Thank you very much, Ed. It's a pleasure to be here. The topic of the
Middle East as a whole is an amazingly complicated one. And so I have written
out some remarks in order to make sure that I do some
minimal level of justice to it. And I will be brief, and
therefore, superficial. But that's never
bothered me in the least. And years ago, a wise
man from the East told me that if
something's worth doing, it's worth doing superficially. He lived on the
East Side over here. By now, it's widely accepted
that US influence in the Middle East is in something
approaching freefall. The Arab uprisings of 2011
overthrew the governments in Tunis, Egypt, and
Yemen, stimulated bloody miscalculations by
both the Syrian government and its opposition, and
destabilized Bahrain. They prompted greatly
increased transfer payments to pacify the people of
the conservative Arab Gulf monarchies, and midwifed their
adoption of policies designed to evoke militarized
nationalism. The aftermath of these events
has been complex and confusing. It has not yet run its course. The Middle East kaleidoscope
is still turning. The patterns it is
creating are not auspicious for either
the region's inhabitants or the United States. It is hard to make
sense of a region that consists of family-run
kingdoms, thugdoms, police states, military dictatorships,
democratically-directed ethno-religious
tyrannies, and societies in near Hobbesian
states of nature. But unless we make
the effort to do so, we risk exacerbating rather
than mitigating the problems that the Middle East creates for
the United States and our place in the world. Things may be getting better
for women in some places. And religious extremism may
be suffering a backlash. But overall, the trends
are not favorable to American interests. They're complicated. And bear with me as
I try to review them. The almost gleeful
American abandonment of longstanding proteges
like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak served to discredit America
with the region's autocrats. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood
won free elections only to demonstrate its
sociopolitical narrow mindedness, lack
of economic vision, and incompetence at governing. Ballot box Islamism soon
fell to a coup d'etat, which the United States
then hypocritically refused to recognize as such. Americans joined
Israel and the region's autocratic Sunni states in
supporting the restoration of military rule in Egypt. The US endorsement
of the overthrow of Egypt's first freely
elected government alienated the
region's Democrats. No matter. The United States is no longer
pushing the democratization of the Middle East
or anywhere else. The European Union
has also toned down its advocacy of human
rights in the societies across the
Mediterranean from it. The United States has
fallen into a pattern of military-driven
diplomacy-free foreign policy in the Middle East. By contrast, astute uses of
force by Russia in Syria, agile Russian diplomacy
with Iran, Israel, Egypt, and Turkey, and
Russian willingness to engage with all parties
to disputes in the region have made Moscow the
go to power capital for major and
minor actors there. But Russia's recent
return to relevance in West Asia and
North Africa does not mean that great power
competition again drives events there, as it
did during the Cold War. In the 21st century,
the traditional power centers in the Mashreq-- the Arab east, Baghdad,
Cairo, Damascus-- have been supplanted by
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, with Tehran, Jerusalem,
and Ankara playing some of the outsider
roles in the Arab world that European imperialists and
the United States once did. But the region's global
strategic importance has not diminished. It's still where
Africa, Asia, in Europe meet, a choke point for travel
between the Indo-Pacific and the Mediterranean
and Atlantic, the hub of the world's
energy supply system, the location of important
new capital markets, and where Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam all originated. Awkward as it may be to
deal with the Middle East, the world's great powers have
no alternative, to some degree, of engagement with it. The challenge of
such engagement is greatly complicated by the
fact that regional actors have largely replaced their
former passivity and fatalism with assertive pursuit of
their national interests as they see them. Pan-Islamism earlier
overtook pan-Arabism as a potential organizing
principle for the region. Now, both Arabism
and Islamism are yielding to notions
of nationalism, and Islam in one
country, as in Tunis. Nationalism has taken hold
even in Saudi Arabia, which long rejected it as
verging on idolatry. Many, myself included,
mistakenly supposed that the national identities
of the countries defined in the 1916 Sykes-Picot
Agreement and its aftermath would dissolve as a result
of the Arab uprisings. They have instead
proved durable. The imprint of European
colonialism on the Levant-- Iraq, Israel, Palestine,
Lebanon, and Syria-- has survived, and
even strengthened. But most countries in
West Asia and North Africa no longer see much reason
to defer to foreign patrons. Egypt, Iran, Israel,
Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United
Arab Emirates or UAE, pay lip service to the views of
external powers like the United States, Britain,
France, Germany, Russia, China, and India, whose support
they traditionally courted, and whose views they
once took as guidance. They now proceed without regard
to these patrons' interests or advice. Calculations by local
actors about the region's geopolitical dynamics drive
most of its antagonisms. But ideology-- now almost
exclusively in the form of theology-- is still a significant factor. Secularism is in retreat. Aspirations for a democratic
Islamism supported by Qatar and Turkey
are under attack by a league of conservative
Arab autocracies, led by the UAE and including Egypt
and Saudi Arabia. The Sunni-Shia schism
has intensified. despite Iran's pretensions
to leadership of Shia Islam, Shia outside Iran
have for the most part rejected its
theology of [ARABIC],, or clerical guardianship
of the state. Sunnis are split between
cosmopolitan moderates and hardline salafis. America's catastrophically
ill-considered military interventions
in the region at the turn of this
century laid low the traditional balancers
of Iranian power in Afghanistan and Iraq. Related Israeli
actions in Lebanon then elevated the
Iranian-aligned Hezbollah, which is a quasi-fascist
political party formed to resist the Israeli occupation
of Lebanon in the early '80s. This was propelled to
the commanding heights of Lebanese politics. External interventions, both
to overthrow the government and to bolster contending
opposition factions in Syria, helped devastate that country
and reinforce its dependence on Iran and Russia. No longer constrained by
external patrons, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the
UAE separately took actions that also
inadvertently entrenched Iranian influence in
Gaza, Bahrain, and Yemen. The United States
has now effectively franchised our major regional
clients in the Middle East-- Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE-- with the power to determine
most American policies in their region. Washington has become stridently
committed to these three countries' objective of
regime change in Tehran. Saudi Arabia and the
UAE have effectively set aside the issue
of Palestinian relief from ongoing Israeli
abuse and encroachment to focus on countering Iran's
expanded political and military influence in the region. This has facilitated the
formation of a previously unthinkable entente-- a limited partnership
for limited purposes-- between the two Gulf Arab
countries and Israel. Israel's primary
concern has been less Iran's expanding sphere
of influence in West Asia than the threat that Iran's
alleged nuclear weapons program poses to Israel's
nuclear monopoly in the region. Now, however, the presence
of Iranian forces in Syria and their support of
Lebanese Hezbollah increasingly alarm the Israelis. The Gulf states'
limited partnership Israel has gained them
intelligence exchanges, new surveillance technologies,
training in assassination techniques, and
cooperation focused on combating the Iranian foe. Equally important from
their point of view-- it has enlisted the powerful
American Zionist lobby in their support, giving them
a near hammerlock on the US Congress that their
money could never buy. History's longest running
diplomatic deception-- the so-called peace
process in the Holy Land-- has been superseded by an
Israeli dictated one state many zones dispensation that
demands Palestinian emigration or submission to the Zionist
version of apartheid. American diplomacy
toward Israel-Palestine has been placed firmly in the
hands of ardent supporters of Jewish colonialism. The peace process
has been reduced to a real estate mogul's notion
of diplomatic maskirovka. This is a Russian term for
an operational disguise that gains time for expanded Jewish
settlement and ethnic cleansing of Arabs and their immigration
or warehousing in projects. This has left
Palestinians with no path to self-determination
other than violence, compounding the potential for
widening resort to terrorism on their part. Unconditional support
from the United States for Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE has facilitated a series
of unspeakable humanitarian disasters in West
Asia, including Israel's quasi-genocidal
siege of Gaza, the multi-national
vivisection of Syria, and the devastation of Yemen. Before Saudi Arabia carried
out the gruesome murder of a dissident journalist in
its consulate in Istanbul-- using techniques which
are typical of Mossad, interestingly-- it kidnapped the Lebanese prime
minister and held him hostage. Each of these horrors invokes
highly selective outrage abroad that generates blind spots
to simultaneous atrocities elsewhere. Turkey and the Muslim world
are obsessed with Gaza, Europe and Russia with Syria,
and the United States is increasingly focused on
Saudi unilateralism in Yemen and elsewhere. US policies toward Israel,
Saudi Arabia, and the UAE directly or indirectly assist
their military operations directed at terrorizing
and immiserating the inhabitants of Gaza,
the West Bank, and Yemen. Washington continues to
violate Syrian sovereignty and to maintain a military
presence on Syrian soil, aimed in part at regime change. The United States is
once again working toward abandoning the Kurds to
their millennial Arab, Persian, and Turkish overlords. Taken together, these
elements of US policy leave it without any
traction to speak of in the region, while severely
eroding American moral standing outside it. A serious deterioration
in US-Turkish relations has exacerbated this
decline in US influence. This has consequences
beyond the region. Turkish support
or acquiescence is essential to the successful
conduct of US policies toward Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Russia, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, the Balkans,
the Black Sea region, the Caucasus in Central
Asia, not to mention NATO, the European Union,
and the Islamic world. Ankara can no longer be counted
upon to back or facilitate US diplomatic or
military maneuvers. Turkey was, for a
time, an inspiration to proponents of
popular sovereignty in Egypt and elsewhere. Its political evolution appeared
to demonstrate the feasibility of a democratic
Islamist evolution to parallel the birth
of Christian democracy in Western Europe. But the rise of
Islamophobia in Europe has now made it clear that
Muslim Turkey will never be accepted as European,
Turkey's goal for the past two centuries. Rejected by
Christendom, the Turks have turned away from Europe
and toward the Middle East. In the process,
they appear to have traded parliamentary democracy
for presidential [INAUDIBLE],, rule by a demagogic
populist strongman. Turkey continues, in
partnership with Qatar, to support democratic Islamist
movements in the region, like the Muslim
Brotherhood and Hammas. But as in Turkey itself,
the regional trend is toward less consultative,
more autocratic systems of government. In Saudi Arabia, shura, or
consensual decision making and oligocracy, rule by
the few, have given way to a form of monacracy, decision
making by a single person. In Israel, the free
expression of ideas is ever more constrained
by intensified ethno religious
identity politics that seek to reinforce
the Jewish democracy's military dictatorship over
its captive Arab, Muslim, and Christian populations. Fear of Islamist democracy
and its consequences for the region's rulers
has sparked the formation of an end of the informal
coalition of Sunni majority states committed to
traditional Islamic systems of oligarchic government,
or to military autocracy. This development
parallels the effort by European
reactionaries to smother the revolutions of
1848, although it's so far been less successful. The United States and
Israel are unashamedly aligned with this
anti-democratic coalition. This, and the decadence of
contemporary American politics, on which I will not
say anything further, have effectively deprived the
United States of credibility as an advocate of
the democratization of Muslim societies. But then, as noted,
the US no longer expresses much, if any,
interest in this cause. Newly assertive UAE
and Saudi policies have divided the Gulf
Cooperation Council, which was created
in 1981 to counter the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Oman now acts with
little regard to the GCC. Kuwait has distanced
itself from it. Emirati hostility
to Qatar's alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood
and unsuccessful Saudi efforts to compel Qatar to abandon its
geographically-dictated cordial relationship with Iran have
cemented a country partnership with Turkey. Qatar's new isolation
in its own region has driven it to redouble its
efforts to develop supportive relationships with great
powers like China, India, Russia, and the United States. Meanwhile, the US effort
to isolate Iran and build a worldwide united front
against it is failing. Last month's Warsaw
ministerial provided a convincing demonstration of
US-European disunity on Iran, as well as Chinese, Indian,
and Russian opposition to the United
States on the issue. It also illustrated the
decline in American relevance to the principal issues
in the Middle East, which are Israel-Palestine, the
emergence of an Iranian sphere of influence, Syrian
peace and reconstruction, the restoration
of order in Yemen, domestic tranquility in
the region's countries, and the faltering efforts of the
Islamic world to reinvigorate itself, as other previously
great civilizations-- for example, China and India-- are visibly doing in
the post Western era. Vice President Pence's and
Secretary of State Pompeo's recent tirades on Iran
and the region's politics were music to the ears of
[INAUDIBLE] Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, and
Mohammed bin Zayed. They clearly struck Europeans,
Asians, Africans, Turks, Arabs, and Persians as
paranoid delusions, policies derived from media
manufactured hallucinations that bear little resemblance to
conditions in the real world. The end of the Cold
War's bipolar order liberated the world's
nations and peoples from the constraints external
patrons previously imposed on their independent action. After the Soviet Union's default
on its rivalry with the United States and its
subsequent collapse, Americans were left with
no existential enemy. What to do? But the 9/11 terrorist attacks
on New York and Washington demonstrated that in
the post Cold War world, the United States is no
longer immune to reprisal by aggrieved parties overseas,
especially in the Middle East, where American policies
are widely resented. North Korea has
shown that the way to be taken seriously
by Washington is to be able to nuke it. Iran's potential to follow North
Korea in acquiring the ability to strike targets in
the American homeland now threatens to
escalate the damage policy missteps in the
region can inflict on us. The multinationally negotiated
nuclear arms control agreement with Iran-- the
so-called JCPOA-- mitigated this danger before
it was repudiated by the United States in favor of
pressures directed at regime change in Iran. But such efforts at regime
change, once without risk to the American homeland, now
entail potentially catastrophic costs to it. Drone warfare against
others is beginning to be answered by drone
warfare against American forces deployed overseas. How long before it's
used against the United States itself? The US and Israeli cyber
attacks on Iran and others have already begun to
be reciprocated by them. Hybrid warfare-- whether
Russian style, as in Crimea, or American style,
as in Venezuela-- could be applied to the United
States, as well as to others. Some think it
already has been used to skew American elections. Israel has evolved a
by now routine practice of so-called targeted
killings as an alternative to diplomatic outreach to its
ever more numerous enemies in the region. Such assassinations
began by taking the lives of Western
engineers assisting Arab countries to
develop weapons that might be used against Israel. Israel then turned to culling
the most promising leaders of the Palestinian resistance
to Zionist occupation and settlement activity,
thereby ensuring, as it wished, that it had nobody to talk to. In recent years, in association
with US intelligence agencies, Israel has also engaged
in the systematic murder of Iranian scientists
and engineers. These operations
have helped to erode previous standards of
morality and international law on the global level. They invite imitation
and reprisal. Since 9/11, the
United States has spent, or committed to
spend, almost $7 trillion on wars to control and contain
trends and events in the Middle East. These diversions of tax revenues
and borrowed capital to warfare abroad account,
in large measure, for the deterioration
of US physical and human infrastructure. None of these wars has
achieved its objectives-- none. Efforts to end them
in the interest of cutting American losses-- and I give President
Trump some credit here-- have been repeatedly frustrated
by Washington warmongers. Now, even as the ability
of the United States to control events
and limit risks in the Middle East recedes,
the potential impact on American domestic
tranquility of developments there is increasing. At the same time, direct
US interests in the region, other than the ability
to transit through it, are on the wane. The United States' rationale for
protecting the world's access to Persian Gulf energy supplies
reflects our self appointment as the guardian of global
order and prosperity. It is not a response to
US domestic energy demand, which can, again, be
met by a combination of domestic
production and sources in the Western hemisphere
in West Africa. The United States is now an
important energy exporter. in some respects,
thanks to fracking, America has become the global
swing producer of oil and gas. Meanwhile, the US Navy
continues unilaterally to protect energy exports
from the Middle East. The largest market
for such exports is now China, an officially
designated adversary of the United States. The second largest is India,
a determinedly non-aligned nation. Under its new "America first"
approach to foreign affairs, US alliances are
increasingly troubled. Washington has charged its
European and Asian allies with freeloading on
our military power. American willingness to
protect US Cold War allies and the health of their
economies is on the ebb. I don't know if you've seen the
latest proposals to charge cost plus for our protection
of all of our allies. No one can now be sure how long
the United States will remain committed to the unilateral
guarantee of worldwide access to Persian Gulf energy exports
that compete with its own. Iran remains deeply unpopular
in the United States. But enthusiasm
for war with it is limited to a few intensely
partisan and interest groups. The American people
appear to have little appetite for more
wars aimed at regime change in the Middle East or the
Muslim world more generally. Americans view both
Israel and Saudi Arabia with increasing distaste. The ability of US client
states in the region to buy support in Congress
for their foreign policies does not buy such approval
outside the Beltway. The US commercial interests
in the Middle East have become less compelling. In the late 20th century,
the United States was the largest exporter
of goods and services to most countries in the region. Nearly half of US arms
exports still go there. But the US no longer dominates
civilian imports in the region. Almost everywhere,
that distinction now belongs to China and the EU. The major US focus in
West Asia and North Africa has become counterterrorism. But this is based on
the dubious theory that the best way to avoid
being stung by hornets is to sidle up to their
nests and poke them. Every indicator we have shows
that the so-called global war on terrorism has multiplied
rather than depleted the ranks of anti-American
terrorists with global reach. That's not surprising, given
the estimated four million Muslims who have
perished from US post Cold War interventions in
West Asia and North Africa-- four million. Fighting terrorists over there
just increases their numbers and encourages them
to seek revenge here. It doesn't keep them at bay. The world's interests, including
those of the United States to demand peace and
stability in the Middle East, and a reduction of the
threats that emanate from it-- current US policies do
not serve these purposes. They prolong wars that
debilitate the United States, disturb its and other
nations domestic tranquility, and corrupt the rule of law,
abroad as well as at home. America's expanding
interventions in West Asia and North Africa are connected
to no war termination strategies. Many in the United States have
come to feel like the chorus on an ancient Greek stage,
watching the protagonists march inexorably toward tragedies
they cannot prevent. The usual Washington
response to policy failure is to plus up the resources
devoted to the failing policy and try harder. Doing this will not correct
the trends the US now faces in the Middle East. The United States
needs policies that address and protect
its interests more effectively than those
it has been following. These policies should
recognize the diminished stake Americans have in the
Middle East, as well as our diminished influence there. They should realistically
address and seek to leverage the diverse players now
influencing the region, not proceed unilaterally. In this, we can learn
from the Russians. Our military should support our
diplomacy, not the other way around. We should be talking
to all parties, not putting labels on some to
rule out dialogue with them, as we've done with
Hammas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. We should halt our
feckless practice of convening peace
conferences that exclude parties whose
acceptance or acquiescence is essential to war termination. The main issues in the region
of wider geopolitical importance remain Israel-Palestine,
Iran's role, Israeli-Syrian enmity,
refugees, the construction or reconstruction of war torn
societies, the war in Yemen, and the political
orientation of Islam. These issues must be
the focus of US policy. But the United States no longer
has the capacity to go it alone in addressing them. American diplomacy
must be redesigned to advance US
interests by joining the power and capabilities
of others to America's own. Even if Israel were
prepared to countenance Palestinian self-determination,
which it manifestly is not, it has succeeded, with
great misguided effort, in making the two state
solution infeasible. There is now effectively
one state in Palestine. In that state, Zionism
has supplanted Judaism as a state ideology. And assertively,
a Zionist minority rules over both devout Jews
and three categories of Arabs-- second class Arab citizens of
Israel, the disenfranchised and persecuted in the
militarily occupied Palestinian territories, and
the constantly terrorized inhabitants of the great
open air prison of Gaza. Call this apartheid if you will. In many ways, it's worse than
the South African version, because it denies the oppressed
any hope of development, separate or otherwise. The Israel-Palestine
issue is now one of equal civil and human
rights within a single polity. Resolving it requires
a moral and political, not a physical, revolution. The movement to boycott, divest
from, and sanction Israel-- BDS movement-- is
a global reaction to Israel's
self-delegitimization. But it misses the point. Domestically dictated
American subsidies to Israel, not trade in human
intercourse with it, are the principal
enabler of Zionism's racist cruelty to Palestine's
indigenous inhabitants. The key to ending
that cruelty is to end American official
and private endowment of it. Given the way the
US political system now franchises interest
groups with the formulation and administration of policies
of primary concern to them, that will not happen until a new
generation of Jewish Americans collectively determines it must. Until then, Israel's
moral decay and departure from the values of
Judaism will continue, and its international
unacceptability increase. That means American Jews
in the United States will be held ever
more accountable for Israeli actions, with
which most profoundly disagree, and of which they disapprove. Both domestic anti-Semitism
and foreign anti-Americanism will intensify. Current US policy
toward Iran consists of a mixture of
ostracism, propaganda to demonize the Islamic
republic, economic pressure for regime change, and
threatened military assault. Without talking to
Iran, the United States can constrain neither
its nuclear program nor its policies in its region. Name calling and
economic pressure reinforce Iran's hard liners
and retard reform and opening to the outside world that
could curtail Iran's militancy and create a basis for
its peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. Threats of military
attack stimulated to seek an effective deterrent,
in the form of the capability to conduct a nuclear strike on
Israel and the United States. Of course, it's only
better to talk than not to talk if you know what
you're going to say. And before we talk to
Tehran, the United States needs a multi-nationally
concerted strategy for a course of negotiation that
can address American-Israeli and Gulf Arab concerns about
Iran's current behavior and potential future
threat to regional order and to the United States itself. Similarly, to deal with
jihadism, refugees, and reconstruction
in Syria, as well as with Syria's role in Lebanon
and its conflict with Israel, will require dealing with
the government in Damascus, whatever Americans, Europeans,
Gulf Arabs, Israelis, and Turks may think of it. Trends and events, including
some that are the product of self-contradictory
US objectives in Syria-- overthrow the
government, overthrow the movement directed
against the government at the same time-- these contradictory
policies have made it necessary to
include Iran and Russia in any discussion of how
to realign Syria, repair its human losses,
and rebuild it. And China's going to
have to be invited to play a role in
Syria's rehabilitation and reconstruction too. Syria has illustrated the
limited ability of great power military intervention to
reshape the complexities of local politics. Yemen demonstrates that the same
limits apply to regional actors as well. The war there has become not
just a calamity for Yemenis, but a burden and
an embarrassment to most of its foreign backers. The only winner
in Yemen so far is Iran, which has acquired
an unprecedented level of influence there. The sooner the
external parties-- Saudi Arabia, the UAE,
and the United States-- can extricate
themselves, the better not just for them, but
for the people of Yemen. Finally, US policy
must recognize that the [INAUDIBLE] Islam, the
Islamic world, is in a crisis quite as profound as that
which tormented Christendom before the Enlightenment. Radically competing visions of
its future are in contention. The ability of
non-Muslims to influence the outcome of the debate
within Islam is limited. But non-Muslims have a big
stake in whether the result is an affirmation of the tolerance
Islam once exemplified or of aggressive medievalism
and ostentatious religiosity coupled with hypocrisy. The United States must take care
to avoid tipping the struggle in the wrong direction. And this will require
a kind of empathy for the Islamic faithful
that is not currently in evidence in our country. The trouble with
kaleidoscopes is twofold. When you give them
an ignorant knock, the pieces rearrange themselves
in unpredictable ways. And when you fail to
turn them, the pieces remain in their
current configuration, whatever that might be. The United States
needs to cease banging the Middle East
kaleidoscope, and start working with others to
produce realignments in the region that serve
American interests, not those of American client
states or third parties. Thank you. That ends the lecture. [APPLAUSE] We have some time for
questions, comments. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. Chris, you've done
a masterful job of summarizing a very
complex situation over a large piece
of real estate stretching from West
Asia to North Africa, as well as making some
very insightful suggestions for guidelines that the
United States should follow in its policies. But I want to focus in on
Iraq, Syria, and the Kurds and ask you specifically
what we should do there. Trump has announced a total
troop withdrawal, which he's now walked back a bit. But given your aversion to
military intervention, what do you think specifically we
should do with Iraq, Syria, and the Kurds? In Iraq, we have sponsored
the creation of an autonomous region that meets most
of the requirements for an independent state
other than recognition. No one will recognize it
as an independent state for the simple reason
that that would trigger Turkish and Iranian, as well
as Arab-Iraqi intervention in the state. So Iraqi Kurdistan is well
served by the legal fiction that it's fully part of Iraq. And I don't think
anybody challenges that, including
the Turks, who have managed to turn it into a bit
of a satellite in many respects. Syria is different. There, the Kurds have
been concentrated in an area along
the Turkish border. These Kurds are
affiliated with the PKK within Turkey, which
has long been engaged in a struggle for
self-determination that has involved a lot
of terrorist acts, and is quite naturally anathema
to whoever was in charge and whoever might be
in charge in Ankara. I think encouraging
that group to maintain a fully autonomous position
in Syria similar to the one that the Kurds have
change achieved in Iraq is likely to result
in tragedy for them and for everybody else. And so I think withdrawal
is the correct policy. And I think President
Trump deserves credit for seeing that. However, it should
be accomplished as a result of a set
of considered judgments about how to minimize the damage
and facilitate the adjustment to new circumstances. And that means discussing this
with Damascus, Ankara, Moscow, as well as the Gulf Arabs who
have their own equities there. I would say perhaps the most
difficult discussions that need to be held are those with
Jerusalem, because as you know, I have tried to work out a sort
of taxonomy of relationships between independent actors
in international affairs, and one of those
is a protectorate, which is a country that you
wish to see survive not because of any reason other than that
it is strategically advantageous to have it where it is. It's sort of what the US did
with China in World War II. As long as they
were indigestible to the Japanese empire,
they served a purpose, and we were willing
to help them. Well, there is an
opposite to that. And I don't know what
the name ought to be, which is a country you
want to splinter, weaken, and incapacitate. And Israeli policy towards
Syria has followed that path. That is, it's been in the
Israeli interest, as Israelis have seen it, to divide Syria
along ethnic and other lines, and preferably to
destroy the Syrian state. So the Israelis,
behind the cover of all the chaos in Syria,
have been very involved with some of the worst
Islamist jihadi groups. And they've also been involved,
of course, with the Kurds, as they are in Iraq, for
the same reason, basically. So that is a
difficult discussion. But it's one we have to have. So I thought President
Trump was right. I think his advisors
pulling him back were wrong. But there should have
been a discussion prior to the decision. It shouldn't have just been the
product of a tweet following a discussion with Mr. Erdogan,
who is off his meds these days. So I think that's best I
can do on that question. Question? Yeah. So, hi. My name is [INAUDIBLE]. I just wanted to ask you
a question about ISIS, and how recently, it's been
combined into the group and [INAUDIBLE] might be
the end of ISIS, per se. But also in the
Philippines, there have been some kind of new
groups that arose from ISIS. And some people might just
think that you can't just eradicate an ideal
[INAUDIBLE],, per se, but it can move towards new
regions and routes over there. So what do you think the
West-- and by the West, I mean Europe, the US, I
guess what we could call the developed world-- the
countries that are involved in the fight against
ISIS, what can we do to prevent the
radical Islamic ideology from not just being
stopped in the Middle East and then moving, but just
being eradicated [INAUDIBLE]?? Well, the difference between-- we have many names
for this thing. Daesh is the Arabic name for it. And ISIS and ISIL
refer to the locality. It never was intended
as the caliphate, which it calls itself. It never was intended
as a locality. So what's different between
this group and other salafi jihadi groups is that they
came to the conclusion they needed a territorial
base, which they achieved. They actually were
ruling an area that was significantly larger
than the UK at one point. But you're right. It's an ideology,
not a state, per se, even if it briefly took on the
characteristics of a state. So crushing it, as we appear
to be doing, with mostly Syrian forces
attacking the remnant of the so-called Islamic state,
is not going to destroy it. And of course, you
mentioned the Philippines. That is not the
only region where the metastasis is occurring. It's much more acute in
Central and West Africa-- Boko Haram in Nigeria. The whole Chadian
basin, basically, is now full of groups
inspired by the Islamic State. Southern Thailand, also-- and
there are dangers elsewhere. And this goes to the
point I was making about the contentions
within Islam over what the identity
of Islam is or should be. The one extreme is these sort
of medieval-minded people who founded the Islamic
State in Syria and Iraq. And the late-- this is sort
of a personal thing, I guess. But I think it's interesting. And it illustrates
a lost opportunity. I don't think we can answer
this from the West, per se. We need allies. We need partners among
major Muslim actors. And in Saudi Arabia,
the late King Abdullah was such a potential
partner, because he came up with a brilliant scheme for
coopting the salafi jihadis. He said, basically--
and of course, he spoke with some
authority because of his custody of the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina. He said, you know, you're right. We live in a
morally corrupt age. Our religion is
full of hypocrisy. We need to purify. We need to revive it. We need to revitalize it. And you're absolutely right. The way to do this
is to look back to the beginnings of
Islam, to early practices, the so-called salaf, or the
followers of the prophet Mohammed. You're entirely
correct about that. Where you're fundamentally
wrong is what early Islam was. It was not intolerant. Jews and Christians
served as prime ministers in the early Muslim empires. It was not xenophobic. It incorporated Greek thought,
preserved it, and eventually retransmitted it to Europe,
causing the Renaissance. It was not misogynist. Women played an
independent role, not just in private spaces,
but in public spaces. The prophet Mohammed's
wife ran her own caravans as a business woman
up to Damascus from Mecca, for example. And so he said, yes, let's
look at the early practices. Oh, and finally, he said, Islam
has a distinction, he said-- maybe it's true, maybe
not-- that of the three Abrahamic religions that
Islam is the summary of, Islam is the only
one that directs its followers to
investigate God's handiwork and understand it. So Islam is a
religion of science. And that is why early physics,
chemistry, astronomy, maths, algebra, and so on were
pioneered in something called [ARABIC],, the house of wisdom,
first in Damascus, then in Baghdad. So that was a vision
that tore the rug out from under the extremists. And we could have
aligned with it. We've had another opportunity. And that was when
the Turks appeared to be developing something
like Christian democracy within the Islamic world. And I don't know-- people probably take Christian
democracy for granted. But in the 19th
century in Europe, it was considered a
logical impossibility. How could an democratic
movement associated with the autocratic
Catholic church exist? The contradiction between
the pope, the most autocratic infallible
person around, and democracy was irreconcilable,
people thought. And yet, it happened. So we might have worked there. There's an irony, now-- I was talking to Ed about
it a little earlier-- what's happening in Xinjiang
in Western China, which is brutal effort
at reengineering a culture by the Chinese
has given Mr. Erdogan the opportunity to contest
leadership of the Sunni world with the Saudis, because
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, went to Beijing
and said nothing about this except excuses. And of course, the Turks, being
related to Uygers and Kazakhs and others who are affected
by these policies, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples,
have seized on it as a means of asserting
moral leadership within the [INAUDIBLE] of Islam. So there are lots of
crosscurrents here. But we need to find Muslim
allies whom we can support. There are such people. We have a tendency to
get off on tangents. And we don't take
those opportunities. Yes. I had mentioned to Chaz that,
in my own scheduling confusion, I thought this
event ended at 5:00. It doesn't. It looks like there are
a number of questions. I'm going to have to run off
in a moment, so my apologies. But we'll just keep the
questions going until-- [INAUDIBLE],, first, thank you
for thinking about something that most of us don't have
the stomach to think about. It's pretty awful. It's pretty awful. But if I read you right
in looking at Trump-- and correct me if I'm wrong--
but the single most important signal that American could give
that it's changing its position will be the withdrawal of
subsidies [INAUDIBLE]---- is that kind of a starting
proposition for any reposition? Yeah, I think that's correct. There is a distinction
between what we do in Yemen, which
is objectionable, and what we do with Israel
in Gaza and on the West Bank. And the distinction
is that the Saudis pay us to give them support. We pay the Israelis to do
the awful things they do, which gives us a higher
level of responsibility-- accountability, if you will. But nobody wants
to talk about this. If you're a politician,
it guarantees support for your opponent
in any political context-- generous support, as well
as vituperation against you. Who needs it? So people just don't talk. And as long as the Zionist
lobby is as strong as it is, that's going to be the case. Therefore, I am not
holding my breath waiting for
intelligent US policies on that or many other
issues in the Middle East. But there are lots of things
that we need to think about. We might actually try
to develop a strategy, and then support it
politically with diplomacy, and back the diplomacy with
force, rather than having a military campaign that we have
to invent diplomacy to support, and treating the diplomatic
service as the cleanup squad after we've banged around and
knocked over a lot of things and made a mess, which is pretty
much what we've been doing. Yes, please. Yes. [INAUDIBLE] some level of
the government people who know about [INAUDIBLE]
open-minded way that would be [INAUDIBLE] the line
that you are talking about in a verified way? Because we read The New
York Times, [INAUDIBLE] The Washington Post [INAUDIBLE]
newspaper [INAUDIBLE] situation, and then we end up
with things that [INAUDIBLE] quite dangerous [INAUDIBLE]. So you said you are not very
hopeful about any improvement [INAUDIBLE]? Oh, there certainly are. There certainly are people
who are very thoughtful and have ideas that are
unconventional and are prepared to speak them. But they're not in
positions of power. And they don't tend to
be elected officials. Now, we have a new
group in the Congress-- Ilhan Omar and Alexandria
Orcasio-Cortez and-- what's her name--
Tlaib from the Midwest who are unafraid on these
issues, which is refreshing. They've opened some
space for discussion. But that's all it is. So far, there's
not much discussion and there's a lot of diatribe. And all these issues tend
to, in the end, become domestic political questions. For example, the question
of Yemen and our role there immediately takes
you to the US Constitution, where Article 1
Section 8 Clause 11 gives the US Congress
the exclusive power to authorize wars of choice. And we are
co-belligerents in Yemen. But the Congress has
never authorized anything. There has been a growth
of executive power, congressional power from
the Korean War, which was undeclared, right
up to the present day. Congress has defaulted on its
power, failed to exercise it. So the controversy over Yemen
is now pushing people who were previously-- and many liberals
who were previously oblivious to or are indifferent to the
constitutional arrangements that we are supposed
to live under-- has been pushing them to
become interested in restoring the constitutional balance
of power and checks and balances that we've lost. So there are trends toward
a more balanced approach that's more consistent
with American values and with our traditions. But they're trends. They're not yet facts. [INAUDIBLE] change
[INAUDIBLE] 2020? [INAUDIBLE] I have no idea what's
going to happen in 2020. I can only say that I'm probably
the only person you'll ever meet who's not
running for president. [LAUGHTER] Too bad! Do you expect global shifts
away from fossil fuels and towards more renewable
sources of energy to shift the domestic political
economy and political economy [INAUDIBLE],, and consequently,
US intervention [INAUDIBLE] members of OPEC? And if so, how? Well, certainly, the
major members of OPEC-- Saudi Arabia,
specifically, or the UAE-- both of which are
very large producers of oil and gas, and
Iran, for that matter, all anticipate a need to
restructure their economies not to be dependent on
hydrocarbon exports. And in the case of
the Saudis, there are two very ambitious plans. I'm never sure, when I'm
dealing with the Saudis, whether they will
actually implement what they talk about but-- both a nuclear
program and solar, which, of course, makes a great
deal of sense in Saudi Arabia. The natural material
for silicon, silica, is what most of the
sand there is made out of. And the intensity
of the sun's rays is about three times
that in California, where solar energy is now
very competitive economically. So there is a big
shift in the region to move into non-hydrocarbon
sources of energy. But there will always be
a role for hydrocarbons, just because they're
easily transportable. They're very efficient if
the engines that use them are correctly designed. But it will be a
diminished role over time. Probably, transportation
will be the last to go. Although electric
vehicles are coming in, something's going to have
to generate electricity in order to go into
the electric vehicles. Unfortunately, the
United States is not the leader in this area,
not withstanding Elon Musk and Tesla. China is the leader,
both in the installation of solar and wind power,
and in electric vehicles. I guess that's because
it's kind of hard to put a dead buck in the back
of your Tesla and drive. We like to hunt in this country. But I'm not sure whether
that's the explanation. Does Jordan have a
role in any of this? Yeah, it's a buffer
state for everybody. Nobody really is
very fond of it, but nobody can feel that
they can do without it. It's a buffer between
Israel and Iraq and Syria and parts of Israel,
Syria, and Saudi Arabia. And after the Gulf War,
there was a lot of discussion in the region about
whether it should just be abolished, because
King Hussein was on the side of Saddam Hussein-- no relation. But they were talking about-- the Hashemite kingdom of
Jordan and the Republic of Iraq were discussing a
unification scheme for three, four months after the
invasion of Kuwait. It went on anyway. Apparently, Saddam had
promised King Hussein he could have Mecca
back, while Saddam would keep the oilfields. But he'd give the holy
part of it to King Hussein. So not an active role, but it's
just a strategic zone of denial that is very convenient to
everyone, and at the moment, greatly tortured by
Syrian refugee presence, on top of the previous
Palestinian refugee presence. Can you say something about the
events right now in Algeria? [INAUDIBLE] just
now [INAUDIBLE]?? I'm not following
Algeria closely. I'm aware that the
geezer president-- I use the term advisedly,
being one myself-- is intent on staying
in for a fifth term. Yeah, sort of. Yeah, sort of. [INAUDIBLE] Today? Oh, good. Hallelujah. But no, Algeria's had a terrible
time getting its independence, and then since
independence, with all sorts of violent politics,
which hasn't gone away. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's getting better. Yes, ma'am. You mentioned that as there
has been backlash in the United States about our whole
protecting of Israel [INAUDIBLE]. You mentioned how there are
certain new politicians that have come in onto
the stage in 2018 and are unafraid to criticize
our [? goal ?] behind Israel. Do you see the growth
of partisanship over how much we're going to
support Israel as a problem? Yeah. Or do you see this partisanship
increasing [INAUDIBLE] years or [INAUDIBLE]? I think the fact that Mr.
Netanyahu in particular has become so identified
with the right wing of the Republican Party
is a very dangerous thing for Israel, because Israel
was not a partisan issue in the United States. Now, it is. And you can see this in
the political polling. There's all sorts of things
going on on that issue. There are many Jews, American
Jews, who, beginning years ago with the "not
in my name" movement and continuing to
the present day, now draw a sharp distinction
between their own faith and Jewish identity and Zionism,
which is something different. And so it doesn't help
when Mr. Netanyahu says, as he said two days ago, that
Israel is a state for the Jews only, and Arabs, basically,
are inconsequential, because this confirms
a lot of the objections that the American-- there's no American
Jewish community-- but American Jewish communities
have to the state of Israel. And it's all bringing out
an interesting phenomenon. And that is traditionally,
American Jews were anti-Zionist. They became Zionist only in
the 1950s, and in a big time after the '67 war. And I think the balance
is being restored. So that is a danger to the
state of Israel as well. And it's all the consequence
of Israeli policies. Israel is jeopardizing
its essential support in Europe and the United
States, in Jewish communities outside Israel. 20% of Israelis have emigrated. If you go to Berlin, there's
a huge Israeli colony there. It never would have
occurred to me that that could happen in my lifetime. So yeah, I don't know
where all this is going. But it's clearly not
going in favor of Zionism. Yeah, one more, than we
should adjourn, I think. Yeah. I just have a question in
relation to the African continent and how the threats
that you've been describing in the Middle East and how the
US has meddled with everything that has been going on
there for the past decades, and how I guess Europe
is quite [INAUDIBLE],, especially Great Britain and
France is quite doing the same in Africa-- I guess, do you think the
role of Western countries is reduced? Is it presumably
reduced recently? Or is there some kind of-- In Africa? Yeah. How does influence and
shifts towards something more productive [INAUDIBLE]
the African continent-- and I guess, obviously, I'm
talking in generalities, and it's much more
complicated than that-- but how these influences
can contribute to something better [INAUDIBLE]? Well, European colonialism left
Africa in a very potentially unstable condition. The boundaries of states
bear no resemblance to local geography
or ethnography. Peoples are split
between countries. And so far, however,
the Africans have managed, with the exception
of Eritrea and South Sudan, to preserve the boundaries
that they inherited from European colonialism. And certainly, in
the Francophonie, there is a lot of French
intervention still in Africa. You don't see that in
the Lusophone countries, the Portuguese-speaking
countries. Spain has nothing to do
with Guinea Equatorial. And the British are not
interventionist in Africa, particularly, although
they've played a helpful role, diplomatically,
in some instances. What's new is the arrival
of Asian and Latin American presences. Brazil-- a very big presence in
particularly southwest Africa, Angola, in Cape Verde, in
Guinea Bissau, in Mozambique. The Chinese are, of
course, everywhere. There are now three million or
more Chinese living in Africa-- most of them small
business people who've emigrated there and have
no intention of going home. And Indians-- India is now
a big factor, as is Japan. Turkey, which had not been
much of a factor in Africa is now very, very active there. I think the last
five years, they've established 18 new
embassies in Africa. And the UAE and Saudi Arabia
and others are also very active, as is Iran, so that
the Africans now have multiple
choices before them in terms of where
they can do business, with whom they can consult, and
whose support they can gain. The United States has never
been big in Africa, really. We are a significant
presence just because we're a global power. But anyway, the whole
African situation, in terms of external
relationships, is just becoming more
and more complicated, giving Africans more and more
choices, which I think is good. The final point is
that colonialism has been replaced by, and
official development assistance programs, which succeeded
it, have largely been replaced by investment
on a commercial basis. Whether it's Chinese or Indian
or Japanese or American or European, it's now on terms
negotiated by Africans for their own benefit. That is something new. Islam is a great
force in Africa, and becoming a greater one,
by the way, quite aside from extremists in Nigeria. I think Ed's skipped out,
which has set a good precedent. So I think we can adjourn this. And I appreciate
your being here. [APPLAUSE]
