Transcription
The Saudis, UAE, uh, Qatar, they're profoundly upset about what has just happened. They fully understand that the Israelis can do anything they want and the Israelis will back them at every turn and this is not in their interest. The question is, what can they do in response? What kind of leverage do they have?
Uh the UAE uh has an Abraham accord with Israel uh and it could put an end immediately to that Abraham accord. That would send a very clear message. Uh and then those three countries and other countries in the region could get together and try to make it clear to the United States that this is unacceptable. But they just don't have a lot of leverage. You can feel the frustration from Riyad, Abu Dhabi, and Doha right now.
After last week's strike in the Qatari capital, Gulf leaders rushed back to Doha for an Arab Islamic summit, openly calling the attack state terrorism and demanding consequences. Yet, everyone in that hall quietly knows J's point is true. Their leverage is thin. In 1973, the Gulf States wielded the oil embargo like a club. Today, US shale, diversified buyers, and a fragmenting OPEC plus mean that same club is half hollow. For them, the real pressure point may be diplomatic, suspending, or at least freezing those shiny new Abraham Accords until Washington shows it can re Israel in. That would hit the White House in a place it still values, optics.
I think that these Gulf states that we were talking about before, you know, Qatar, uh, the UAE and Saudi Arabia don't have much to worry about. And I'll say more about that in a second. What you want to understand is that the Israelis are interested in creating a greater Israel. That's their first goal. And that means conquering territory uh and incorporating it into a greater Israel in places like Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Sinai. They want Laban's realm. The second thing the Israelis want is they want to get the Palestinians out of greater Israel. They want to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and they want to drive them out of the West Bank. That's their second goal. Their third goal is they want to make sure that all of their neighbors are weak. They want to make sure that Lebanon and Syria are never a cohesive hole and therefore never a threat to Israel. What they have done or trying to do in Iran is they're trying to break Iran apart. They want Iran to fracture. They want Iran to be weak. They want Iran to look like Syria. And that's a chilling template.
Syria's decadel long fragmentation suited Israel and frankly several actors in Washington. If Iran were pushed into a similar patchwork, the region would inherit a permanent low-grade wildfire. The irony, of course, is that the very chaos intended to make Israel safer would likely spill across borders and boomerang into global energy prices, hurting allies first. So countries like Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, these are countries and Jordan I would throw in as well have to worry greatly about Israel trying to break them apart and weaken them. But I do not think they have territorial goals that involve Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the UAE. And what they depend on with those countries is for the United States to make sure that there are good relations between Israel and the Gulf States. What the Israelis want with Saudi Arabia is an Abraham accord similar to the one that they have with the UAE. They want to have good relations with the Gulf States. So I think this attack on Doha notwithstanding the Israelis are not a direct threat to the Gulf States, but they are a direct threat to all those other states I listed because they get in the way of creating a greater Israel that is bigger than the one that existed after 1948.
Older viewers might recall the French term Lean's realm from their history classes. Whenever a state starts talking in spatial civilizational terms, smaller neighbors become bargaining chips. That rarely ends quietly. Ask the Poles of 1939 or the Kuwaitis of 1990.
You want to understand that the United States and Israel basically act as a tag team. Uh they, you know, operate together and no matter what Israel does, the United States supports it unconditionally. Uh so I think what happened here is that the Israelis decided that they would uh kill the negotiators in Doha. These are the Hamas negotiators because the Israelis are primarily interested in making sure there are no negotiations. Killing negotiators is the diplomatic equivalent of burning the bridge while you're still on the riverbank. It ensures drift toward escalation. Notice how Qatar's mediators now face domestic pressure to shut the talks altogether. Once dialogue spaces close, the only bargaining chips left are rockets and sanctions uh that settle the conflict or come close to settling the conflict in Gaza. So if you kill the negotiators, there's no negotiations.
Uh I don't think that the United States was in cahoots with uh the Israelis. I don't think we planned this operation together. But I find it hard to imagine that the Israelis didn't tell us what was coming. Uh or if they didn't tell us what was coming that we didn't detect it given our intelligence capabilities in the Middle East. There's no way we would have not seen this attack coming. And again, I think the Israelis would have told us anyway. Uh and the question is, did President Trump or whoever was in charge uh of this issue in the administration tell the Israelis they couldn't do it? And the answer is no. We basically greenlighted the attack and now we're making uh all sorts of noises uh that make it sound like we really didn't do that. But of course we did do that and uh the Israelis understand full well that they could do it again. Exactly. The NSA's ears in Aluduade and Sentcom's feeds light up if a motorcycle backfires in Doha. Washington's studied silence afterwards speaks louder than any press briefing. It was a green light or at minimum a blink and nod.
There are three great powers in the system. We're now in a multipolar world and those three great powers are China, Russia and the United States. And because of our foolish policy in Ukraine, we have pushed the Russians and the Chinese close together. They are now at this point in time very close allies. Mirheimer's right. By overplaying Ukraine, Washington welded Moscow and Beijing together. Look at last week's virtual brick summit. Lula, she and Modi openly railed against tariff blackmail. That's diplomatic code for US pressure. And it shows how the economic front is converging with the security one despite the fact that in the past they've had very testy relations, if not terrible relations. But today that's not the case. And it's not the case because the United States, given what it's doing in Ukraine, has pushed the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.
Then take the Indians. India is not yet a great power, but it is definitely a major power. And it looked until very recently that it had good relations, improving relations with the United States. But President Trump decided to get rough with the Indians because the Indians are importing Russian oil. And the end result is that the Indians and the Chinese and the Russians have all moved close together. And you see all sorts of other examples. Just take bricks and what's happening with bricks. There's no question that bricks has become a more formidable institution over time. And bricks of course includes not just India, Russia and China. It also includes countries like Brazil and Turkey. And all of those countries are angry with the United States for one reason or another. And through international institutions like BRICS, they make their anger known. So we have this very interesting situation where the United States has pushed all sorts of countries into an oppositional camp and we're left with allies like the Europeans and the Israelis. Those are our best friends in the world today. But then if you look at the Europeans and you look at US European relations, they're actually much worse today than they were 10 years ago. And everyone expects that those relations will get worse with time. So you see that US European relations are not good. The cracks are widening. Germany's latest energy price spike and France's outcry over August submarine deals remind us that allies tolerate a lot until domestic voters start paying the bill. We're inching toward a transactional Atlantic, not a romantic one.
There's no question that the United States is still the most powerful state on the planet. If you look at the multipolar world that we operate in, uh it's clear that China is a pure competitor of the United States and that the United States lives in fear that China will become as powerful, if not more powerful, than the United States. Russia is the weakest of the three great powers for sure. But nevertheless, it is important to understand that we still are the most powerful state on the planet. Although China is a peer competitor, but this is a fundamentally different situation that existed during the unipolar moment. That's the period after the cold war ended from roughly 1992 up to about 2017. We were the only great power on the planet. We're incredibly powerful relative to everybody else. That world has gone away. Right after 9/11, we thought the unipolar moment would last a century. Two wars and three recessions later, power has diffused. Anyone over 40 remembers when Washington set the agenda unchallenged. Younger audiences are growing up in a marketplace of power centers. And again, we now have two great powers, one of which is a peer competitor. So that's point number one.
Point number two, Steve, is that it's very important to understand, and Western policy makers and Western strategists have a difficult time understanding this, that there's limits to what you can do with your military power. We tend to think that having a big stick and threatening people with that big stick or using that big stick allows us to always get our way. Just think about Afghanistan. We lost in Afghanistan. When I was young, we lost in Vietnam. despite the fact the United States was far more powerful than Vietnam and the United States is far more powerful than the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the fact is that we lost. They're just limits to what you can do and there are limits to what the United States can do in the Middle East even though it is incredibly powerful and there are limits to what we can do in Ukraine against Russia. And therefore, it is not that we're impotent because we're not impotent. Again, we are the most powerful state on the planet. But nevertheless, there are limits to what we can do with that power under any circumstances, but certainly in a world where you have two rivals. The Chinese on one hand and the Russians on the other.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, even the endless sanctions loop. Each reminds us that kinetic dominance doesn't equal political victory. Military force can clear land. It can't plant legitimacy. I would imagine that at some point in the not tooistant future, the United States will understand that having taken the velvet glove off uh and exercising nothing but mailed fist over other countries is counterproductive uh and that you want to at least appear somewhat as a benign hegeimon or a benign great power. So I don't think that the situation you see today is forever. But I think Steve, you never want to lose sight of the fact that the United States is a ruthless great power. Uh and that the soft power that we've exercised in the past was largely designed to cover up our basic ruthlessness. Uh great powers just act that way and they go to great lengths to disguise their behavior and the United States uh is very good at that. But uh I think what's happened uh with President Trump is that he's taken the mask off or he's taken the glove off, the velvet glove, and we've behaved in a very heavy-handed way. Uh and that has not worked to our advantage for sure.
So where does this leave Washington? For decades, we masked hardedged real politique with soft power branding. Peace Corps in the morning, drone strike at night. Trump's naked knuckle approach ripped off that mask and the world responded in kind. The US is still the single most powerful actor, but power minus persuasion equals isolation. If today's Doha condemnation and yesterday's BRICS chorus tell us anything, it's that nations are learning they can say no, or at least not yet to American demands. Rearning influence will require something rarer than aircraft carriers, restraint.