Transcription
Tel Aviv and Tehran are on fire. It is a war that many people tried desperately to avoid, while others were actively trying to ignite. Now that we're here, what is it that Israel really wants to achieve? What options are there for Iran to deescalate? And what will the United States do? Will it stop the war, or will it join it?
[Music] Welcome to the Big Picture Podcast. My name is Muhammad Hassan, and today I am joined by Middle East Eyes editor-in-chief David Hurst. David, welcome back to the show.
Thank you very much for having me. I don't know where to begin. There's so much to talk about. Things are moving at a breakneck speed. Let's start with how do you explain how it is that we got to this point?
So when I first met Benjamin Netanyahu, he was an opposition MP. He was out of power. It was the early 2000s. He was described by my host BCOM as an extremist. Mhm. And the first thing he told me, and the first thing he would tell everyone, is we've got to bomb Iran. And Iran is, to use his words, the mothership, and Hezbollah and Hamas are its aircraft carriers. And so this has been a project of Netanyahu's that stretches all the way back to then and beyond. He said over the weekend that he has been waiting for this moment for 40 years, in an address to the Israeli people. And there is no doubt that he wants to expand the war aims from something that is really pretty focused—which is disabling Iran's nuclear sites—to something which is much bigger: a complete destruction of Iran's oil infrastructure, its hospital system, Tehran itself, all of these, now, and regime change.
And so over the weekend he got involved in a debate. Well, we can discuss whether this is a real debate or whether this is scripted in a sort of good cop/bad cop way, but with him and Trump—with him and Trump—he got involved in this debate on television, with Trump saying, letting it be known that he had vetoed a hit on the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and Netanyahu saying, "Well, Trump can have his opinion, and he's the leader of America, but I'm the leader of Israel, and we'll form our own judgments." I.e., he didn't take that off the table. And then he added a completely spurious claim, which has got, as far as I can see, no evidence at all, that Iran was behind the two assassination attempts on Trump in the last year; i.e., that was a direct threat to Trump personally.
Trump is still trying to maintain that negotiations and Israeli bombardments can coexist, contemporaneously, simultaneously with each other, in exactly the same way as this sort of Steve Vekov, his Middle East envoy, employed with Hamas—that they had negotiations in Doha, but the war continued in Gaza—that's been going on for some time. And to a lesser extent, it also happened when Hezbollah was negotiating a ceasefire in November last year. You had ongoing operations and very big hits by the Israeli army, and you had a negotiation process going on in Beirut. He thinks he can do the same thing with Iran, and Iran has ruled this out.
So at the moment, what we're doing is we're in a period of each side trading blows with each other, finding out how far they are degrading the other side's will to fight, and Trump just watching it. Trump will have a choice to make: either he puts his weight fully behind moves to deescalate the crisis, or he lets it continue, or could eventually join in. Joining in is difficult with the moon and Congress in its present state. But if, for instance, Israel degraded Iran to the extent and with the speed with which it degraded Hezbollah, you could get to a scenario where Trump said, "Well, you see, I tried to give them a way out. I tried to give them an exit ramp. They wouldn't take it. I warned them. They didn't take it. I'm very sorry, but you make your bed and you lie on it," and he could have that sort of—and I think he'd get most of the backing of the big major European states.
However, there are lots of other problems with that scenario—just letting the war run its course. And one of them is that the further down the line you go, that this now becomes an exercise in regime change, the more Iran will say we've got nothing else to lose. We're going to go for—we're going to use all the levers at our disposal. We're going to use the closure of the Straits of Hormuz, or—and they've just said this now, they've threatened to pull out of the NPT. Now, the NPT, the non-proliferation treaty, doesn't cover Israel, but it does cover Iran at the moment. And under it, Iran is obligated not to develop a nuclear weapon, and it is obligated to accept weapons inspections, or inspections. Both of those it will now—it can now pull out of, which would be a precursor to developing a nuclear bomb.
Now, my argument, the argument I argued in today's column, was that the more Iran's back is to a wall, the more likely they are to develop a nuclear weapon with the fissile material that they've got. Now you can bomb Natanz; you can try and bomb Fordow, which, although the cascades of centrifuges are much, much deeper below ground, and it's been built to withstand a six-on-scale earthquake—and this is what Israel wants the US to help them to do, and that's what Israel wants; they want the B-2 bombers and the really big bunker-busting bombs to do that—but I'm not sure even that would be successful. But in addition to that, there are still a sizable quantity of enriched uranium around which could be hidden anywhere, that Iran could use to develop a bomb at short notice. So just letting the war run its course absolutely plays into Netanyahu's hands, in terms of its ultimate goal is to dismantle Iran in the same way he dismantled Hezbollah, in the same way he degraded Hamas. And it isn't simply the nuclear weapons or material that's on the table. It's Iran as an independent state. It's its missiles that's now also on the table.
So basically, the deal on the table, if Iran did wave its hands in the air, did wave a white flag in the air, would be you can't enrich uranium on your territory, and there's no—and you can't have any means of defending yourself because you can't have any rockets anymore. Now, which independent country is going to accept that? Mhm. Let alone a country that calls itself an Islamic Republic.
So let's talk about Iran then. And you wrote in your column about Iran being pushed further and further to seeing having a nuclear weapon as its only form of protection, as its only form of deterrence. And the last time we spoke on the show, it was a year ago now. It's actually hard to believe how much has happened since then, but this was the first time that Israel really provoked a response from Iran, and it targeted its embassy in Syria, and then it, of course, assassinated the Hamas's political chief Ismail Haniyeh. Both of these attacks seemed like they were designed to provoke a response from Iran. Netanyahu wanted Iran to get dragged into a war. Iran had this show of force. They sent 600 drones into the sky and moved them very slowly over the region, so to create a sense of—and told Israel, or told the world, that they'd launched them. Yes. So they gave everyone plenty of time to shoot them down, but it was meant to be this spectacle that said, "You don't want to mess with us. We're a major serious military power. This is our deterrence. Don't try this again." And it happened once, and it happened twice. And now they seem to have lost any sense of military deterrence. Israel is striking them wherever they can and however they will, with appearing to have the backing of most Western leaders, including, of course, the United States.
Did Iran actually fundamentally miscalculate what was happening over the last year?
Well, there are two ways of looking at it. You can certainly say that Iran, and the peoples closest to what the IRGC were thinking, made a massive miscalculation. They thought their air defenses would hold up. They didn't think that the most important targets were within the reach of Israeli bombers without a massive in-flight refueling system, which is also very vulnerable to missile attack. And neither of those assumptions turned out to be the case, and Iran's skies are as open as Lebanon's or Gaza's or Syria's to Israeli planes, as it turned out. That is a massive miscalculation. The second one is that Israel appears to be able to strike the leadership of the IRGC and the nuclear scientists at will, and they're continuing to do so. And I'm really puzzled as to how there are no serious counter-intelligence efforts made by the IRGC. It's a year, as you said, it's a year, roughly a year since Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an IRGC building with his bodyguard at a very specific time of the day when they just finished a meeting, and he was alone in his room. So not only did Israel know where Haniyeh was, on which floor he was, but even the room. This was hours after Iran had just sworn in their new president. That's right. And basically nothing has been done to stop those—the—that level of detail going to a power with that level of force. If you consider, for instance, how it took the CIA nearly 10 years to track down Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan, you're now got a situation where the entire leadership of Hezbollah and now the entire leadership of IRGC has just been picked off at will. How has this happened? Why are everyone still in their own homes? Why haven't they hidden all their assets? Why does Israel know where everyone is in real time? That's a massive intelligence failure, and it hasn't been addressed. So Israel's got all this intelligence. It's got the means to hit. It knows that Iran has never been weaker. Therefore, it's now going in for the kill, and it's going for the jugular.
The real question is what strategic reserves does Iran have? And here again, when we judge Iran, we go either from exaggerating its power—which I think we have been doing for much of the period since 2006 and the last big war in Lebanon—and Iran has exaggerated its power, or believed it could—it could establish a means of deterrence, mutually assured destruction with Israel. But we've also got a massive technology gap, and that technology gap is, at the moment, proving decisive. However, like Russia, the West also has a habit of understating or misinterpreting Iran's weakness. And we massively underestimated Putin's power to recuperate against the most sophisticated Western weapons in Ukraine. And slowly, you know, inch by inch, Russia is gaining more territory and pushing back. And the same could happen in Iraq if Russia decided to pile in on its side. So another unknown question is what happens to the enriched uranium that has already been enriched, and how will it be protected, and will it—will it be the precursor to a bomb? And at the moment, the warning of the NPT is a very, very clear warning of what Iran is thinking to protect itself, and it's entirely logical that it does that, and exactly the same process is at work in Russia. In fact, when I was a correspondent in Russia, I had endless briefings from people who really knew what they were talking about when it came to wargaming nuclear war between the Soviet Union and America, and then, you know, post-Soviet space, and they said, "Look, it's very, very simple. We know our conventional forces are rubbish, and we know that America/NATO forces could cut through them like a knife. We know they're corrupt; we know we"—so that makes us rely even more on our nuclear arsenal. Exactly the same logic applies to Iran, even though it doesn't have a bomb yet, it must now be tempted to think the only way to get a bomb is to do it quickly. And therefore, if you're actually interested in preventing the nuclearization not just of Iran but of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, you know, all the Gulf States—of a real nuclear arms race—the only way out of this is a voluntary agreement of the JCPOA type, or some form of guarantee that Iran's nuclear enrichment is peaceful and it is inspected. But we're miles away from that now. And the—and we are led by the nose by a messianic leader of Israel whose life's ambition has been exactly the war that we're now seeing. And that, to me, is the most alarming aspect of this—is that Israel and Netanyahu—to a certain extent, I feel like we have a good grasp on what his drives are, what his ambitions are, and what makes him take these decisions. What I find less understandable is the reaction that we saw from the rest of Western leadership.
You have—and you mentioned the JCPOA. You know, these were the same countries that signed that deal with Obama to curb Iran's nuclear program, which—and then left those sanctions. And that was seen and agreed upon by most of Western Europe as well as the United States to be the most sound, the most rational way of bringing stability to that part of the world. But yes, the sanctions were never lifted, and a major problem with going back to the table again, even if Iran agreed to the condition of not enriching its own uranium—which it won't do now—but even if it did, and even said, "Fine, right, we'll sign the deal on the table," exactly. Trump will give you exactly what you want. Trump would not be in a position to lift those sanctions because it now requires a two-thirds majority by Congress, and Congress would not lift those sanctions because they'd be completely under the sway of Netanyahu. So even Joe Biden didn't lift the sanctions that the previous Trump administration—the maximum pressure sanctions—that imposed. So it is—it is France's position, for instance, is one of the utmost hypocrisy when it comes to nuclear proliferation because it says we cannot have an Iranian nuclear program, and so it supports the war aims, and it basically supports Trump, but France was the one that gave Israel its nuclear weapons in the first place. And Israel, everyone knows that Israel has got at least 200 warheads, and no one talks about it. Yeah. And when there was a serious—and Israel has never admitted officially that it has nuclear—no, but where there was a serious attempt to actually say let's put these on the table and discuss the complete denuclearization, it was Amr Moussa, the Egyptian foreign minister, who did that, to his credit. Everyone just laughed that off. But if you really want to stop a nuclear war or a nuclear exchange happening in the Middle East, Israel's nukes have to be put on the table. Obviously, they're not a member of the NPT, and they've not, as you say, they've never acknowledged that they have over 200 warheads or the submarines to deliver them.
So you're in a position where there is no logic, and we're asking of Iran something that we're pushing Iran into an absolute corner. We're really pushing it into the sort of North Korean logic—that the only thing that can guarantee its security from a fickle, untrustworthy West that constantly breaks the deals that Iran signs is to actually get a nuclear weapon itself. The logic of now pushing full scale for a nuclear deterrent is becoming unassailable from Iran's point of view. Whether or not you have an ideology that says death to Israel or a theology that says basically God is on your side—we are a religious state—that is, you can put all of those questions to one side for Iran's self-preservation. If you have people who will dupe you into negotiations while knowing an attack is imminent, what incentive is there to go back to the negotiating table?
This time last week, we were looking at a Europe that had become more critical of Israel and Israel's government, and in particular the ongoing genocide in Gaza, than at any time over the last two years. You had somebody like Emmanuel Macron who was going around actively lobbying other leaders to get behind him and Saudi Arabia's UN push to recognize the state of Palestine. He made a speech in which he said that if Europe doesn't do this, if it doesn't take action against Israel, then it risks losing credibility and undermining the international rules-based order. And then within hours of Israel launching its so-called preemptive strike against Iran, all of their positions changed, and all of a sudden you had France, you had the UK, you had Germany, of course the US and others rallying behind Israel, rallying behind Netanyahu, and condoning his attacks on Iran, this war that he has ignited. What happened? What are these—the same people that have taken both of these positions? Were they ever serious about protecting this rule-based order and upholding their own credibility? So weak and so without a moral center of gravity that it's easy for Israel to manipulate them by events. Macron has become chicken feed, not the leader of a great country. It's—and before that, even if the conference had gone ahead, the UK probably would not have backed a Palestinian state because they would have been bullied into it by Netanyahu saying, "Okay, we're going to unilaterally announce the annexation of two-thirds of the West Bank." So they were just willing this declaration on so that they could then announce what they've already done, which is to annex the West Bank. So Israel's got—or Netanyahu, in particular, has got a very shrewd understanding of exactly what a paper tiger Emmanuel Macron and Knesset are, and Trump, that waivers from one reality TV announcement to another and doesn't have even a credible line that would stop a major war taking place in the Gulf. I think Macron has read Europe's weakness brilliantly, and he's very confident that he can keep Trump on side, this is while defying him. I mean, okay, then now we now we can talk about, you know, is he really defying him right, or or is this actually, you know, just a very clever bad cop/good cop routine? Well, I'm sure this is the exact question that Iran is asking themselves—is that was this whole—these weeks of negotiations, this very public promise by Trump that he really wanted a deal and he wanted this to be part of his peacemaking legacy. Was it all smoke and mirrors, or has Israel figured out how to lead US foreign policy by the nose?
I think Israel has done exactly that. I think Trump's playing around with negotiations allows him to say, "Look, I gave him every chance." It allows Israel to prepare secretly for a massive blow. He keeps—he is continuing to supply that blow; there are no indications that he's—that that he's restraining Israel in any way in terms of the number of bombs they're dropping or the quality of them or the missiles, or—and in fact, the US are fully engaged on shooting down Iranian drones. So they're fully engaged.
On, on a, on, on, on Israel's defense from uh, an Iranian counterattack, while doing nothing to restrain uh, uh Israel, and the war aims—i.e., uh, dismantling um Iran's uh capability to threaten Israel—are the same; uh, slightly different means, but exactly the same. So if Israel just carries on trading blows and degrades Iran, um, that's, you know, um Trump will have a big smile on his face.
Um, sitting in the middle between Iran and um Israel geographically, but also politically, are the Gulf States who just weeks ago hosted this extravagant welcome for Donald Trump, poured almost a trillion dollars worth of investment into US tech companies—and a trillion, it's like 4.5 trillion, is okay, I've got my numbers right—of an insane amount of money. And it appeared that all of that was uh, as a way to win Trump's favor and loyalty, right? That the, and you know, he had a huge smile on his face as he was leaving the region. Uh, it's the happiest I think I've seen him in a long time. Uh, he was marveling at the marble and the and the the jets and the red carpet and all of this kind of stuff. And part of that also seemed like these Gulf states had figured out how to win Trump over without having to appease Israel, which was, would always seem to be that the the cost of doing business with the United States.
Now they're at a position that seems very precarious. They don't know what's going to happen. They don't know how vulnerable they are. They have these military bases, these US military bases that have protected them and now feel like a liability. Where are these states now? What are they thinking? And how are they assessing the situation? They must be crossing their fingers. Um, and they must be wondering whether the money they shelled out to Trump was actually good value for money. uh, because uh Trump hasn't protected them, and he's he he has endangered all the oil and gas gas traffic in in the Gulf. uh, the Strait of Hormuz is a passageway that deals with 21% of the world of the global supply of uh oil and gas uh petroleum liquids, and that's a huge quantity, and that is explicitly now being threatened uh by Iran. Uh, that's also their lifelines, all of these all of these states. Yeah.
Um, now they have much better relationships with Iran, and they they've built it up since Iran undoubtedly attacked uh Aramco uh uh four years ago. Uh, and um more now, actually 2019. 2019. Yeah. Six years ago. Um, and and mind their ships as as as a way of getting deterrence. Um, Saudi Arabia is is is has allowed Iran now back into the Hajj again. Um, they have come to an accommodation over the Houthis. Um, and it was to protect that accommodation that that Saudi Arabia persuaded Trump to stop bombing uh uh Ansa uh Ansala in in Yemen before his Riyadh conference. Um, and they must now be scratching their heads and saying, "How on earth can we stop this before this becomes before before Iran really does uh reach for the nuclear button or or or uh at least pulls all the levers at its disposal." Mhm.
Uh, and one of them must be stopping uh all oil and gas traffic out of out of the Gulf. So um, they are obviously issuing quite strong statements. The Emirati statement over the weekend was very strong. Um, they are absolutely all on side of a mediated stop the war as quickly as possible. Um, but do they have a favor to call in? No, they don't. They've just got all this money that they that they that they paid out. Um, and they must be praying that this war stops very very quickly because uh, the more uh the list of targets uh of the Israeli uh air force spreads, and it and it starts in a general bombing campaign of which is what I believe we'll see happen. Uh, it's certainly what Katz, the um the Israeli uh foreign minister uh has threatened over the weekend, that they will now start targeting um Tehran's population. Mhm. Um, he said Tehran will burn. Yeah. um uh the more uh Iran will be thrown back into the sort of situation it was when it came under existential attack from Saddam Hussein. And it was from that point um just after the revolution when they were attacked by Saddam Hussein um and they really didn't have an army to fight back, and they really didn't have the weapons to fight back. They had very old Second World War rifles. um, that today's policy uh it's it's its enrichment program, but particularly it's its missile strategic missile capability was born, it was from the Iran-Iraq war that the uh um the policy was born of establishing militias uh that could really fight Israel uh right next to its borders um and had those militias stretch from the Mediterranean to the coast of uh to the borders of of Iran. Mhm.
Um, and it was in that war that that of course uh Saddam Hussein had the the absolute undivided backing of American technology uh German technology companies that provided him with a precursor for sarin gas and and for mustard gas that he used on the battlefield. Um, and uh he had the great blessing of Ronald Reagan and his then uh bright young envoy called one, you know, Donald Rumsfeld. Mhm. Um, and there are still people in Iran who are suffering from those gas attacks. They're still veterans of that war who do it. And it it left it was a very very bloody episode. It took eight years for Iran to expel Saddam Hussein. Um, and they'll never forget it. And that is the that's a crucible of um Iran's foreign policy and and its reason for uh for setting up the network which now appears to be much weaker if not dismantled, and that the Iran-Iraq war I think is a very uh important touch point to look back on because it was as you said, you know, Saddam Hussein went into that war with full backing from the west who believed that they could use him to deteriorate ate and undermine and ideally collapse the Islamic regime in Iran just after the revolution, just after the revolution, before they had even were able to get on their feet or or prepare for an eight-year long war, and it failed. And we are here now 40 years later.
Um, with this regime that has survived a lot of hits from the outside, a lot of upheaval from within its borders. um, popular protests, popular attempts at uprisings, sabotage at, you know, all sorts of things. What is the likelihood? I mean, if they survived all of that, are they strong enough to survive what this could be? That is the key question. And honestly, I can't answer it. I don't think anyone can because you're dealing with uh a completely new uh range of technologies and weapons which have been tried systems which are trying being tried out for the first time. Um uh those systems can be deployed with total impunity and western backing. Um, there's no break on Israel yet. um, and uh uh assessing uh Iran's strategic depth uh which is what we're talking about um is very very difficult. Um, the conventional wisdom is that uh Israel will not be able to uh break through the the um the hundreds of meters of rock. uh in in in which the cascades of um enrichment centrifuges are are buried in in in FOD. Uh, but we've seen conventional wisdom being upended before. Uh, the conventional wisdom is that um Iran is a country of 92 97 million people um being attacked by a country of you know 5 million people. um, and that it is a real country and a real state unlike anything that Israel has fought uh since uh 1973.
Um, so Israel has purely been used to to to to fighting civilian populations um uh and uh insurgencies and militias. Um, it's never come face to face with a proper army and a proper state with its own missiles. and we'll see how it how it copes with that. How how the other unanswered question is so two unanswered questions. How how how much punishment can Iran take? Uh number one. Number two, uh how long can Israel keep it up? Because their population faces being in air raid shelters for not just one night or two nights, but for months on end. Um, is Israel's economy shot to pieces? Uh um there's war fatigue from the reservists. They have difficulty getting reservists for another stage of the campaign in Gaza which is which is still carrying on. Um, how long can they keep up war on all fronts which is now the recipe that the that that Netanyahu has delivered. And um at what time will they say enough's enough? We're now going to sue for peace. um, which would which would involve kicking uh Netanyahu out of power and and uh a new election uh and a new government. Um, but what we what we're not asking ourselves is how how long can physically uh Israel keep this up.
So we're now in in a uh a situation where people trading blows, but neither side quite knows how tough the other side is. Right. and and and because I mean a lot gets said about Israel's Iron Dome technology which has protected it this far from any kind of real uh fundamental damage from Iran's missiles. But although I mean Israel is sustaining more damage now than at any time in the last two years and this is costing it so for it to replenish its Iron Dome this is billions of dollars every single day that it is spending on on these anti-air missiles. Yes. and and and and I mean the other thing is that that uh Ben Gurion airport is shut, Israeli airspace is shut um and that will be costing Israel untold millions uh of lost trade uh uh and and lost income. How long can it keep on uh carry on like that? That again these are unanswered questions. So it's now a question of you know uh they've just had the equivalent of Operation Barbarossa uh when when st when when Hitler attacked Stalin um by surprise and and Russia had this massive strategic depth although it lost uh a huge amount of its industrial input output in in the western half of Russia but but moved moved everything it had eastwards out of range of the Luftwaffe. Will Iran be able to do the same thing uh against a completely different uh in new technology which allows Israel to roam literally all over the airspace. Um, and will it have that strategic depth just to keep on uh surviving uh and keep on functioning uh as a country at war and fighting for its very survival.
Let's talk about Russia. I remember 6 months ago now you and I were at the Doha forum. Um, and it was a very consequential weekend because it was the weekend that Bashar al-Assad fell. And very quickly you saw how all of these kind of foreign delegates that were there were scrambling to try and make sense of what was happening. And at the heart of them was the Russian foreign minister um, Sergey Lavrov. And I'll never forget the look on his face during a one-on-one with an Al Jazeera reporter where he was asked about what on earth is happening in Syria right now, this kind of a key proxy that Russia had spent so much time and effort trying to kind of protect from from falling and and he and he looked over and he and and and said, "I I'd rather talk about Ukraine." Yes. Why aren't you asking me about Ukraine? Yeah. And I wonder what Russia is thinking at this moment and what are what options they're weighing up. Are they going to let Iran potentially fall or are they going to get involved and risk escalating this into something that that might go beyond what they're prepared for?
Well, uh, when I was last in Tehran, uh a a a big delegation, uh Iranian delegation had just returned from Moscow with great smiles on their faces about uh uh all the trade that was just about to happen. They were they were there was a I attended a a an Iranian uh conference of automobile man manufacturers and they'd all just come back and received this fantastic welcome and lots and lots of contracts for for car parts basically. Um, and we knew then that that developed not just into car parks but but into um uh really big uh transfer of uh uh Iranian drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Something like 9,000 of them have been used uh in in the last two years according to to the Ukrainians. Now, is uh Russia going to treat uh uh the potential fall of Iran in the same way that it that that it treated Bashar Assad where it basically shrugged their shoulders as did indeed the IRGC as did the uh um the Hezbollah. Mhm. Uh they all when they when they realized that the Assad troops weren't fighting and they walking away, they walked off as well. um pragmatic, but that was the end of that. Um, and now their tone to the people who who ousted Bashar Assad uh is is uh very business-like. Uh, and they've done a deal to keep their two bases there. Uh, these are the very same people they described as as jihadis uh when Damascus was about to fall. uh, and they then intervene and they said had we not intervened you would have you would have had uh the Islamic State in control, well it's not obviously not Islamic State but it it's it's it's former al-Qaeda people in control, so it's the very people they described as irredentist takfiri uh jihadi extremists uh they're quite happy to deal with now.
Um, in terms of Iran, I think their thinking will be very very different, and always Of course, uh Iran is vitally important for Russia geographically. Uh, it's basically the whole of the the the southern caucuses that it that that is behind. It's very very sensitive area for Russia. Um, it's always been part of the great game between the west and Russia who who who who has got Iran. Um, if America recaptured Iran, uh, Russia would be extremely vulnerable to attack from the south as well as from everywhere else. Um, it would just but it would be exactly like a return to the days of the Shah when the relationship with Israel and the west was absolutely central to you know uh taking back the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war, be really a return to those days. Will Russia allow that to happen? No. Now the relationship between Putin and Netanyahu it goes back a long way. Mhm. And there was a time I can remember when Netanyahu flew uh by private jet secretly to Moscow and persuaded Putin when the missiles were literally on the flatbed trucks um to not supply Iran with the latest generation of S400s.
So if you if you look at the whole scenario, the attack on Iran has been decades in the making because it required Israel's certain knowledge that it had not only the the latest generation of bombers, but that Iran could not did not have the latest generation of of air defense, which could only be supplied by by China now by by Russia, and that they had a huge technological advantage. Now that that putting that jigsaw in place took took decades. Um, it was a life's work as you described. You know this is he's not going to suddenly now say oh mistake I'm now going to retreat. There's nowhere for Netanyahu to retreat domestically. He can't retreat. He has to. And if you notice this uh each war one closes down another war opens up. So so at the very point at which Gaza was was was coming possibly to some sort of solution he he opened up a new uh war with Lebanon and expanded and with Hezbollah and expanded it. Mhm. Uh, initially they just traded fire in the Shabbah arms. But it but it quickly uh ballooned out and out and out and became more and more and and each as each side traded blows uh the Israel says you see this is a war about uh uh the whole affecting the whole of the north of Israel. Therefore, we're going to invade. Right when that closes down and there's a ceasefire uh Syria starts up. When Syria comes to some sort of deal with Israel. Again, another power that did everything to not fight a war with Israel, even though Israel just bombed uh um the Syrian navy and its uh and its air force out out of out of existence. Um, as soon as that settles down, there's a war with with Iran. So Israel has consciously moved from one war to another. uh uh finishing or trying to finish each foe off at a time. And the question, the real big question now is uh is Iran a bridge too far? Mhm. Um, and I can't answer that question. I don't think we can until it actually happens. Or will it have the strategic depth to just keep going and to reply? uh, and as it does so the pressure on Netanyahu domestically will increase because what are the stakes here not only for Iran but for the region as a if it continues to have its back pressed for more and more against the wall uh and it runs out of options to continue defending itself from these attacks. What does it look to do if it gets desperate? If it becomes existential for the Iranian government to to keep itself from it develops a bomb. Uh, it closes the Straits of Hormuz. It goes to Russia and says we helped you in Ukraine. You've got to help us against Israel. And those are very at the moment Russia is is is is basically strongly on on on the side of negotiation uh and deescalation. But if it gets to the stage where it's about to lose uh that calculation might change. But those are the three things that immediately come to mind. There probably many more.
And I guess my final question is if we imagine if we think about the last two years and what has been happening in Gaza and what Israel has been navigating internationally in terms of public opinion in terms of legal challenges uh in terms of western backing there has this been this question about the rules-based order about international human rights about the structure that we at least on paper believe that we had lived been for the last half a century and there has been a lot to undermine that by allowing Israel to continue as it has and now we're at a point where um there doesn't really seem to be any opposition at all diplomatically, politically, economically to Israel and to Netanyahu pursuing this war against Iran. But there's huge opposition on the streets. There's huge opposition in public opinion. Israel's lost a generation uh of uh supporters in uh America. Anyone who turns on the telly and starts the clock of looking at the Middle East in the last two years will be anti-Israel. Anyone. So uh um what we've got is a uh a generation of politicians that are unrepresentative of a massive change. Israel as and Gaza and the Palestinian cause has become the number one global human rights issue uh in exactly the same way that the the uh ending uh a part in South Africa was so many years ago. I think it's bigger than that now. So Israel has lost global public opinion. It hasn't yet lost uh the leadership uh the representatives of u all western powers. It's lost the global south. It's lost Brazil. Uh, it's lost Africa. Uh, it's lost China and it's lost Russia. That's quite a lot of the world. It's got India. But that's quite a lot of the world to to to uh say that. And that one would have thought would have over time uh uh a huge effect uh on the status quo that allows that gives Israel complete punitive action. And there are battles everywhere. There's a battle. We've been crying that battle in in the Hague in the ICC where Israel has absolutely tried to pervert the course of international justice with pressure on Karim Khan, the British uh uh Casey and prosecutor who's trying to serve two warrants on Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yaakov Galant and served more warrants on on other Israeli ministers like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, they're absolutely involved in basically uh uh in threats in open threats to to to the ICC. So if we say we need an international court of justice to try the likes of Muammar Gaddafi or Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army or uh Omar al-Bashir, former president of uh Sudan, how can we possibly maintain as Lindsey Graham so delicately put it, this is a court for Africans only. It's unsustainable. Mhm.
Um, and um I think basically we're seeing the last generation of Western leaders who give Israel that that blanket support. That doesn't necessarily mean that the West turns into an enemy for for Israel. But um uh I I think the era of impunity for Israel is historically is is uh at at an end. Mhm. Uh, but you're seeing a very long tail end uh of that impunity which is all about European guilt for the Holocaust. But we're moving to a post-Holocaust generation where those arguments now no longer apply. And if anyone talks about the Holocaust, they'll say, "Well, what did you do in in in in Gaza?" Mhm. so um but the other process that that is happening here is that uh while Israel is getting stronger and stronger simply
Militarily stronger and stronger, uh, and is now using all the arms at its disposal in a way that is completely unhindered and unchained, uh, and is being supported. It's being supported by Britain, who are now sending RAF jets over to the air. They're probably also shooting down drones. Well, they did the last time. We don't know what they're doing now. But they could easily be shooting down drones that the Iranian drones protect Israel. And you know, British involvement could be actually quite overt if the Straits of Hormuz did actually close because they could say this is a British interest, and we're going to put our boots on the ground to stop it. Um, so I think we're—you know, the other thing that is happening is that as western powers argue the unarguable, I argue the unsustainable.
Um, while it is so obvious that Israel has driven a sort of D9 bulldozer through a rules-based system, uh, and it's impossible to argue now that Israel is a force for good in the world, put crudely. Mhm. Um, you're seeing the end of the western rules-based order, or the shrinking of it. It will not apply much beyond anywhere else. And so, uh, you know, the next time the west has to appeal to anyone outside it to say, "Oh, we support us because it's the right thing to do," people will say, "Why should we support you?" Um, you know, the America First nationalism and the other nationalisms that are going on in Europe will lead us to governments that are all far right? Um, because the Macrons of this world or the Starmiers of this world will lose to the far right eventually, um, because of the economy, over the economy. Um, Trump is endangering the global economy.
Um, and we won't have at the end of it any props or any international system because it has been weakened. I mean, routinely the UN argues that the Gaza war should be stopped on humanitarian grounds, and routinely it is completely ignored. It's now become just a talking shop. It has very—is no power. The UN has got absolutely no power now in Gaza. Once it had huge say and a huge moral voice, but if you don't have the Western leaders who are willing to back it up, you've got no UN. Um, and we should really look at this because we will need the UN at some point because our power will decline and China's will increase. How can we then go to the UN and say, "Stop what China's doing?" We won't be able to do that anymore. So, uh, it's desperately shortsighted policy. Uh, it is so obviously wrong; it can't be defended. Um, and it is the cynical, um, tail end of a colonial era that is passing and declining.
And it seems that Donald Trump, and we're only four months into his second term, um, it seems that he is, in a lot of ways, heralding something new, or actually something old, an old way of power, an old way of leadership. And in a very, very short amount of time, you saw a lot of European leaders go, and not just European leaders, a lot of world leaders go from being cynical and oppositional to him to falling in line and finding ways to appease him and talk to him and speak honeyed words into his ear to get his attention. And you have this situation that is unfolding very dramatically that he definitely has a hand in, and he has no intention of trying to stop.
Um, and when we talk about the rules-based order, uh, when we talk about the ICC, which is now under sanction by the United States government, and the United Nations, which has been actively undermined and attacked by even Trump himself, who threatened at some point that he might defund the United Nations, are we now entering, have we entered a new reality, a new way of doing things? Uh, and what does that look like? What does the world look like? At the moment, it's chaos, and might is right. Um, I mean, every time one sort of thinks about, or I'm asked about Trump, uh, I immediately think about, "Well, hang on, what happened under Obama? What happened under Biden?" This decline and this retreat happened over three or four presidencies. Uh, the whole history of intervention basically since Kosovo, right? So you're talking about the first quarter of the 21st century and the last few years of the last century have all been military defeats for NATO or the coalition of the willing. There's not a single thing that's gone right.
Um, and we've had very big economic shocks and could be about to have another one as well, uh, if America defaults on its historic debt. Um, so this decline and things going wrong for Western military projects or liberal interventionism um has been happening over a number of presidencies. It's not just Trump. Trump is an accelerant to a process that's been happening ever since 1999 when the ruble crashed and we suddenly said, "Who lost Russia?" That's the moment at which everything's gone wrong for us. Um, so we're dealing with a really quite—and China has grown through default rather than by design. Uh, it's filling the spaces. It's the only country that basically hasn't fought a war in the last quarter of a century. Um, and it's booming from that point of view. Yes, it has an awful lot of problems from COVID uh and also from the bubble of its real estate. This is still a country whose GDP is substantially lower than the average GDP of the average American. It's still a long way behind, but it's the only country that hasn't fought a war, and it's the only country that's quietly arming and arming and arming and arming. So, um, and it will also want to ensure its oil supplies from the Gulf and from Iran. So Iran's supply of oil to China and to Russia would be a very good excuse for both China and Russia to enter the war on Iran's behalf because it is a strategic interest. It's not the major one, but it is a strategic interest.
So what sort of world order are we entering? We're certainly entering the decline of, or the end of, the peace that settled over Europe for over half a century since the end of the Second World War. Um, we're entering an era where the West as such is in a far weaker position to determine other people's choices, economic choices. Um, a weakening of the dollar as the reserve currency, although it still is the global reserve currency. Um, and it's being replaced by other currencies. Basically, the euro or Swiss franc is actually a safer reserve currency than the dollar at the moment. Um, so we're certainly—you can see that this is an end of an era. Uh, what you can't see necessarily is what replaces it. And I'm in no—I don't have rose-tinted spectacles on when I think about Russia or when I certainly think about China. I don't think necessarily what replaces this world order is going to be a better one, but it's certainly going to be more chaotic. Uh, and anyone in the middle of this, like particularly the Middle East uh and particularly the Gulf States, has got to think very carefully of how they hedge their bets. They cannot place their trust in America as their umbrella. Uh, they have to replace it with other things, and they may turn to China increasingly. The relationship between Saudi Arabia and China is actually really quite interesting because they've started to deal with each other in not dollars but in other currencies. Mhm. So, um, long-term, I see those relationships developing, particularly security relationships.
Um, now you can argue that all of these will actually force America to see that following Netanyahu blindly down the footpath that he has so carefully laid for America and for Trump is not in America's best interest. Um, but so far that hasn't happened. Uh, it'll be interesting to monitor in the next few days and weeks the opinion of Republican senators in the Congress because that might give us the first indication of second thoughts about following Israel into regime change in Tehran for all the reasons we've been talking about for the last hour. Yeah, David Hurst, it's always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. We'll keep an eye on what's happening. I'm sure there'll be many surprises in the days to come. And uh, again, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Big Picture. And a big thank you to Middle East's editor-in-chief, David Hurst, for being our guest today. You can read his column by going to our website at middleeast.net. As always, you can listen to all of our episodes in audio format wherever you get your podcast from. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below. Tell us how you felt about this conversation, what you think about the war that is unfolding between Iran and Israel. And as always, my name is Muhammad Hassan. [Music]