Transcription
We're seeing here the decline, the fall and collapse of the American Empire. This idea that they're a superpower that can act at will is clearly wrong. This is an absolute strategic disaster for the United States.
American policy has always been up for sale over the last couple of decades. And the Israelis understood this. The penetration of the pro-Israel lobby across all aspects of decision-making in Washington, the media space, the political space is so deep.
Now we can speak about the truth and the truth is out there. Israel has lost the capacity to make sober, rational, strategic decisions. Mossad for years had built major networks and inroads into civil society in Iran. And they were pressing all the buttons, issuing them with communication devices and weapons. They create false flags against an enemy that comes out of nowhere. They're fighting ghosts. It's insurgency at its worst. It's Vietnam times 100.
Ultimately, America is far less well-off than they are now. This war has been to the detriment of all economies. The burden of that is now being borne by the Europeans and you know you touched their interest and that's a step too far. Everything the Gulf states have told Trump was going to happen did happen in the end and it led to this strategic defeat. The Arab street or the Muslim street see the Iranians now as a protector of the Palestinian cause and the only capable obstacle in Israel's way in terms of Israeli expansionism.
For the Trump organization, for the Trump family, their opportunities to make billions of dollars moving forward. Israel-US relationship, Trump-Netanyahu relationship in the next coming weeks is going to be extremely interesting to watch. I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump Organization.
On February the 28th, Israel and the US launched a coordinated attack on Iran. Just under four months later, the US has agreed to a peace deal that's being widely slammed in both Israel and the US as an abject climb down. President Trump's rhetoric about the Iranians has changed dramatically. "We're dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they're smarter than the first and second group."
It's now Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis who are the target of his anger. "I'll tell you what, Israel's fighting Hezbollah too long and too many people are being killed. And you don't have to knock down an apartment house every time you're looking for somebody because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they're not all as that. I can tell you."
Vice President JD Vance has fired a series of unprecedented broadsides at the Israeli government. "And I guess my response to them would be what is your exact proposal? You're a country of of 9 million people. You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have."
Seismic shifts are clearly underway in both the balance of power in the Middle East and in the US-Israeli relationship. The abrupt cancellation by Iran of the first round of talks because of continuing Israeli strikes in Lebanon is a sign of how emboldened the Iranians now feel.
I invited Andreas Krie, associate professor at the school of security studies at King's College London to come into the Doubledown News Watch studio to help us pick it all apart. Andreas Cre, thank you very much for coming in. Um, who won?
Great pleasure. Uh, Iran. If you just look at the measurables and the metrics in terms of where Iran was pre-war and where they are now, I think it's fair to say that Iran is in a far better situation.
In what way is Iran stronger than it was on February the 27th? Now if you look at Iran January-February it was a regime under immense pressure domestically, social political mobilization, we had mass protests, the economy obviously under massive sanctions, you had an elderly leader in charge who was going to die anyway at some point. I mean, was not in a position to really lead the country, was reactive, very risk-averse. Now we have an Iran which has a very strict, very strong, emboldened leadership built around the IRGC and the and the son of Harmony who's far more hardcore, hardline. We have now a prospect of lifting sanctions. Tens of billions of dollars of frozen assets that will come to Iran and they will not just be used to prop up the economy. A lot of it will also go into building military capacity. There is a pathway now to reintegrate Iran into the global economy. At the same time, they've shown the Americans that there are limitations of what America can do with its military might. This idea that they're a superpower that can act at will, that is omnipotent almost. um was is clearly wrong. I think this is we're seeing here the decline, the fall and collapse of the American empire.
But then that that's a lesson the Americans have been learning again and again for 70 years, isn't it? I mean, invariably these these end interventions end badly.
They do. But I think 2003 is the beginning of the end of American Empire, and I think now we're getting to the end of American Empire, particularly in this part of the world. I do think ultimately the Chinese are the ones who will come out on top because they had had didn't have to do anything. It's a bit like what Napoleon said, if your enemy is making a mistake, don't interfere. US made a major mistake. China was holding back, sitting back. America is far less well-off than they were before financially, in terms of military capacity as well. Um, we have a major depletion of military assets. It's an absolute strategic disaster for the United States.
Did the Iranian military performance surprise people? Those people who've been watching Iran for a long time knew how the Iranian defense system was set up, that it was a network of different sort of hubs that operate with fair degrees of autonomy, very decentralized, able to take decisions even under attrition. Um, so it was quite clear that the IRGC was they were waiting for this attack to happen. So throughout February, we knew the Iranians knew this was coming. So they were already delegating decision-making authority to the local level. This was very clear.
So they'd made themselves assassination-proof?
Decapitation-proof. So the idea of the Israeli policy over years has been decapitate and then everything else will collapse. The the Iranian network state was never set up like this. They were always set up as a very resilient network state from the beginning since 1979. So the disruption of the chain of command was not going to be easy. Um, equally the same has happened to the entire military-industrial complex in Iran. So a lot of the infrastructure to build missiles and ballistic ballistic missiles as well as drones was moved underground, decentralized, spread out across a major country. I mean, Iran, if you just look at the size, we look at the map, the strategic depth that the country has is nothing. There's nothing like it in the Middle East. Um, it's a large country. It's very difficult to actually hit them hard across that massive space. A lot of the infrastructure to build drones in particular, but also ballistic missiles, was very much is still intact. I do think that the Israelis were overconfident that they were able to mobilize the, you know, civil society in Iran against the regime and basically bring the regime to a collapse from within. So decapitation on the top and uprising from the bottom, that would have been a really problematic thing to deal with for Iran. The miscalculation was that, you know, Mossad for years had built major networks and inroads into civil society in Iran and they were pressing all the buttons in January to kind of amplify sort of mobilization, but also issuing them with communication devices and weapons, and the regime hit hard, hit back hard. It's a large amount of people that were killed within a very short amount of time. We have to say as well, that was a deterrent. The Iranians were not going to come out again after that happened, and it happened without air power. In many ways, the Israelis already shot and used all the ammunition that they've built up over years in January, and then the war happened, and then all the munitions were basically lost, and so you were stuck with an air power only operation that was never going to succeed. What is also interesting is that the Iranians went nuclear quite quickly, not literally, but nuclear in the way of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, hitting US bases across the region very precisely.
Defensively, how well did the Iranians perform? How well were they able to conceal their weapons, their manufacturing capacity?
The biggest challenge is just geography. Uh, you know, maintaining lines of communication very deep into into Iran, and the fact that the Iranians have basically spread out their capacity across the battle space, moving a lot of the stuff to the northeast of the country, which was very far away to be reached from Israel and difficult to be reached from the Gulf as well. Air defense systems as well, they've had support from Russia and China. And mind you, for a long time, the Americans were not able to draw on the bases in the Gulf. So they had to fly from Israel and then had to refuel. That really...
What about aircraft carriers?
Well, aircraft carriers play a role, but also there is there is a limited range. You can't go all the way to the northeast of of...
They also had to withdraw to a degree, didn't they? For for their own safety?
Of course. So you couldn't you couldn't, first of all, none of the aircraft carriers went into the Gulf. That would have been way too dangerous. You couldn't approach the Strait of Hormuz. You would have been hit, and that was the end of it. And the fact that the American Navy had to withdraw just shows that, you know, they weren't in complete control, definitely not of the maritime space. So basically the Iranians were able to conserve the bulk of their their missile capacity and their missile production capacity, and most importantly, the launching capacity. The launching capacity was still at a very, very high level all the way up to last week when the Iranians were able to launch missiles at at Israel. And then the other thing is when you look at the drones, which is all they needed to disrupt the airspace in the Gulf, they didn't need to use sophisticated technology. You can launch them pretty much ad hoc from wherever you want to launch them from, and there is nothing you can do about it. And that was why I think the most of the calculus then turned in the GCC of saying, actually, there isn't a military way out of it. We need to have a negotiated settlement. That includes even the UAE, who were very belligerent early on. I think we need to look at intent, which is very important. The IRGC had a 180-degree shift after was killed. If you look at 2023, after the 7th of October, all the way up to February 2026, what you see is a very hesitant, almost risk-averse, reactive posture by the Iranians. They responded rather than proactively got involved in the conflict with Israel. They let their proxies do the talking. This time around, it became immediately a war of survival. The intent was go all out. Coupled with the ability to actually continue shooting means that you have the intent and the capability. Then they had new more sophisticated weaponry which they used. I think last time around, I think it was in June, in the June war in 2025, we've seen towards the last two days, we've seen some of these cluster munitions being fired. So they were missiles, as they come down onto the target, they release clusters, small bomblets, basically to distract the um, the interceptors and have the main warhead actually go through. And that was a major shock in June 2025 to the Israelis, and they've used these quite extensively across Israel. We have, obviously, there's no independent media in Israel, so we have no way to actually look at the damage, but if I speak to some of the Israelis I speak to, they said it was really destructive in in areas. I mean, they've hit very high-value targets. They obviously hit um, civilian environments as well. And for the Israeli mindset and psyche, that was extremely damaging. So, that's very sophisticated.
So, hitting military targets, hitting some civilian targets as well, but hitting military targets targeted. They're not just lobbing things and hoping for the best.
Absolutely not. So, and that's the third major bit, I think, is intelligence. The ability for them to microtarget um, in a way that they weren't able to. And that's particularly interesting not just in Israel, because they were hitting things in June 2025 as well. What is interesting is that they were able to really pinpoint strikes on American targets in the Gulf with a precision of, I remember this one case where they hit a hotel in Bahrain where you had American servicemen staying. They needed to have the human intelligence of knowing at which what floor the Americans were staying, but also then the intelligence of actually being able to to hit that target very precisely. They were hitting that particular floor where they were staying. I mean, the extraordinary thing that the Americans really very early in the war moved all of their troops and much of the equipment off their bases, which does kind of beg the question, what's the point of the bases if you evacuate them the moment a war starts?
Absolutely. And and more than that, not only were they unable to protect the Gulf States, which is what they were intended to intended to do, but they made the Gulf States targets in the first place. And the Gulf States, had they not had any American bases or or, you know, capacity there, would have been no attacks by Iran onto the Gulf States. So American military bases became a magnet rather than a shield.
They did the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do.
But the the drones, which were more important for the um, Iranians, drones or ballistic missiles?
Drones, I think overall, because and just everything that Iran does, going back to the network-centric idea, is swarming, right? Is about decentralization. It's a numbers game. So if you fire, you overwhelm any air defense system in the world. The most sophisticated air defense system in the world, which the Israelis arguably have, is overwhelmed if if it's if it comes in numbers. They're built cheaply. I mean, the engines are basically piston engines from a from a moped. So they can be produced in high numbers very quickly, component parts coming from China, and then hit targets with quite a lot of precision.
You can see on the American bases, they've hit a plane on the tarmac, they've hit a fuel tank and so on. It's absolutely precise.
And it's precise in the way. So, for example, if the strikes in Oman, they were hitting a fuel tank, I think it was in Salalah, and they only hit that one fuel tank which is American. They didn't hit any of the other ones. Ras Laffan as well, they only hit the train in that Ras Laffan that was owned by an American company. The radar systems as well, they knew exactly where to hit the radar. They said, "Okay, we don't have to destroy the whole building, but just destroy the weakest spot and we need to pinpoint a very small warhead to hit." And they did. And they've taken out all the major radars in the region, taking out planes, taking out hangers. There's a great map that CENTCOM, I think, has released where you where they where they show where things have hit. It's not random. It's very, very targeted. And that begs the question, where's the intelligence coming from? So there is an element of human networks that the Iranians had prepared within the Gulf. But beyond that, in terms of signal intelligence, the only explanation is that they're getting signal intelligence from China and from Russia.
How much damage was done to American military bases? How how damaged are they? Are they going to reoccupy them?
No. There's an interesting point. So there have been discussions among all the Gulf States and within the Gulf States of saying, to what extent do we need their relation with America? Nobody's saying let's throw the Americans out. That's quite clear. All of them are saying we still need the Americans. We need access to American technology. But do we need to have these bases and are we giving them the same rights that they had before? And and then there is a discussion ongoing in Washington as well. Should we be should the Americans be in the Gulf in the first place? If you're America First, MAGA, you'd probably say we, you know, we don't need to be there actually.
Do we have a monetary value on how much damage was done to American bases? Very, very roughly.
Very, I mean, billions, but billions of dollars.
Billions of dollars. Definitely billions of dollars. And the question then is who's footing the bill? Is it going to be the Gulf States? Is it US taxpayers? But then there is an an option or opportunity saying for the Americans to say, we're not going to bring as many boots on the ground back as we had prior to this war. And that kind of solves two issues also for the for the Gulf States, because they can then say, okay, we're we're we're basically telling the Iranians, we're we're we're kind of um lowering the the force level that we have in our own countries.
Let's turn to Lebanon because it's a sort of two-front war, this one. Just as Iranian military capacity rather surprised um the Americans, did Hezbollah's resilience surprise the Americans than the Israelis?
Hezbollah is an interesting case. The problem with Israel, with everything they do, is they everything is primarily an information operation, right? Domestically and externally. Um, the problem is they've drinking they're drinking their own Kool-Aid. The narrative has been, we destroyed Hezbollah in 2024, completely decimated, degraded. They're no longer they're no longer a threat. That was the Netanyahu sort of messaging. That messaging was aimed primarily at external audiences, but also domestically. And so the belief in the IDF as well, even in the intelligence service, was Hezbollah is deterred, degraded, they're no longer a threat. And then came 2026, and Hezbollah apparently being far more resilient and far more robustly built up than priorly anticipated. And the number one reason is that the information operation that Israel put out there, and you know, a lot of Israeli accounts attacked me for saying that in 2024 of saying, actually, yes, you've degraded the core of Hezbollah, but Hezbollah, like Iran, is a networked entity. If you look at the network hub that is spread across southern Lebanon, they weren't even targeted.
So it's quite assassination-proof again, quite decapitation-proof?
Decapitation-proof. Uh, and the key Radwan forces, which are the special forces of Hezbollah, they're very much still operational, and very few of them had been killed in 2024. The progress that the IDF made in 2024 was extremely slow. It was a war of attrition where the IDF was able to go a few miles into Lebanese territory and then were forced to a standstill. And they've been forced to a standstill again this time around.
Forced to a standstill by ground troops, or again is the key weapon here, drones?
Both. I mean, it is it is obviously, first of all, you're fighting an insurgency where you, most of southern Lebanon is is tunneled under, and you know, I've been there. I mean, it's quite amazing what Hezbollah has built over the decades. Um, but then the other bit is, so the IRGC has helped them in in multiple ways. One is reorganizing the the their the chain of command by making them more flexible, using less of, you know, any digital communication devices which the Israelis could penetrate. It's everything is analog now. Um, and the other aspect is having more sophisticated drones, and this this is something they've learned from the Ukrainians as well. I mean, these these small drones that are basically with a very small payload, but extremely well-targeted, appearing out of nowhere, attacking the Israelis from the rear as they're taking a break, as they're, you know, having a cigarette, um, and taking out tanks and and and um, and and quite expensive heavy equipment with a very low, very cheap, very small payload, uh, in terms of the drones hitting them. That is that made a major difference because psychologically as well, it kind of undermined an already very much drained IDF. Netanyahu never provided an off-ramp. He never said, if we get to this objective, we come, you're coming back home. No, he said, is another objective and another objective, another objective. All of this requires immense amounts of human capacity to man it, to occupy. Occupation is not cheap. Occupation takes a major human toll on the occupier as well. Not...
And this is a small country with a small population. Israel is a small nation, and even if everyone is joining the IDF, at some point they're massively overstretched. One of the big things for the communities in northern Israel was that Netanyahu said on the after the 7th of October, we will make sure you will no longer be under his attack. Attacks from Hezbollah continued until the ceasefire and shows the capability of Hezbollah to do so. So in in many ways, it's a, you know, it's a groundhog day for a lot of the IDF soldiers against an enemy that comes out of nowhere. They're fighting ghosts, which are in many ways far worse than the Hamas ghosts they were fighting in Gaza because the the technological sophistication of Hezbollah is far superior. It's insurgency at its worst. It's Vietnam times 100 because of the force multiplier that Hezbollah has been using.
For the Israelis, the war against Iran was essentially about destroying Iran's capacity to act as an independent sovereign nation. They wanted to reduce Iran to the sort of status of Syria and and Lebanon. In that, they clearly failed. What conclusions have Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, to a degree, Saudi Arabia, what conclusions have they drawn from this conflict?
Number one conclusion, I think, normalization. This idea that Trump has injected that now normalization and Abraham Accords extension has to be part of that is completely bonkers.
That means normalization of the relationship with Israel. With Israel. Yeah. Not on the table.
That's dead in the water. Dead in the water. Everything the Gulf states have told Trump was was going to happen did happen in the end, and it led to this strategic defeat. Um, and they felt abandoned because he did it anyway. And so there is that competition going on, and that will continue over US Middle East policy between, on the one hand, the Gulf lobby, and the other hand, the Israel lobby. And it seemed like the Israel lobby won initially by getting them into the war, and now it's the Gulf lobby coming back, winning in terms of getting him out of the war. But the key thing that the that the Gulf states now have, the key lesson is, if they can't rely on the Americans to keep them safe, what will keep them safe? Iran is not going anywhere, whether it's the Islamic Republic or any other sort of form of Iran. So you need to have a relationship with them. You need to engage, and you need to entangle.
For the Gulf States, the conclusion is actually, we have to get on. We have to have some sort of accommodation with the Iranians. They're not going anywhere. They've shown they can defend themselves.
What has to be defined now is that the nature of the relationship with the US. So how do you disentangle from the US and try to diversify your security relationships? That's kind of the thinking in Abu Dhabi and Doha and in Riyadh.
It seems to me a much more healthy um approach is now being imposed on them because previously they were relying on basically American power to a degree, Israeli power, but basically American power to be able to sort of crush and intimidate their adversaries. Now they're reaching a situation where where they're saying, look, we have to talk to our neighbors and find a way of living with them. That seems to be a rather healthy development.
Which is has always been the country and Omani approach. I mean, they've always been in that camp. The Omanis were from the beginning saying, you know, we're neighbors. We've been fighting the Persians for hundreds of years. We never, you know, this was never good for us.
The Persians aren't going anywhere.
They're not going anywhere. I mean, they take a very long term. You know, Oman has a very long history with Iran that goes back centuries. Um, and the countries also, they say, you know, that we we're small and we're not going to win. UAE is quite interesting because they have that self-perception of being exceptional and b being a middle power. That aspiration of being a middle power meant that they thought as little Sparta, quote unquote, they're able to fight the Iranians, and that was quite clearly not how it worked out. I mean, they were really pounded badly um by by the IRGC. So that hopefully is a brings them all around the table. The Gulf states, despite different objectives on other issues, there is now a bit of a consensus of saying, actually, Iran is not going anywhere. We're all prisoners of geography. Let's try to be pragmatic about it. And if sanctions are being lifted, it would transform everything. So we might see actually much deeper integration between the the the the Iranians and the GCC.
The Gulf Cooperation Council. Economic integration.
Economic. Yeah. But economic integration will lead to political integration as well.
So the Iranians have reestablished their own deterrence. They've also sort of extended it to the Gulf region where they've shown that the Gulf States certainly can't be Iran's enemies, even if they're not going to be their allies. Let's look at possibly the most complicated front of all, which is Lebanon, where the Israelis clearly have a a long-term goal of utterly destroying Hezbollah, which again and again and again they they have failed to do. The memorandum of understanding, according to all reports, is very clear that it's a ceasefire on all fronts. Will the Israelis respect that in Lebanon? And if they don't, what are the consequences?
The answer I think was given this morning, a couple of hours ago, the Israelis did strike targets in southern Lebanon. So the answer is no. I think in Israel, there is now a very comprehensive cross-societal consensus that this is a bad deal. I do reckon that Lebanon is the Achilles' heel of this deal, because that's most likely where things will kick off.
Where is the where's that threshold of pain where the Iranians are saying, that's too much? We're we're responding with a missile attack on on on Israel as they've done last week. And where is the threshold of pain for Trump of saying, that goes too far? Because usually Trump is like, "Okay, that's just a small skirmish. That's fine." But it really, it's the Iranians who will set the term of acceptable behavior. What is acceptable under the MOU has very clearly been determined by the IRGC. They they now tell the Americans, the Iranians will tell the Americans and the Israelis what is and what isn't acceptable. Um, and I reckon that Israel will misstep, and it will get there will be some retaliation that will be painful. But the hope then is that Trump will not give a green light and a carte blanche to Israel to retaliate, but say, you know, stay in your box. That's going to be that's going to be moving forward. I mean, that relationship, Israel-US relationship, Trump-Netanyahu relationship in the next coming weeks is going to be extremely interesting to watch. There there's also another issue which hasn't been addressed by the MOU, which is the issue of um, the Israeli presence in southern Lebanon. So none of it suggests the Iranians, the Israelis have to withdraw from Lebanon. The understanding Israel is we stay in southern Lebanon. For Hezbollah, that's unacceptable. So that is an...
And it's never worked out well for the Israelis that they always get driven out of southern Lebanon in the end.
Yeah, of course they do, and they will eventually leave southern Lebanon again, and this greater Israel thing is not going to happen. It's not going to go down. And so these are a lot of little things that Trump has not thought through, and he will never think through these things anyway.
Because he doesn't do that sort of thing. The other thing about Trump, of course, is he's not an ideological Zionist, which Biden was, which Hillary Clinton was, which Bill Clinton was. Um, you know, which certainly most Democrats have always been, and which the Republican party now is. He's he's transactional. He's it's, you know, it's what's in it for him and his family.
He has no philosophy. He has no ontology. He has no ideology whatsoever, which is a good and a bad thing, because he has no handrail to hold on to. If he thinks he can make money, he'll swing that way. And but that's an opportunity in this deal. um, you know, if if sanctions are being lifted, there is a geoeconomic argument to be made for why the deal is good for America. American companies could make billions and billions of dollars. That is a kind of message Trump likes. Um, you know, the rebuilding of the entire oil and and gas infrastructure in Iran, which is going to be the biggest in the world. Iran, if if not sanctioned, will be one of the biggest economies in the world. Certainly the biggest economy in the region. It's 80 million people, highly sophisticated middle class, well-educated. That's an economy. That's a market that is, you know, will will change everything for Western companies as well. And they are...
And the Gulf States have a massive vested interest in working with that economy.
Yes. I mean, the Gulf States want to become the gateway to Iran. I mean, Oman, Qatar, UAE, they want to become the gateway to the Iranian market. So, lifting of sanctions will transform everything. I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump Organization and some of these affiliated firms with the Trump Organization would actually rock up in Iran if sanctions are being lifted. So for the Trump organization, for the Trump family, there are opportunities to make billions of dollars as well. And so ultimately, you have to look at it from a transactional point of view. He will look at Israeli um aggression, which is costing taxpayers money in the US, is costing reputationally for Trump globally, makes no money whatsoever. And then the Gulf approach, which is pragmatic, which is providing stability, and also makes quite a lot of money for him personally and for us, for the U.S. economy. If you frame it like this, Trump might be able to be he might be able to be swayed in this. And I think a lot of the conversations have already taken place with the Trump administration saying, "We're underwriting this as in the Gulf States, but we're also allowing American companies to come in. You can make billions of dollars in the Trump Organization as well."
Hezbollah have clearly shown the capacity to resist and to hit back. It's now clear that the Iranians can and will hit back. The Israelis are in a weaker position than they were before. Worse than that, Iran was actually never really a hegem. in the sense that Israel wanted to be. Israel sees itself as a hegem.
Trasi describes it as hegem on crack. It...
Is on crack shooting all in all all directions. But hegemony requires a degree of omnipotence, acceptance, and also a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the people who you rule over, and Israel has none of that. Going back to the point of Iran's building of the axis of resistance, which was never meant to be a way for Iran to kind of get influence in in this part of the world. They this was never an expeditionary campaign thing. It was always, you know, misrepresented as the Iranians are trying to occupy territory and build an empire. That was not it. It was, I would call it...
It was forward defense.
It was forward defense. It's a campfire strategy. And so the axis of resistance was supposed to be the first line of defense of the Islamic Republic after the trauma of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, where they said, we need to push the enemy as far out as possible. Now, what has changed with Hezbollah is, for the first time, Iran is actually saying, you know what, we're also backing you, and we're backing Lebanon, and we have a stake in this, and we will make sure that the security of Lebanon is is an Iranian interest. That is, for the first time, a way of the Iranians saying, actually, our ambition doesn't stop at our border. We have a regional vision, and it's it's an anti-Israel vision as well. And this is what the Israelis are probably fearing as well. The Arab street or the Muslim street, maybe not the regimes, but Arab streets and Muslim street generally see the Iranians now as a protector of the Palestinian cause and the only capable um, sort of obstacle in Israel's way in terms of Israeli expansionism. So that in itself is a is an opportunity for Iran to grow. And how this will play out with Saudi and the GCC, who the Gulf States themselves are, they are the center of gravity in the Arab world. Will they accept that? Definitely not. They don't want a sort of hegemony in...
They don't want Iranian domination, but they're they're perfectly prepared to reach an accommodation.
Yes. But it has to be on par. Um, they don't want to be a junior partner. And I think economically speaking, and that's where entanglement comes in as well. If you if if the growth of the Iranian economy moving forward is dependent on Gulf money and Gulf companies, and the Gulf States are the sort of gateway to the economy, there is leverage that the Gulf states have over over Iran as well.
The American involvement in the Middle East, it seems to me, is quite clearly destructive in that by um, giving Israel this sort of carte blanche that they can always rely on American support, they've they've encouraged this almost maniacal aggression on on the part of the Israelis. You know, they've attacked Lebanon, they've attacked Syria, they've attacked Gaza, they've attacked Iran. Now, just as the American partial withdrawal has actually encouraged a more healthy approach to diplomacy in the Gulf, it seems to me from what we're seeing that we haven't reached the same state with Israel yet. We've reached a sort of halfway stage where the the Israelis have a new awareness that they can only push things too far. But in the final resort, the Americans still are always there for them. This is not what happens in the Middle East. It's what happens in Washington. The penetration of the pro-Israel lobby across all aspects of of decision-making in Washington, you know, the media space, the political space is so deep that it won't be eradicated overnight. And clearly, there's been major pushback towards AIPAC, particularly in the upcoming midterm elections. But there are other vehicles and sort of funds that the pro-Israel lobby uses in order to get people to do what they want to do. And I think the Israelis are quite sophisticated when it comes to information operations. A lot of the stuff is actually not coercive. It's not transactional in terms of people being bought, but there are these are information operations where they create false flags, where people are drawn into certain narratives and social media, not necessarily because they support Israel, but they're being support they basically inadvertently become useful idiots in in an Israeli information campaign. The way that the Israelis are able to do that is unmatched in many ways, and that is not going anywhere anytime soon. So what we're seeing now, this decline of Israel's image in America, in the public, in the electorate, is not necessarily going to be translated into elite reluctance to support Israel, and because the Israel lobby is still so strong. What is interesting to see is this emergence of the Gulf Lobby. And I've I've said it in, you know, 2024 before Trump was got elected, I, you know, my prediction was always, if the Gulf lobby acts as one. So if you if Saudi, Qatar, money and networks in Washington work as one together, they're able to eclipse the Israel lobby. They're able to have a similar weight on decision-making in Washington. And that's the problem of America. American policy has always been up for sale over the last couple of decades. And the Israelis understood this, and now you have a counter um lobby to all of this. And the outcome now is the Gulf lobby basically won against the Israel lobby. But it doesn't mean the Israel lobby is going anywhere. We shouldn't underestimate the way that a lot of elites in America are still very much beholden to Israel.
What you're saying is, to a large degree, Israel, the Israel lobby, the media, political elite generally in the West has sort of lost the public on Israel on Palestine. um, that they're desperately trying to enforce this sort of cognitive dissonance, to tell people to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes, to disbelieve these or or to discount these images of murdered children they've seen for three years and continue to see.
Israel as us, the people who are on our side. For the moment, the political media elite in Israel can continue to discount that the grip is so firm of the sort of AIPAC lobby and so on. The problem for them is is the is the Gulf lobby, is the money of the Gulf.
I think we need to also give the Gulfies more credit. This is not just here is Saudi, Qatar pumping billions and buying people. It's not like that. They learn from the Israelis and being more subtle, especially the Emiratis, of saying, let's build networks that are transformational, where people buy into our narrative, not because they get money, because they believe in what we're pushing for. If you're MAGA, if you do believe in America First, the narrative that the Gulf lobby is putting forward of saying, look, we want stability, we want growth, we're going to put money in your economy, and we allow your companies come over making money in the Gulf in the region. Um, that is an argument that resonates where you're saying, you know, we're willing the Gulf, we're willing to underwrite your policies. I mean, after all, all the bases in the Gulf are paid for by the locals, by by by the Gulfies. They're not paid by US taxpayers. Um, we're willing to buy your jets, and we're buying your weapons. Um, we're also injecting cash into your AI companies. We're willing to support the American empire where we can, but we're a net contributor to American power. That in itself is a very powerful narrative.
Whereas, by contrast, Israel is a net consumer of US power, right? It drains US power. It sucks money out of uh the US economy and taxpayers money. But this isn't just an argument put forward by the Gulf States. It's true, and this is what people like Tucker Carlson have worked out. The Israel alliance doesn't really work in America's interests.
No, but now you're allowed to say it. What is interesting, and this is where I think after the 7th of October, the Overton window, which is the idea, you know, the boundaries of acceptable discourse have changed rapidly, opened up to a degree that I thought were was never possible. I remember when we filmed the first Al Jazeera documentary, I think it was in 2023, I was still very hesitant, can we say this, can we not say this, because of what was acceptable, and now we we can speak about the truth, and the truth is out there. People are comfortable. Even the old elites who would have been shilling for Israel in many ways are now quite comfortable to actually call out Israel as well.
Still, if someone more overtly left-wing than yourself was to say that, they'd still run a huge risk of being cancelled.
Oh, no. Of course. But despite the fact there is now acceptable discourse that's not just left-wing or far-left or whatever, it's mainstream. And just saying, look, Israel doesn't work in our interest. And I think the greatest disaster, and I think that's also what we we haven't actually talked about, of this Iran war, it's not it's not Gaza and the killing of of Gazans and children and and civilians in general. These atrocities are well-documented, but they haven't led to the same outrage in elite circles in the West as this war in Iran. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, at the G7, she was like, you know, the Strait of Hormuz needs to open again. It's, you know, we need to do whatever we can. We need to mobilize people. This war was terrible because it affected our economies. She didn't say anything about, you know, Palestinian children.
The Strait of Hormuz matters an awful lot more than the lives of 30, 40,000 Palestinian children. Clearly.
Absolutely. And this is, I think, again, another nail in the coffin of of of what Israel is advocating for. This war has been to the detriment of of all economies, cost of living. The Gaza war was an issue far away. It was a it was an issue of values. Actually, ultimately, this one is about hard interest, not just for Americans, but particularly for Europeans. And the sort of discussions I've had with people in London as well, former elites or still, you know, what we would consider to be elites who are tend to be quite pro-Israel behind closed doors, seen a major shift.
You talk to sort of powerful people, people on the inside, people who are part of the security establishment who wouldn't talk talk to me. Your sense is that since February the 27th, a really fundamental shift has taken place there, and perhaps over the last three years, a really fundamental shift has taken place in terms of public opinion because of Gaza? You're saying because of the Iran war, that's now being matched in the elites?
It's matched by those people in the strategic on the strategic level who make decisions, people who work in military strategy, political strategy. I haven't seen anyone with any sort of credibility in these senior positions in the US, in the UK, other European countries, who said this was a good idea to go into Iran. And it it was very clear in the first or second week of this war that this was going pear-shaped, and since then people have called it out. And since then Netanyahu has been on the record of actually undermining any opportunity for peace. I think another turning point for us here in the UK was the Israeli attack on Qatar last year, which was came out of the blue in September.
September last year was another disastrous miscalculation and it failed as well, completely.
And so miscalculation after miscalculation, where the burden of this conflict for Israel, because it's no longer about Israeli security, but and the burden of that is now being borne by the Europeans, and you know, you touch their interest, and that's a step too far.
Is Israel actually a country that has lost the capacity for rational decision-making?
I would agree with that. What is interesting, there are some very good Israeli analysts out there who used to work in intelligence. You people who are retired, um, people who are, you know, on on social media giving great analysis, criticizing their government, criticizing Israeli decision-making in general, but they all left. The problem that we have with the IDF is obviously bottom-up influx of radicals, people on the far right, religious Zionists, but also on the top. I mean, Netanyahu has put people into places who are aligned with his sort of ideology, and the normal Israel that, you know, I used to live in Israel, right? The Israel that I knew from 20 years ago doesn't exist anymore. Normal decision-making doesn't exist anymore. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which used to be sort of institution that was advocating for reaching out to state solution, all that gone. I mean, these people who are there now are within a completely different also societal context in which operations are decisions have been made. Israel has been subjected to the same information operations, the same false information. There is no free press. They haven't seen a lot of the stuff that we've seen. They've been fed disinformation by...
They've come to believe their own propaganda.
And so even people in intelligence are now believing their own propaganda. I I still, you know, interact with Israeli officers at times, and some of them obviously have called out what's going on, and others have said, no, this is the evidence that we have, and it's the same wrong evidence that they are propagating in the information space. So yes, if you ask, you know, if you ask me, I'd say Israel has lost the capacity to make sober, rational strategic decisions.
Andreas, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you. Great pleasure.
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