Michael Doran | The United States and the Middle East

my name is virginia abram i'm a senior studying history and minoring in journalism and it is my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker michael duran is a senior fellow at the hudson institute where he specializes in middle east security issues he received his ba from stanford university and his m.a and phd from princeton university duran served in the george w bush administration as a senior director in the national security council with responsibility for the entire middle east except iraq a former senior fellow at the brookings institution dr duran has taught at nyu princeton and the university of central florida he has written for numerous publications including the wall street journal the new york times the new york post usa today and the los angeles times he is the author of three books including pan-arabism before nasser egyptian power politics and the palestine question and ike's gamble america's rise to dominance in the middle east please join me in welcoming michael duran [Applause] thank you virginia and thanks to all of you for coming thanks for to hillsdale for hosting this it's the first time i've ever been to hillsdale it's a great honor to be here it's fabulous um to see an institution like this um for me it's fabulous because i i'm a refugee as virginia alluded uh i'm a refugee from academia and i left about 15 years ago my last teaching position was at princeton and when i left princeton the the political correctness uh the progressivism was already intolerable and um i had this naive idea back then that the pendulum was just going to swing because it had gotten so ridiculous i thought 15 years ago that the pendulum had to swing but everything that i see and everything that i hear from my friends is that no actually the pendulum is not swinging it just uh it just continues and all of the major institutions especially in the humanities and social sciences all of the middle all the all of the major institutions almost all of american academia is just speaking with one monotone voice and so an institution like hillsdale that has something different to say and says it uh clearly and with conviction it punches way above its weight it's a it's a it's it's a fascinating thing and it's just great to be here and be part of this um i thank you for having me so what what i'm gonna do today is uh talk to you about uh uh trump and the middle east or really the united states and the middle east uh but what i intend to do here is uh argue uh that what donald trump is doing in the middle east makes an enormous amount of sense it is coherent intelligent and successful and that is not something that you hear very often and i would like to go into some depth here to explain to you why i think that now if you if you uh been following the news lately you know that uh just recently the president had on the south lawn of the white house a signing ceremony with israel and the united arab emirates in bahrain where they where they assigned on to what has been called the abraham accords now if you followed the press on this if you read the new york times then the interpretation that you heard was that uh this is basically the story of the emperor's new clothes uh that donald trump was up there in the in the white house lawn uh uh thinking that he was wearing a resp resplendent robes of a peacemaker um when actually not that much was was going on yes it wasn't a bad thing that the uae and bahrain were were making peace with israel but were they really ever at war with israel no and you know this is really just kind of a glitzy formalization of a status quo that we're all familiar with and oh by the way donald trump didn't have anything to do with it anyway it was really benjamin netanyahu and [Music] mohammed bin zayed the united arab emirates who made it happen trump just played host to this uh to this garden party um well what i want to argue to you for you today is that indeed the emperor's new clothes is a proper lens through which to view that event but only with the roles reversed trump really was wearing resplendent robes of a peacemaker and the people who were naked were the critics now if you've been following trump's middle east policies and you've been following what the critics have been saying then you know that at every stage he has the critics have been saying that what he's doing is wrong-headed it's counterproductive and it's going to lead to war and that's you know from from from moment one that was the case now let me give you just a little example of the the the flavor of the analyses that we've been hearing uh uh in uh in uh early or late 2017 then secretary of state kerry was asked donald trump was a president-elect and he was asked what if trump moves the embassy to jerusalem what will happen and john kerry said this is john kerry as secretary of state he said you'd have an explosion an absolute explosion in the region not just in the west bank and perhaps even in israel itself but throughout the region so the whole middle east is going to explode and it goes on to suggest that maybe even the peace agreements between israel and egypt and jordan might fall apart as a result now that line of analysis has pursued trump on everything he's done moving the embassy from jerusalem recognizing the israeli sovereignty over the golan heights getting out of the jcpoa the iran or the iran nuclear deal reimposing sanctions on on iran killing qasim suleimani the head of the kurds force of the iranian revolutionary guards every time he's done something like this we've been told the prediction ahead of time has been that uh that it's going to lead to war uh trump is alienating allies it's going to lead to war it's counterproductive uh and in the case of qasim suleimani after he did it it was a mistake that's also is going to lead to war none of this has come true now you can dismiss you know or you can explain some of this absolutely horrendous prediction track record of prediction as just partisan politics we live in a very polarized moment uh trump is a polarizing figure anything he does is gonna is gonna is going to be criticized and and and it's absolutely true but the interesting thing i mean it's absolutely true that some of this opposition can be just put down to you know politics um as politics is played but in in the case of the middle east that's not completely true because the predictions that somebody like john kerry is making are also backed up but you just have to trust me on this they are also backed up by all of the experts on them or a very large percentage of the uh of the experts who are putting their opinions forward not simply for partisan political reasons they actually they actually believe what they're saying but they're being proven wrong uh time and time again and so that's what i want to dig into here um a little bit um an interesting question by the way i'm told that students are going to ask me questions afterwards so uh i don't know if you've already got your uh your questions ready or or or if you're supposed to prepare them while while i'm talking so i'll um i'll help you out if i don't get to it ask me how is it that donald trump nobody has ever suggested that donald trump has a lot of patience for intelligence briefings or even long poly he's not interested in the the minute detail of uh a policy he has no reservoirs of experience on the middle east how is it that donald trump is getting it so right and the experts are getting it so wrong it's a fascinating question i'm going to kind of answer it here but i have a feeling that i'm going to run out of time so you can ask me the question and answer i'd love to i'd love to answer it but i have a lot of other stuff i have to cover here okay what i what i want to do what i want to suggest to you is there are there are two paradigms for looking at the middle east um and these are these are policy paradigms but they're also intellectual uh intellectual paradigms and for for the sake of the discussion i'm going to call it um the obama paradigm and the trump paradigm but but but beware beware that that is just a simplification that there are there are people you know it's not just simply republicans and democrats the obama paradigm is more prevalent among democrats than it is among republicans but there are republicans who see the world through what i'm calling the obama uh the obama paradigm it's just sort of there are two american lenses for for seeing the middle east um uh and i'll explain to you you know his sort of historically where they come from historically i mean just in the last um in the last uh 10 15 years um are starting starting with the iraq war the when george w bush went into iraq and the united states got bogged down they're developed among uh the foreign policy elite a sort of deep critique of everything that bush had done wrong and this was again primarily a democratic critique but it was there were also republicans who shared it and we have a document that sort of codifies uh in for all time the critique of bush's uh of bush's policy and that document is the baker hamilton report just out of curiosity about the students here anybody know what the baker hamilton report is just to raise your hand none of you do okay the baker hamilton report was a congressionally mandated um study of what's gone wrong in iraq so it's 2006 we're bogged down in iraq things aren't going well congress says to bush we you have to have a bipartisan study of how things have gone badly and so the the the baker hamilton report is is headed by lee hamilton of indiana and james baker the former secretary of state of george h.w bush by the way everyone thought that that james baker was george w bush's because he had worked for bush's father that he was george w bush's ringer on the baker hamilton report that he was there to do the bidding a bit of of of bush and to and to draft the report in such a way that would be helpful to to bush's agenda not true not true james baker has the obama worldview the obama paradigm anyway uh the baker hamilton report by the way was penned the guy who actually wrote the words on the page by ben rhodes he worked for lee hamilton ben rhodes goes on to be the deputy national security advisor for strategic communications of president obama he's a very significant figure in the uh in the obama white house part of obama's inner circle so what the baker hamilton report is is it's not simply the critique of bush from the foreign policy elite it's also the blueprint of obama's foreign policy now the baker hamilton report has it's it's worth looking at online it's a little book it's got hundreds of pages none of them matter except about the first five pages uh the rest of it is all window dressing um another another good question i i won't go into what i mean by that but you might want to ask me about that one of you uh enterprising students who doesn't want to thank just ask me that question because it's kind of interesting but the the all that matters in the baker hamilton report are the are the five major recommendations and those are pulled out of iraq pull the troops out of iraq just give up on this failed war plus up in afghanistan put more troops into afghanistan reach out to iran reach out to syria so engage iran against syria and revitalize the arab-israeli peace process in particular the palestinian israeli peace process now in these in these uh five recommendations is the essence of the alternative worldview or the the the obama worldview about um uh about the middle east and the basic idea that the basic perspective is this the united states drove its military into iraq got bogged down and in doing so it threatened syria and it threatened iran and at the same time by the way george w bush is also calling for a democracy promotion around the world and that's also alienating countries like russia now the fact of the matter is this is the perspective this is the obama perspective this is not i'm speaking now in the the perspective of the baker hamilton report not the perspective of mike of of mike mike duran in this world view iran and syria and the united states have shared interests in iraq iraq is right next to iran and why would it why would iran want to have a destabilized country on its borders obviously it wants to stabilize iraq and the united states could work with iran to stabilize iraq if it didn't have its military there and the military wasn't threatening iran iran is afraid the united states wants to carry out regime change against it and so there's this reservoir of shared interests that the united states and iran have but because of our overly militaristic foreign policy we have created a situation that doesn't allow us to benefit from the shared interest with the iranians or or or with the syrians so if we just get out and we signal to the iranians and the syrians that we want to get out then that will create a space in which we can start to have some creative diplomacy with them and stabilize the region they won't the iranians then won't be working and the syrians won't be working to kill americans as the iranians were or or to destabilize uh iraq at all the israeli-palestinian conflict well the bush there's a there's a hidden critique of bush there bush is too close to the israelis and in particular to ariel sharon who was the leader of israel at the time and combined and the israelis are too militaristic so there's a the combination of you the u.s militarized foreign policy in iraq and the alliance with israel is alienating muslims worldwide so we need to demonstrate to them to not just to the palestinians but also to the muslims worldwide that we are that we are conciliatory and not aggressive and so we need to do that that will also by the way have uh um a good effect on syria which remember we alienated by putting our forces in uh um into iraq so we're going to switch from from military to diplomacy and we are going to reach out to these actors that we have been that bush regards as malignant actors that need to be contained we're actually going to start uh working with them while we revitalize the arab israeli conflict the the the the the bullet point about putting troops in afghanistan well that's about al-qaeda that that 911 the bush justified the war in iraq because of 9 11 but iraq had nothing to do with it the real the real conflict is against al qaeda so what we need is narrow counter terrorism focused specifically at al qaeda and the larger agenda that bush had in the middle east we should uh we we we should abandon uh that is in that's the essence that is the blueprint of the obama foreign policy now obama the the single most important decision that president obama made about the middle east he made before he ever was elected president in fact he made it before he was even the the officially the democratic nominee uh before he ever talked to an ally before he ever got an intelligence briefing he made a key decision and that kind of that kind of dictated every move he made thereafter and we have a record of this the moment when he made this decision he was the president this is in 2000 and uh 2008 and he is the presumptive uh uh nominee of the party and he hasn't yet been officially uh made officially the the nominee and he goes on a congressional delegation to iraq and he meets there with david petraeus the commander of our troops in uh in iraq and he tells petraeus if i'm elected president i'm going to pull the troops out of iraq and petraeus says it says to him my best advice to you would be not to do that because if you do that iran will move in and iran will take over iran will fill the vacuum as we as we leave and obama says um yes i you know i'm look i can see the map up there they're sitting in uh you know in in petraeus's office he's got a map of iraq on the wall and he says i can see the map i understand that that's what's going to happen but you know we have to we we have problems at home we have to worry about uh we we cannot afford to be involved in this war uh anymore so the decision is and this is in keeping with the baker hamilton report the decision is that that what obama is assuming is that iran and the united states actually share a lot of interests and if iran understands that in that the united states is not going to be too that is not going to topple it and and that it doesn't intend to use the military that it has in iraq against iran well then there's all kinds of opportunities for um for diplomacy between iran and and the u.s and iran will stabilize iraq in a way that will that the united states can live with comfortably that is the key decision that obama made because it was a decision not to contain iran presidents prior to obama saw the united states there's there's two competing world views here they saw the united states as the leader of a coalition of states in the middle east whose goal the code the goal of the coalition was to contain uh malevolent actors iran first first and foremost obama basically gave up on kentucky now he inherited a huge number of policies and let's say an american posture that is going to work to contain iran in a lot of ways but you can't find a single decision that obama ever made to actually contain uh uh contain iran and every decision that he made moved in the exact opposite uh the exact opposite direction now what he what he has in mind here is the sort of two there's if you imagine two different visions of the middle east one vision is the middle east is a rectangular table and on one side of the table is the united states and its allies yeah uh israel saudi arabia turkey uh egypt jordan you know you know you know all of them and on the other side are the malevolent actors uh russia iran syria hezbollah and so forth in that view the job of the united states is to elevate the united states and its allies up over the malevolent actors on the other side that's the head leading leading the coalition view obama views the middle east as a round table and sitting at the table are america's traditional allies but also russia iran uh syria and so on and all of these all of these people at the table are stakeholders in middle eastern order and the united states is there to bring the everyone around the table to agreement on key issues so the the what obama is thinking is i want to pull i want to pull out of these wars these mistaken wars that george w bush started and i want to pull back from the middle east the middle east doesn't matter that much anymore i want to pull back there's going to be some vacuum there how are we going to fill the vacuum we're going to fill the vacuum by rebalancing and that is rebalancing between america's allies and and america's enemies and in fact in an interview in the atlantic magazine obama said specifically with regard to saudi arabia but it also applies to israel and to turkey and the other uh the other states the other allies that the saudis need to learn to share the region with iran so think about that because what he's saying is america's allies are the problem america's allies are provoking iran just like the united states is provoking iran with its forces in iraq so along with this baker hamilton view of the middle east what i'm calling the obama view is is a a reading of iran that is very prevalent in america's national security elite which sees iran as basically a defensive power and a status quo power and one one and a pragmatic power with which the united states can uh can can operate now this is the context in which you need to understand the iran nuclear deal obama very cleverly sold the nuclear deal to the u.s public as a narrow arms control agreement and whenever anyone said oh but what you're doing is actually elevating iran up you're strengthening iran against our allies nonsense nonsense we're stopping them from getting a bomb so and this and this is just an arms control agreement it has nothing to do with anything else it's a it's a blatant lie and i i it's this week of all weeks it's very easy to show you that it's a blatant lie or yeah let me be nicer to president obama it's it's an it's a it's a um you know it's a it's an uh uh an act of of artful misdirection the the the way i can prove that is that uh is that the conventional arms embargo on iran is being lifted now uh by the jcpoa this is why if you've been following the news lately you see president trump has is is unilaterally imposing a conventional arms embargo so if this was a narrow arms control agreement with respect to nuclear weapons how come lifting the conventional arms embargo on iran is part of it and i could go through lots of other aspects of the of the agreement both written and not written uh uh show you that this is this is part of a larger conception of reconfiguring the american position in the region and the american position vis-a-vis iran and it has nothing to do with with uh it's not primarily about nuclear weapons and in fact it doesn't stop iran from getting a nuclear bomb either actually it actually creates a kind of a a very clear pathway to a bomb for the uh the iranians uh now why did he do this basically what he did is he parked obama came to an agreement with the iranians that would park the nuclear question off to one side for eight to ten years until you know long after obama and long after uh the next the the next the term of the the first term of the next president or maybe even the second term of the next president and he parked it off to one side because then he could affect this change where the united states becomes the power holding the balance between the different actors in the region rather than leading a coalition against iran he was getting the united states out of the iran conflict the problem is that all of america's allies and the american people don't like iran's nuclear program this is a this is a domestic political issue so he could not affect this sort of grand strategic change if he didn't uh if he didn't park the nuclear question uh off to one side now the problem one of the there are many problems with this conception as a as i as i see it but one of the major and most immediate problems is that it it uh enraged america's allies because for their point of view the u.s was just heading for the exits in the region and it was empowering the russians and the iranians as it left in 2015 right on the heels of the of the completion of the jcpoa the iran nuclear deal the russians and the iranians put together a military alliance i just realized i don't have a clock i looked up to look for the clock and there is no clock how long have i been talking about five minutes right matt how much longer do i have here 10 more minutes okay i got 20 more minutes that's good so the uh the um all that talk about minutes now i lost my train of thought i was saying something really interesting oh the rest of the year thank you thank you thank you thank you uh so uh the russians and the iranians made a military alliance and uh and intervened in syria on behalf of the assad regime the assad regime being the closest ally of iran uh and so the russians and the iranians moved in in order to prop up the uh to prop up the um uh uh the assad regime uh this was a uh this was a move that was extremely uh threatening to both israel and turkey i'd love attentive students love to talk about the turkey dimension of this but i won't have time so remember that from questions afterwards the uh uh threatening to both israel and turkey and obama's policy uh basically not in so many words told both of them the israelis and the turks to sit down and shut up and benjamin netanyahu did not do that he came to washington you'll recall and the prime minister of israel and he gave an address before both houses of congress in which he said that the nuclear deal with iran is a bad deal one that has is actually defining a path to a bomb for iran and at the same time there's a certain this is my words not has a certain hidden codisl to the iran deal which is recognizing iran recognizing syria as an iranian sphere of interest uh and uh we we in the region we have to be concerned about this rise of iran iran has is distributing militias in in four arab countries now iraq syria lebanon and yemen and then it's creating militias on the ground and then distributing to them precision guided weaponry so this is freaking out this is a political science term it's it's freaking out the the uh the allies in the region is that they can't believe that the united states is sort of holding the ring around syria and yemen and and iraq and allowing iran to build up this this kind of this kind of power okay so that's the obama worldview the trump world view is starts from the same premise as obama but it goes down a very different path and the the premise is this that the united states wants to pull back from the middle east um it does it it no longer wants to put large numbers of troops uh on the ground it wants to avoid military conflict to to the extent possible so just like president obama thought this through in the in and realized that there was going to be a a vacuum president obama's answer to what's what's going to fill the vacuum a concert system of all the stakeholders in in in the region and trump returns to the idea of the united states leading a coalition a coalition designed to to contain uh uh to to contain iran but like obama he also does not want to have a large uh u.s military footprint on the ground so trump obama wants a rebalancing it's a rebalancing between america's allies and america's enemies traditional enemies traditional allies traditional enemies trump says no no the rebalancing has to go on between the united states and its allies so he's saying to saudi arabia and to israel and to turkey as well yes i am still your ally yes i will work with you to safeguard your your interests but you have to do more right that is that is the that is the space into which the emiratis and the israelis together with the bahrainis have moved and that is the that is the genesis of the the uh of the the peace agreement that we saw on the the south lawn i'm going to say more about that in a second but let me say a few words about the palestinian the palestinian question remember in the old in the obama worldview the uh uh we had to have an uh we had to have a peace process on uh an israeli-palestinian peace process remember that that was part of the baker hamilton report the congressionally mandated report on what on iraq so somehow in their mind think about this a peace process on israel is going to help us stabilize iraq how the party you just have to take my word for uh my word for it i don't have enough time to go into it deeply here but you have to take my word for it that there are two different perspectives just like on the between the obama worldview and the trump worldview there are two different perspectives on iran i actually forgot to fill that space in there a little bit the trump uh view of iran that iran is a malevolent power with hegemonic aspirations that is in um inveterately hostile to the united states and its allies so that when you create a vacuum and iran starts to move into it it doesn't open up a space for diplomacy and agreement with iran iran will just pocket all of the concessions that it gets and then demand more from you because it is always hostile to you right so there so there are two different visions of iran there are also two different visions of the arab-israeli conflict the obama worldview says the israeli-palestinian conflict is one of great strategic significance it also it is the the the cause of the conflict also is israeli policy not palestinian policies and israeli policies and attitudes not palestinian policies and attitudes so but even beyond that it is important for the united states always to be seen to be working to make arab-israeli peace because this is such a symbolically laden conflict in the islamic world that the association of the united states with israel in the eyes of muslims is damaging to the reputation of the united states the united states is tarnished in the muslim world by its association with israel and so the way that the united states has to contain the reputational damage is by engaging in a peace process with israel this is deep in uh the sort of the the the the democratic uh the democratic mindset that's why john kerry believes that if we move our embassy to jerusalem the region is going to explode so donald trump's view which is correct and i say that as a completely objective observer and an expert on the middle east with a with a graduate degree from princeton university this is actually a relatively minor geographic conflict between israel and the palestinians and what he has been doing while he's been while he has been containing iran and having this dialogue with the allies about rebalancing roles and responsibilities within the alliance he has also been whittling down the uh the israeli-palestinian conflict and he has been basically bypassing the palestinians and saying you will no longer have a veto over everything that israel does with the other with with with the other arab states the other arab states have been happy to take this deal that that that trump is offering uh for for two reasons uh one uh uh they they now see you know that you know they they the world has moved on the the the latest generation um uh of arab of arabs once you know once a better future they don't want to be stuck in the paradigms of the past they want to move forward they can see that israel is a healthy vibrant democracy with a uh with a with an innovative uh technologically based economy and so forth and they and they see opportunities for themselves and they would like to uh they would like to enjoy those um opportunities but they also want to vector the united states they can see that the united states under trump as under obama is sending great messages of great ambiguity about the american role in the middle east and about whether the america america is even going to stick around in the in the middle east and so one way to look at this is that this is a block coming together to work with the united states to contain iran and to realize the potential of arab and israeli partnership in doing so but another way to see it is that this is a block that's kind of developing together in the region in order to lobby washington about what its proper role in the in the middle east is um and when i started at the beginning i told you that the the the the new york times is saying well this is just between israel and bahrain and and the uae and the these are little minor minor players uh it's not really very significant hogwash the the bahrainis and the uae would not be doing it if they didn't have the tacit support of saudi arabia which is the single most important country in the uh in the arab world this is really the way you should really see this this is the beginning of a normalization process with saudi arabia and with president trump told us in the meeting on the white house lawn five other states those are probably uh those are probably kuwait oman morocco qatar and sudan which is quite shocking actually so what we're looking at is the end of the arab-israeli conflict the palestinian you know as distinct from the palestinian-israeli conflict the palestinian-israeli conflict will move on i mean we'll live we'll live on there's nothing to do about that they'll they'll keep throwing that in trump's face and saying well you haven't solved the palestinian israeli economy as if anyone can right nobody can do that what he's done is he's saying yes i can't solve the israeli-palestinian conflict so i am going to i'm going to put a ring around it i'm going to set it off to one side like obama did with with the iranian nuclear deal and i'm going to go go about the business of putting together a coalition with israel and the uh and the arab states it's practical it's pragmatic it's wise and it's very successful now um let me just i matt over here is making faces at me and screaming and stomping his feet so let me let me bring this to an end but let me let me bring it to an end with with another quote from noted middle east expert john kerry so uh i'm going to go ahead and answer the question then i'm about to do damage to one of the students here because i told you you could ask this question i'm going to give you a little bit of an explanation i i i can still i can still answer in greater depth about how is it that trump gets it so right when he doesn't have any background in the middle in the middle east well it's his instincts are right his his instincts are to look after the american interest to look after the friends uh uh uh of of uh uh of america he has the same instinct that he doesn't want to be taken advantage of you hear that all the time by the friends but it doesn't mean we don't have friends but we have to rebalance those so he listened to the friends it's as simple as that it's not that he had brilliant advisers next to him telling him what to do he talked to benjamin netanyahu he talked to muhammad bin zayed in in in in the uae he talks to mohammed bin salman in saudi arabia and they tell him and they were these guys were telling obama the same thing for years just obama wasn't listening because he knew better right now what's the proof that they were talking well in in 2008 the king of saudi arabia at the time told america to the key is to cut off the head of the snake meaning iran iran is the problem iran iran iran and then in 2015 i'm sorry 2016 benjamin netanyahu the prime minister of israel gave a speech at the united nations general assembly and he said for the first time in my lifetime this is 2016 so obama's still president for the first time in my lifetime many other states in the region recognize that israel is not their enemy he continued our common enemies are iran and isis our common goals are security prosperity and peace i believe that in the years ahead we will work together to achieve these goals work together openly okay that's a prediction that benjamin netanyahu made everybody at the time dismissed it just like they dismissed what trump is saying as just so much verbiage from the crazy right-wing israeli prime minister now here's what john kerry said immediately after netanyahu said that now kerry is still secretary of state uh kerry kerry before kerry made the the the iran nuclear deal kerry devoted at the a year the better part of two years to trying to broker israeli-palestinian peace you got nothing you got nothing all of that senior level uh leadership of you know all that time the most precious thing you have as a senior leader in the american government is your time all that time he devoted to this conflict which has no strategic i'm sorry no i got i i i engaged in hyperbole which i occasionally do let me be let me be more measured it's very important students to be very measured in your in your judgments it has limited strategic significance and he devoted it was his it was his number one priority and he got nothing for it and netanyahu is telling him in the in the general assembly there's another way john there's another way work to bring israel and the arab states together and just forget about the palestinian question for a while kerry goes ballistic and in a public statement he says let me tell you if you can look this up on the web because it's fun to watch him he's didactic and you know he's telling you with all of his knowledge as secretary of state let me tell you a few things that i've learned for sure in the last few years this is in public he's making a statement there will be no separate peace between israel and the arab world i want to make that very clear to all of you and then just to make sure that you understand that he's talking directly to benjamin netanyahu he says i have heard israeli politicians saying well the arab world is in a different place now we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the arab world and then we'll do a deal and then and then after that we'll do a deal with the palestinians kerry says no no no and no well that belongs that's that belongs in the long list of uh of horrendously bad predictions that john kerry has made about the middle east i'm not singling him john kerry out because as i say all of these predictions are backed up by experts on the middle east because they all have that same view of the region which i laid out to you donald trump has a different view and he is completely impervious to the views of the experts and it's a very good thing because what's happening in the middle east uh in his in his tenure is very positive for the people of the region and for the united states thank you thank you dr duran we now have some time for q a if you have a question please make your way to the microphone michael use the term traditional enemies and traditional allies of the united states that very phraseology seems to be in contrast to what the early founders such as george washington and john quincy adams articulated american foreign policy as resisting entangling and not alliances so in this conversation you mentioned iran as this major opponent of america and the middle east and yet it's worth pointing out that iran and the persian shia generally speaking have never committed a terror attack on american soil the same is not true about arab sunni muslims and yet so i guess my my question to you is you're a supporter of the iraq war you played a significant role in that policy decision can you just run through the logic that um that you used to defend that war or have you recanted some of your earlier positions ah interesting um so uh you're right i did support the the iraq war but i had nothing to do with the decision making about it um even when i was in the white house i'm not trying to to evade your question just in the interest of accuracy uh yes uh uh i have uh um i have regrets about the iraq war and my support for it i i look now um and i see that i had certain assumptions about how everything was going to go that where i i made certain john kerry style predictions that were that turned out to be totally false i i it never occurred to me um for example i always regarded iran as the primary enemy and i thought that we would uh i thought that we would use our position in iraq in order to contain iran which i thought would be a good thing and we never did that we basically um we basically opened up the we not this was never george w bush's intention it was obama's intention uh uh it was uh uh it was the effect of george bush's policy that we opened the doors of iraq to iranian influence so i look at all of the lives lost all of the treasure uh wasted and i don't see the strategic advantage that i thought was gonna that was was going to come from this um as far as your larger question is concerned about um entanglements it's it's this is not something i can i can only give it to you this is this is a story of a much larger discussion the beginning of a much larger discussion i'll just give you bullet points here it's my strong belief that our position in uh in the middle east is absolutely crucial to defending american freedom um at home um and basically you can read i wrote an article a couple of weeks ago in tablet magazine called china's emerging middle eastern kingdom um and have a look at it because i lay out the scenario there if we pick up if we pull up stakes and just leave the middle east china is going to come in and take over like like that in in two seconds uh china will take over um and china will then dominate the global energy markets uh and they will use that domination to basically finland dies all of um eurasia they'll take over the middle east in two seconds and then they'll use that from that position they will detach europe from the united states and uh uh and then they will use that position in the global uh economy then uh uh to undermine our own uh our own institutions have uh uh uh have a look at that article but i i i think that um trump has trump is walking the line i think very intelligently between minimizing the military risk um while maintaining the u.s position which is crucial in the in the struggle to contain china hi i was wondering if you would be willing to touch upon a bit what you think the u.s relationship should be with for example the various kurdish factions within the middle east consisting that in recent years the kurdish forces have been absolutely essential to with with helping u.s forces on the ground in their war against isis and whatnot and also in maintaining some sort of balance against the assad regime in syria but at the same time they're also the enemies of our allies turkey so i just was wondering if you'd be willing to comment on that relationship i'd love to that's again the beginning of a very large conversation but fortunately there's another article of mine that i can direct you to uh which uh i published about a week ago with the hoover institution and their online magazine called caravan just look up duran that's my name mr magoo uh uh and um that's the beginning of the discussion there just again in a nutshell uh when obama aligned with iran in the region he aligned with iran across the board including in the um in in the uh in the kurdish arena uh the there's no uh you americans often say kurds kurds curves we i like the kurds i want kurdish autonomy there's no such thing as kurds saying kurd is like saying is like saying arab the question is which arabs you know and in particular which organizations so what the united states did when it aligned with iran is it aligned with the pkk which is the enemy of turkey wants to bust up turkey into two in in into two states now i go in in the article i explain how we did this and how we dressed it up and pretended that we weren't doing that when we did when we did we are we are still aligned to this day with the pkk and that has done more than anything to damage our relations with um with with turkey now there was another option the the barzani faction in in the krg in the iraqi kurdistan is anti-pkk and it has good relations with the turks so if we had what we should have done we came we borrowed the pkk was the natural ally of assad russia and iran and we borrowed the the pkk to defeat isis because it did not threaten iran and russia because we were recognizing syria tacitly as as an iranian russian sphere of influence the cost of that just like the the the cost of the policy was to alienate the israelis and the saudis because we elevated iran the cost in the in the northern syria was that we alienated the turks because we aligned with the pkk so what i what i i think turkey is the strategic prize and turkey obama detached turk obama tells a story about each ally that focuses on their moral failings so when they when when when when netanyahu raised his head above the parapet and said don't align with iran obama said you're oppressing the palestinians when when saudi arabia made a peep it was it was you are you are a an uh an islamic extremist despotism you need to reform and democratize at home when the turks raise the peep it was your your your murdering kurds and you're supported you're tacitly supporting isis right that uh um none of these is true each one takes a little sliver of of reality and then blows it up into a you know into a uh into an indictment of our allies um the the in the case of the um in the case of the turks the single worst thing that obama did uh uh in the middle east i think actually was to detach turkey from the american alliance system everyone is understanding that these days i'm an outlier by the way i'm the only guy in washington or one of the few in washington that makes this argument i'm an outlier on this but i'm right i'm objective and remember that i have an advanced degree from princeton from princeton university so anyway there's a much larger discussion it's very interesting but i i better stop there because i could go on okay i think we have time for one more question good evening i just wanted to know if we continue with the trump approach which you say is the correct approach what does the middle east look like in say 20 years and does it open up an avenue to solving the israeli-palestine conflict um the the simple answer is it it opens up an avenue uh it it it creates a um better chance of reaching an israeli-palestinian deal than any than the other framework the other the other framework incentivized the palestinians always to say no if you go back from from oslo to the uh to the i don't know if these if these terms mean anything to you but at each stage we offered the every time the palestinians said no we offered them more uh or we used our influence to to get the israelis to offer them more so there was what rabine was offering the the the the palestinians in the mid 90s then there's what barack offered in 2000 then there are the clinton parameters which clinton came out with after barack after the second intifada started and then there's ulmert's offer in 2008. and each time we put pressure on the israelis because remember we're defining the problem as israel not the palestinian intransigence it's israel we put pressure on the israelis to come up with more and then as barack obama is leaving the white house in 2009 you remember he kicked the israelis with a u.n resolution that recognized the four june 67 boundaries as an international boundary which they never were they were uh the the armistice lines of 19 of 1949 were the were the these were the ceasefire lines that um that were behind which the israelis at the the four june 67 lines before the war in 67 were the armistice lines of 1949 these are not international boundaries obama was turning them into an international boundary trump is erasing that so if you're the palestinians and you're sitting there the if you're abu mazen and you're watching you all i have to do is sit here like an amoeba and say no no no it's not enough to any offer that's made and and the americans will come back and offer me something better so of course you're just going to continue to sit there and say no i mean to the extent that pilot that this kind of negotiation is a rational activity between actors who were trying to come to a deal now having said all that i don't believe the palestinian leadership can make a deal so i'm not i i'm mike duran i'm not going to hold my breath until the palestinians come forward and say yes but if you ask the question as you did then there's a much better chance in the trump formula because the world is now moving on and the palestinians have been offered something uh that approximates what they've been offered in the past it's not it's not as good but it approximates and they can negotiate for better if they if they want and and the world is moving on if they don't want to take it they don't take it as as trump says i'm okay either way right that's a that's a healthier place for america to be because this there's no reason why our policy in the region should be hamstrung by by the by the by the palestinian question it makes no sense please join me in thanking dr duran

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 16,267

Rating: 4.6799998 out of 5

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america

Id: acvrAGczYwY

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DeadPopulist2RepME]

Same wavelength bro

It's risible when libs accuse trump of being a Russian agent since the closest thing we had to a real manchurian candidate was Obama's desire for Iran to take over the middle east

[u/dapocalyptic]

Leaves Syria and allows it to bleed at the hands of Assad

"Yea, trump has the right policy for the middle east."