran would emerge, my definition is Iran emerges in a competitive and antagonistic way as a threat, as a threat to Saudi Arabia, as a threat to Israel spreading its ideology in five.

• 33:35Ezra Klein?

  So an expansionary power with a nuclear weapon.

• 33:37Speaker 13

  Yeah, that'd be a better way to frame it. An expansionary power with a nuclear weapon, right. Because that threatens our core interests. I mean, Iran is, clearly has an ideology which seeks to influence and convert the so-called Shia axis, Baghdad, Beirut, Sanaa with the Houthis, Damascus. That seems to stretch these days in large part, given Russian retrenchment, given Ahmad Shara's rise. You're not talking basically about a Sunni regime in Syria. I don't see, and you now have the hollowing out of Iran's ability to project its power abroad. So I don't think that is as critical an interest.

• 34:21Speaker 13

  But Iran's pursuit of the weapon and Iran, 90 million people, Iran's a keeper. It's been a keeper for centuries. It's a real country. Is Israel an expansionary power with a nuclear weapon? Israel has a new definition of border security, which I find to be very intriguing. And it goes beyond their security doctrine that they have, they will preempt or prevent. But if you look at what the Israelis have done, in Gaza, they are there for an indefinite period of time. In the West Bank, they are now more entrenched than they've ever been since the second Intifada. In Lebanon, they still have not withdrawn from the five strategic points obligated to withdraw, and the Trump administration has acquiesced in that.

• 35:05Speaker 13

  And in Syria, they've declared much of the area southwest of Damascus as a no-go zone. It's a fascinating sort of anticipatory hedge against October 7, and partly also because it does advance Israel's operational and offensive capacities. So, an ongoing Israeli-Iranian conflict is basically going to endure, even if the Iranians don't make a major effort to try to reconstitute the program, or worse, right, push for an actual weapon.

• 35:47Ezra Klein?

  And as somebody with long experience in the region who has thought deeply about these questions, do you think it served America's national interest to drop bunker buster bombs in Iran?

• 36:00Speaker 13

  Given the fact that we don't know what the damage was, given the fact that we don't know what the end state is, it's a highly arguable proposition. At the same time, it reminds me of the guy who jumps off the 10-story building, and as he's passing the fifth floor, somebody yells out, "How you doing?", and he responds, "So far, so good." I think it was a judgment call, and it was not, in my judgment, a slam dunk judgment call. I guess if I were running the railroad, I would have asked for two more months to determine whether or not Iran was serious about this negotiation.

• 36:45Speaker 13

  I would have probably varied what I would put on the table.

• 36:52Speaker 13

  In an effort to get the Iranians to agree, it wouldn't have been anything like the JCPOA. And then

• 36:59Ezra Klein?

  Which was the Obama era nuclear deal with Iran that the Trump ripped up.

• 37:02Speaker 13

  Right. And then at the end of that two month period, if the Iranians were not interested, I think I would have agreed with the decision.

• 37:13Ezra Klein?

  So there's an argument, you've heard it made recently from a number of Democrats that, look, Obama signed this deal with Iran, that a lot of other countries were counterparties in this deal in some way or another. We had inspectors there, there was a framework, there was a structure. Trump ripped it up, then was trying to make a new deal that sounded kind of like the JCPOA, and then ended up bombing during the deal making process, which probably makes, it makes it very hard to imagine that you will ever convince Iran back to the table in the future. So first, do you buy the argument that the deal we had was sort of fine? And the problem was just Trump ripping it up and causing a problem that he now needed to solve? And two, since you said if you were running negotiations, you would create something very different.

• 37:58Ezra Klein?

  What would have been different about it?

• 38:00Speaker 13

  Well, first of all, the JCPOA was flawed but functional. It restrained and constrained, it created a degree of intrusive inspections that I think frankly were working. That doesn't mean that the Iranians weren't cheating, of course they were cheating. Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, in my judgment, never had a good answer. This is not the best answer either. And it leads into the analytical question of, how do you permanently ensure that Iran can ever acquire a nuclear weapon? There's only one way to do it, and it's tethered to a galaxy far, far away, rather than the realities back here on planet Earth. And that is to fundamentally change the regime and create one, or the Iranian public will create one that

• 38:46Speaker 13

  is not interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon. I might add, the Shah was well on his way and wanted one as well. Iran has a profound sense of entitlement and insecurity. That is a very bad combination in any nation. Profound entitlement and profound insecurity. And I think that the Iranian program is not dead. It hasn't been totally obliterated. The 800 pounds of highly enriched uranium fissile material went missing. Where is it? How many centrifuges, advanced centrifuges, survived? Iranians, I think, over time, even though it'll be very difficult, given Israel's command

• 39:29Speaker 13

  of airspace, but if they don't deal with the IAEA any longer, or they withdraw from the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, you can see that this operation, which is now being touted as an unqualified success, I certainly wouldn't call it that, is going to be looked at quite differently. Which is why, in the end, in my judgment, we talk about the New Middle East, we come back to the same two unanswered questions. How do you translate this escalation dominance into something more enduring, that reflects a better balance of interests?

• 40:11Speaker 13

  And number two, do you have the leaders to convert that? And it seems to me Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested. He's already demolished Israel's enemies, now he seeks to become the peacemaker. I don't see it, because it assaults at least one of the core principles, which is there is not going to be a Palestinian state, and there will be no division of East Jerusalem, and there will be no major Israeli concessions, with territorial concessions on the West Bank. I don't see it among the Palestinians. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86. Every Iranian expert I talk to tells me that if there is regime change, it's likely

• 40:53Speaker 13

  to be, particularly in this environment, it's going to be IRGC, heavily military-securitized regime, and figure that the only, borrowing a page out of Gaddafi's book, the one Gaddafi didn't read, but one Kim Jong-un did read, basically, you need a nuclear weapon.

• 41:13Speaker 13

  To guard against, hedge against regime change. I don't see the leadership.

• 41:18Ezra Klein?

  I want to say from my perspective, I just claim no knowledge of how any of this will turn out. I've actually felt even in preparing for this conversation, it's just, it's hard to find anything that feels like strong commentary to me because everybody's just speculating.

• 41:32Speaker 13

  Ezra, you're, I mean Ezra Klein, you're a very wise man.

• 41:36Ezra Klein?

  Thank you.

• 41:36Speaker 13

  And one of the lessons I've learned after decades of failure in negotiations, you really need to respect, not admire, not countenance, but respect the degree of difficulty that the issues and the leaders in this part of the world pose. It is more often than not, a place where American ideas on war making and peacemaking go to die. No one that I know, and I'll put myself at the top of the list, is prepared to make predictions, hard and fast predictions. The Israelis now believe that what's happened to Iran is going to open the door to a dramatic expansion of the Abraham Accords.

• 42:19Speaker 13

  I don't know what Middle East they're looking at.

• 42:24Ezra Klein?

  One version of what just happened, there's a sort of precedent in Israel bombing the Iraqi nuclear program back in the eighties, is this sets things back quite a bit and it just kind of defers it and people are able to keep it contained and keep it in a box. There is a tension there. I mean, you've spoken to the Israelis about the Iranians much more than I have, but I've spoken to them enough about the Iranians, that the completely universal opinion within the Israeli security class is that America does not understand Iran. Iran is a patient strategic power with an imperialistic past and deeply ideological hegemonic ambitions.

• 43:05Ezra Klein?

  And they will wait and they will strategize and they will act on a longer timeframe than America ever acts upon. It seems to me that if you believe that. Then a bombing campaign that, you know, depending on who you believe, set Iran back six months, two years. But at the same time, made it almost impossible for the Iranians to ever trust diplomacy with us again. You sort of knocked out the idea of a deal. And so what? You're left with either regime change or the expectation that the thing Iran is not going to do is wait

• 43:46Ezra Klein?

  one screwdriver turn away, that when the new hardliners come in, or when there's quiet, or is it, or America is distracted by something else, they're going to spread to a bomb. And that what they'll do is what Pakistan did, what North Korea did, which is like emerge one day and say, we've got one now. And so now you can't attack us. Now, maybe that doesn't happen, but that seems very plausible.

• 44:10Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 44:10Ezra Klein?

  From where we sit, because making diplomacy into a ruse seems like it has at least one very obvious problem, which is if you ever need diplomacy in the future, how do you persuade your counterparty? It's not, again, a ruse.

• 44:22Speaker 13

  Well, ever is a very long time.

• 44:24Ezra Klein?

  Sure.

• 44:25Speaker 13

  Declaring the end of anything is a hard proposition because the truth is neither you nor I can see what's in front of us. I was in Israel on October 6, 1973, right? Until now, the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the state of Israel. And within six years, I watched Sadat, Begin and Carter sign a full treaty of peace on the White House law. And in that case, trauma for the Israelis turned to hope. I sat on the White House lawn, October, September 13, 1993, watching Rabin Arfand Clinton sign the Oslo Declaration of Principles. And yet, everything on that day now lies somewhere, broken, bloodied and battered. In that case.

• 45:10Speaker 13

  Hope turned to trauma. So what do you conclude from this? Well, you conclude that we occupy a tiny space on the planet for a very short period of time. You can say, you never say never. That is a very strong proposition in my, of my worldview. I have two kids and four grandkids. I'm not going to mortgage their futures by saying the American republic is doomed to failure, or Israelis and Palestinians cannot find a way forward. I, I don't have the right, the moral right to do that. So in answer to your question, I've been around the Middle East to know it doesn't

• 45:47Speaker 13

  offer up very often transformative, happy, or Hollywood endings to everything. So when people talk about a new Middle East, I shake my head, but I listen. I listen a lot more now. I have a lot more uncertainty and a lot more humility. But this is one complicated region. And we are like, very often, a modern day gulliver wandering around in a part of the world that we don't understand, tied up by tiny powers, some large, some small, whose

• 46:27Speaker 13

  interests are not our own, and more than that, as reburdened, in essence, by our own illusions.

• 46:36Ezra Klein?

  I think that is the place to end. All's our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 46:40Speaker 13

  I actually prepared for this. I have two books.

• 46:44Ezra Klein?

  The rest are just winging.

• 46:46Speaker 13

  I have two books on how to do successful Middle East diplomacy, since that's what kind of we're talking about. Martin Indyk's Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, and Peter Baker and Sudan Glasser's masterful, The Man Who Ran Washington, A Life at Times of James Baker. Those are the two books I would recommend about, there are real lessons there, about how to do successful diplomacy. I have a third book, one that isn't out yet, that argues that the US, including...

• 47:19Speaker 13

  Many who worked on this process for a very long time has gotten it profoundly and utterly wrong when it comes to peacemaking. It's called "Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine" by Hussein Agha and full disclosure, my friend of many years, Robert Malley. Those are the three I would look at.

• 47:44Ezra Klein?

  Aaron David Miller, thank you very much.

• 47:46Speaker 13

  Ezra, your great, phenomenal questions. Love the conversation.

• 48:09Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klontz Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, and Chris Denlin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Sami-Lewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.