Donald Trump’s whirlwind involvement in the Israel-Iran War, first with force and then with negotiation, begs the question: are military strength and diplomacy contradictory — or compatible?  

On this episode of Identity/Crisis, host Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer to understand the impact of power on strategic negotiations, how heads of state are thinking about the current conflict, and why only diplomatic leadership can bring closure. 

Power and Negotiations Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We recorded today’s episode on Monday, June 23rd, prior to the ceasefire agreement that kicked into place late Monday night. Today is Tuesday, June 24th. We’re releasing this episode because it still has a lot of important things to say, and we think it is evergreen, with respect to analyzing the situation between U.S. policy, Israel, and Iran.

The Mishnah, which is the first study book of Jewish law, compiled in the early third century, opens tractate Bava Metzia with a classic case. Two people are holding the same garment, each is insisting it belongs to them. There is no dispositive evidence affirming either claim. What is the court to do?

The rabbis offer an improvised version of a Solomonite solution. Both sides have to make a vow attesting to their ownership of the garment. That itself is a big deal in the rabbinic world, because now you’ve affixed the risk of blasphemy to your property claim. And then you divide the property, usually by selling it and splitting the profits.

It’s not quite a negotiation, but this outcome leads to the same place that negotiations try to lead. The goal is to reconcile the conflict, and here, neither party gets exactly what they want. Even worse, this outcome requires one party, the person who truly owns the garment, to accept losing some, and to concede their just claim to another person, whose claim is unjust.

We might read this text as the rabbis affirming their superior belief in bringing about reconciliation between people and maintaining social order, even at the cost of absolute justice and truth.

But there’s a separate Talmudic text, in a different tractate, on Bava Batra 34b, in which the rabbis discuss a similar case, not about owning a garment but about a conflict about who owns a boat. In this case, one of the litigants asks the court to temporarily seize the boat, to take it into receivership, while he looks for witnesses. When he fails to produce them, he then goes back to the court and asks them to release the boat, and, in his words, “kol de’alim gvar,” let the stronger party prevail.

This approach to justice, let’s call it power-over-negotiation, sits squarely at odds with the first approach earlier, which seems designed to get people to stop fighting, and which accepts the possibility that a division of the assets makes no one really happy, but at least it prevents violence.

What’s surprising about the second Talmudic text is that even though the Talmud continues to lead toward the approach of dividing the asset rather than fighting over it, the argument of “let the stronger party prevail” gets a serious airing, and in fact, is attributes to several sages who view it as the right approach to resolve conflict.

Now personally, I’d love to believe that resolving conflict through negotiation is a more evolutionary and morally advanced way to mediate difference, rather than the strategy of telling people to fight it out. It also fits better with the historical understanding of the rabbis, operating in a world where they have limited power, and as the bearers of a legacy of a people that suffered under the weight of the most powerful military regime of the ancient world.

I like the radical turn away from clean outcomes to messy ones, and I certainly like the prioritization of conflict resolution without violence. But I’m left unsettled by these two texts side by side, and seeing the pull on both of these instincts, and the fact that both are affirmed, at least partially, in Jewish tradition. I’m also left to recognize that the human fight between these impulses, that we resolve our conflicts peacefully, even if imperfectly, or we fight it out—that, too, remains painfully unresolved.

I went into Shabbat assuming that President Trump’s threats to join the war with Iran were mere bluster. I assumed that the political fallout with the isolationist part of his base would be too risky. I am famously a terrible prognostic, maybe one of several reasons I am a historian and not a professional gambler, and once again, in this case, I was wrong.

By late afternoon on Shabbat we saw the news of the American strike on Iranian nuclear enrichment plants, and at that moment, the total collapse of the viewpoint, which was already on the ropes, that the better strategy for the West to contain the Iranian threat was through firm negotiation, and the triumph of the counter view, advanced very publicly by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and by the Roman Emperor Hadrian before him, of peace through strength.

Trump continues to talk of returning to the negotiation table, but, consistent in the way he tries to lead through his dealmaking, by pressing his opponents to the brink and forcing them into unfair terms. The Chinese, meanwhile, have publicly declaimed the future credibility of Americans at any negotiation table, for persisting in what now appears to have been sham diplomacy with Iranians while readying an attack against them.

And maybe you don’t have to care about that, because you like the outcome of the bombing campaign, but I think the Chinese have a point. Unless the future of American policy is entirely driven by their military agenda, and by the articulation of force against our enemies, the future of American negotiative and diplomatic powers seems deeply at risk.

The tension between diplomatic strategy and military strategy about Iran is about twenty years ago, between the position held by many in the diplomatic community, and especially in the Democratic party, to try to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions through deal-making—remember that resulted in a short-lived JCPOA, the Iran Deal, the counterview on the other side, most prominently associated with Netanyahu, who has been banging this teapot for a long time, and by American Conservative war-hawks, that there can only be a military solution.

I suppose the tipping point on this issue, as on so many issues, was on October 7th. Once Israel largely defeated Iran’s proxies, there was nothing left for it to do but try to kill the problem at the source.

Has it succeeded? There seems to be a lot of breathless optimism in Israel and in other parts of the world about the future of this nuclear threat from Iran, even as more and more information emerges that the Iranians may have relocated all of their enriched uranium before these attacks, and in the fear that the Iranian nuclear program will persist but go further underground.

Is it possible for a military solution to succeed? More vexingly, does a military approach ever stand a real chance at resolving generational, global conflict? Like many people, when I’m uncertain about things and want to talk them through, I call my dad, so, happy belated Fathers’ Day to all of you, by the way.

And it’s particularly salient on this topic, as my dad, Ambassador and now Professor Daniel Kurtzer served for nearly thirty years as an American senior diplomat, a leader in the negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, and between Israel and the Palestinians, a decorated foreign service officer who served as ambassador to Egypt and Israel, and a scholar of diplomacy in the Middle East, who has taught at Princeton since 2005.

Most recently he wrote an article in Foreign Affairs last week, arguing against American intervention, military intervention, rather, and for an expanded diplomatic role, and now he, like the rest of us, is picking up the pieces and trying to figure out what’s next.

Abba, thanks for coming on the show, and let’s start with the state of even the possibility of diplomacy right now. It feels to me as though the climate of unpredictability right now, especially given, you know, the way that President Trump seems to govern, where you have no idea what he’s saying and what he’s doing. What is the conversation in the diplomatic community right now, especially following this surprise attack of the US participation in the war that Israel had initiated with Iran, or you can say Iran had initiated 20 years ago with Israel. Is there any conversation about the current status of negotiations between America, Israel, Iran, or are all the balls now in the air and no one knows where they’re going to go?

Daniel: Well, first, thanks for having me on. Look, the problem is that too many people head to their respective corner and they don’t pay attention to the center of the ring. It’s never really been a question of diplomacy or strength or military force. It’s always been a question of how do you marshal the right capabilities that will help bring about a negotiation and then have an endgame in which the negotiation can help you secure a better future.

And so what we saw in the run-up to both the Israeli attacks 10, 12 days ago and then the American attack this weekend was that everybody simply went to an opposite corner in the ring. You had those who said, all we have to do is bomb Iran and that will solve the problem. And others who simply said, well, let’s go back to the JCPOA or let’s have a new negotiation.

The article that I co-authored in Foreign Affairs that you mentioned in the introduction basically said, let’s take advantage of the fact that Israel had debilitated and done a significant amount of damage to the Iranian nuclear program in order to find an end game which would be more secure than simply what’s called mowing the lawn, which means having to go back to the same targets time and time again because you don’t have a diplomatic endgame.

Frankly, it’s the same problem that Israel is facing in Gaza. They’ve done a military job in defeating Hamas, there’s no question, but they don’t have a way of emerging from that in a more secure manner, which means that there’s no marriage of peace and strength. So that’s, I think, where we have to be thinking about today.

Yehuda: I don’t know, I hear… a lot of the public debate does wind up, as you said, of position itself on those kinds of two poles of negotiation versus war. But the criticism of Bibi has been very strong since October 8th, which is, a military solution without a diplomatic solution means you’ll never actually resolve the problem.

But there’s a credible argument to be made, at least from a devil’s advocate standpoint, that that distrust of that military campaign that persisted from the beginning misunderstood how dramatic the outcome actually might be, right? That, you know, no one fully expected that Israel would be able to do what it did and as quickly as it did to Hezbollah in essentially neutralizing them as a significant force, that the vociferousness of the attack on Gaza puts Israel in a totally different negotiating position, as is the case today with Iran.

Does Bibi get more credit than his critics want to give him on this because of the effectiveness of effectively moving the goalpost for the possibility of negotiation, even if they show no signals that they actually want to engage in negotiation for long-term change?

Daniel: Let’s look at the three fronts. You have Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. In one of them, Israel marshaled significant intelligence and military capabilities. And then there was a diplomatic outcome and that’s Lebanon. In other words, Israel decapitated Hezbollah, destroyed a significant amount of its armaments and storage capabilities in southern Lebanon. But then the United States came in, helped arrange a ceasefire, and that offered the government of Lebanon an opportunity to try to rein in Hezbollah, which they’re still trying. It’s not yet a success story, but it is what you wanted to bring about as a quote unquote “end of the conflict.”

Neither of those, neither of the other two fronts has offered that diplomatic outcome. Certainly not in Gaza. We’re now, what, 20 months into this war with no political or diplomatic end in sight. It may be too early to make a judgment about Iran. Maybe the Iranians will come back to the table. A lot of people are skeptical of that. But unless you have a way of concretizing your results, your military results, which are extraordinarily important and, you know, great kudos go to the Israeli army and the Israeli intelligence community. But until you have that closure that only diplomacy can bring, what have you really accomplished? You’ve surely set the program back, but then you have to set it back again and again until you do reach some kind of a definitive diplomatic conclusion.

Yehuda: The Iranians have actually been confusing with one of the things they said the last couple days, which is they were like, we will not re-enter the negotiation table until the bombing campaign stops. And part of me was like, wait a second, you don’t hold any of the cards. You should be most motivated. You should be like, we’re desperate. Yes, we’re persuaded by this bombing campaign. But like, why would, if Israel is not interested in negotiations, why would they stop the bombing campaign? Let’s stop so that we can get back to the negotiation table.

Is there a, I guess, to get into the mindset a little bit of the Israelis here, what’s the, what is a version of a negotiation table that Israel would actually wanna have with Iran? Because everything that you’ve seen from Bibi over 20 years has been the need to fully destroy any possible capacity of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, but not only that, and you’ve heard murmurings more about regime change, a perception that there is no future of a negotiation relationship with Iran. So is there even an imaginable future Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership that is gonna wanna get to any version of a negotiation table again, or do think that that door is closed?

Daniel: I don’t think Netanyahu has ever wanted a negotiated outcome. I think the question you ask is exactly the right question. And I almost can understand it in some respects. Since 1979, Iran has dedicated itself to destroying the state of Israel. Therefore, if you were the prime minister of Israel, you say, well, what kind of negotiation can I have until the other party is willing to accept that I will exist as a result of the negotiation?

So I don’t think that Netanyahu has a negotiated outcome in mind. And that’s where the United States would normally come in. We came in in 2015 with the other members of the Security Council in Germany with the JCPOA. It worked for a couple of years. It had a number of faults. It didn’t cover all of Iran’s malign activities. But since 2018, when President Trump pulled out, there hasn’t really been an alternative pathway other than debilitating the program, but then coming back to diplomacy.

And here’s where I think President Trump gets some credit for trying diplomacy for what he called 60 days, but he’s now confused the issue even since Saturday afternoon, because in the first blush of success, you know, chest pounding and, you know, we destroyed the thing entirely, there was a sense that, okay, we have to get back to negotiations.

But overnight, he’s now talked about regime change, which if you’re the Iranians and you’re thinking about coming back to negotiation, why would you want to go into negotiation when you know that one of the key parties, the mediator, as it were, doesn’t want your regime to last? So the messaging from the United States really has to be far more sophisticated than it has been until now.

Yehuda: The way you portrayed the Netanyahu and actually the Israeli interest, I don’t think it’s just Netanyahu, I think that’s why you see the wide embrace by this war among Israelis, even those who have turned against the Gaza war, is precisely basically the Neville Chamberlain problem. Like, why would I negotiate with someone who seeks my destruction in the naive belief that that’s going to actually calm them down, in what Avishai Margalit calls rotten compromise.

So play out what the American interest is that would be different from the Israeli interest in which Israelis are not Neville Chamberlain by trying to achieve a negotiation with Iran, especially when it relates to one of their allies. Because I think that’s actually what you hear a lot from the Jewish community. We expect America to behave towards Iran the way that Israel behaves towards Iran because the existential threat that it’s portraying towards Israel is against the American interest. But you see it a little bit differently, I think.

Daniel: Well, if you go back to the underlying thinking in the Obama administration, which brought about the JCPOA, and you can see it in the two interviews he gave to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, where he talked not about Iran as a positive, pacific actor, but rather using the agreement to try to moderate Iran’s larger behaviors over time.

Now, it was not possible, the Obama administration believed, to negotiate a larger deal than the nuclear deal. And that’s why the JCPOA only focused on the nuclear deal and not on terrorism and so forth. But at least Obama had the idea that if you at least temporarily removed one of the major problems, which was the nuclear issue, from the agenda, you could then work on maybe changing other Iranian behaviors.

Now, I don’t know if that’s President Trump’s attitude. When he talked about wanting to get back into a negotiation with Iran and wanting to have an agreement, I don’t know what he had in mind because his messaging has been all over the place, even during the 60 days when we were engaged. But unless you’re ready to go to an all-out war of total destruction, from which you will then pick up the pieces, you have to be thinking about a step-by-step diplomatic process of kind of unraveling the worst parts of Iranian policy, which is now made easier by Israel’s having so significantly weaken the so-called axis of resistance that you can change Iranian behavior over time. But you have to maintain strength, which means that you keep a vigilant watch over Iran’s possible reconstitution of its program.

Yehuda: It sounds the way you’re describing Israel’s accomplishments that there’s a credible bipartisan position to effectively support what Israel achieved militarily. You never hear anything that’s described as bipartisan. Do you think that’s right? I mean, do you think that this just has to be seen by anyone who cares seriously about the region as basically a good accomplishment for Israel to preemptively strike Iran?

I’m asking this because I’m… We continue to anticipate that anything that the state of Israel does on the global stage is going to be treated by its opponents as being bad. And since that maps into increasingly partisan divisions, it’s going to be understood as like, well, I have to be inherently skeptical of this. But it kind of seems that the way you’re describing Israel’s military strategy is like basically unassailable, unimpeachable.

Daniel: I think that’s right. Ironically, paradoxically, the person who may have described this best was the German Chancellor, who was quite supportive early on of Israel’s attacks against Iran. In our country, of course, we have a partisan divide that persists no matter what the issue is, but you’re exactly right. This should be a case where the two sides come together saying, yes, we reached a point, 60% enrichment, enough uranium enriched to rush to the bomb that whether it was last week or two weeks from now, it didn’t really make a difference. At some point, Iran had to feel that its program could not continue.

But without that, and with, I go back to this question of messaging, unless the president can find a way to signal to Iran that there is an outcome here other than regime change, that they’re going to have to give up their enrichment, they’re going to have to give up their pile of enriched uranium, they’re going to have to open up all their facilities, not just Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan, but there’s a report today that there’s another secret site in a mountain 300 feet deep. And that’s going to be Iran’s bitter pill that they have to swallow, but they won’t swallow a pill that requires them to change the regime. And that’s the part that becomes problematic today.

Yehuda: There seems to be two conflicting viewpoints about the advancement of Iran’s nuclear program. One argues that the JCPOA enabled the Iranians to continue towards nuclear enrichment because it was not fully comprehensive and because there were evasions that were tolerated. And there’s the contrary viewpoint that says, no, the JCPOA restrained nuclear enrichment and then it only picked up again after they suspended the Iran deal and basically gave the Iranians the freedom to do so. Is that a fact question? Right, cause… Yeah, go ahead.

Daniel: Yeah, it’s a hundred percent a fact question. There is no question at all that for the three years that the JCPOA was in effect from 2015 to 18, Iran abided by its provisions. They reduced the level of their enrichment to the 3.67% that you need for medical isotopes and so forth. They gave up their pile of enriched uranium. They opened up their facilities. They destroyed one of their facilities under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And when there were minor infractions that were discovered, they were fixed immediately.

And that’s a factual issue where even Israeli critics within their security establishment recognized that the agreement was working. There were two fundamental weaknesses of the JCPOA. One was the fact that after 10, 12, 15 years, there were different timetables. The agreement was supposed to end. It had a series of sunset clauses which needed to be fixed during the course of the agreement, and secondly, it didn’t inhibit any of Iran’s malign activities in the region.

And those are serious issues, there’s no question about it. But on the nuclear issue, the Iranian program came to a halt, a screeching halt, and in May of 2018, when we pulled out, they restarted the engine and accelerated.

Yehuda: But so that’s confusing because it would suggest that during the process of the JCPOA, Iran was signaling itself to be a rational actor, that it was willing to abide by international norms, that it actually did not… If you’re willing to give up your enriched uranium, you’re signaling that you don’t feel that you need it. The decision, then, in 2018 to resume the building of a nuclear weapon seems like it threatens or undermines the very legitimacy of that claim during the JCPOA that they’re actually willing to give it up.

So to say, we exited the deal, therefore they were able to advance building the bomb, also basically says, well, they wanted to be building the bomb anyway, and maybe it was happening, it was going to happen under the nose of a deal like this anyway, and it would have happened during a time when a sanctions regime got lifted. So what’s going on with the Iranians? Like, how do we think about the fact that they clearly proceeded quite significantly over the seven year period of time to build a nuclear bomb? And am I allowed to use that to say, well, they never wanted to get out of the nuclear bomb business to begin with.

Daniel: You know, from our many years of having these conversations, you know that one of the most significant requirements in any kind of foreign policy or diplomacy is to try to put yourself in the other side’s shoes to understand the way they see what you’re looking at.

Now, we have tended, we as a country have tended to see Iran as an irrational, theocratic, extremist society. People who know Iran far better than I say that has been mistaken since 1979. Yes, it is an extremist regime, but they think in rational terms in terms of their own national interests. They’re in a very bad neighborhood, like Israel’s in a very bad neighborhood. They know, for example, that we did them two tremendous favors by weakening Iraq and weakening Afghanistan.

In fact, after 9-11, as you know, they cooperated with the United States in trying to deal with the problems in Afghanistan, not because they wanted to be friends with us, but because Afghanistan had elements of enmity towards Iran, which was important for them to curb. In 2003, they sent a message through the Swiss ambassador looking for a grand bargain with the United States, a rational position which didn’t go anywhere because the George W. Bush administration was not interested.

And the way they look at the world today, and I’m not defending them, please don’t misunderstand me, but the way they look at the world is that you have one nuclear power in the Middle East, and that nuclear power is a power that they have assessed is an enemy of their system of government. And they believe, as we just talked about, that any prime minister in Israel would want to see regime change in their country. And so they want to have some kind of a capability of pushing back against what they see as an enemy.

Daniel: And therefore they have pursued a policy which would give them some degree of power to do that. The axis of resistance, yes, it’s a means of trying to destroy Israel, but it’s also a means of enhancing Iranian power as a counterbalance to what they see as unbridled Israeli power.

Now, Yehuda, don’t misunderstand me. I am not defending them. I’m not saying that they are pursuing a smart policy, but it is not an irrational policy. It’s a policy that for their perception of where they stand in the region makes some sense.

Yehuda: I don’t know. I think that with a piece that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me is, yes, the Netanyahu administration is now talking in the language of regime change, and it’s because they feel emboldened. Look how… that we control Iranian airspace, we can control all of you, we could end this problem once and for all, even though many theorists are saying that the folks who would replace the Ayatollah are no better and perhaps even worse. The top military establishment in Iran is extraordinarily hawkish and those were—are likely the people who would step in in his place. But they literally had a countdown clock in the middle of Tehran which was just bombed yesterday by the Israelis about the destruction of Israel. That is just not the rhetoric until this war in Israel.

It just seems maybe I’m just being a home team guy here but it seems like Israel would leave perfectly content leaving the Iranians alone if they stop their fixation and their obsession with the destruction of Israel and the empowering and the arming of Israel’s, through its proxies, of various different military and paramilitary groups that are just trying to attack Israel. So it just seems like from their standpoint, very strange to make it out as though these countries are engaged in an existential war with one another. Just like, chill out, and this could kind of end.

Daniel: Look, we’re all on the home team and we all want our team to win, whether it’s the Yankees or Israel. But the reality is that in much of international relations, you don’t have a 100 to 0 score at the end of the game. It may be 51-49, it may be 75-25, meaning in this case that you might have to live with an Iran that doesn’t have a nuclear program, but has a very malign regime and will use other assets within its capability to try to do you harm. It may be that that’s where our outcome is going to be. It’s not a happy outcome.

But as you suggested in the question, even if these mullahs go away, who’s going to come after them? Will it be a democrat, small-D democrat? Or might it be the Iranian Revolutionary Guards or the Basij? Even if it’s the military, we don’t know much about the military. And this is a military that’s grown up since 1979. This is not the military that Israel and the United States knew during the period of the Shah.

So I’m not suggesting that you lie down and accept the reality, but you’ve got to be real careful about getting what you hope for, in this case, and rather, adjusting your sights to an Iran which has much less capability to do you harm. Can you do away with all of its capability? I don’t think so.

Yehuda: Yeah, you said something earlier about, you know, they see themselves as in a bad neighborhood and you hear that phrase a lot and I find that to my opening on the tension between negotiation and the pure expression of power which you push back against, like the two are dependent on each other, but it seems to me that that attitude towards Israeli policy from Israelis has shifted over the years to a greater embrace of that language of we’re in a bad neighborhood, therefore we should behave like we’re in a bad neighborhood.

Matti Friedman was on the show maybe a year ago, two years ago, from Jerusalem talking about the Lebanon threat. And he said, you know, the best way to understand Itamar Ben-Gvir is, you know, you see those guys driving around on the backs of jeeps throughout the Middle East, like in Yemen and other places. He’s like, that’s him. He’s basically, like, embraced that kind of Middle Eastern consciousness.

And it does feel like, it does feel like the Western orientation towards diplomacy is increasingly just like, no, we don’t do that. We just fight it out and eventually we achieve a kind of modus operandi. I feel very pessimistic about saying that and you’re a career diplomat, you’ve fought for this. How do you get the parties and players to get back into a mindset that they do not have to operate by simply taking the approach of I’m in a bad neighborhood, I’m gonna use the naked exercise of power constantly until I subdue my opponent to a place that we get to finally working out some sort of agreement. How do you change minds and hearts towards that kind of diplomatic orientation?

Daniel: Well, first of all, I rely upon the Hartman Institute to provide the moral, ethical grounding for decisions that the Jewish people and the State of Israel have to take.

Yehuda: Yeah, well…

Daniel: And if there were not a Hartman Institute doing this, and I’m not just giving you an advertisement here, if there were not institutions within the society that keep reminding us that we don’t want to be living off the back of a Jeep with machine guns, know, arrayed in every direction, then we’re really in trouble. So, you know, we have to strengthen those institutions here in the United States. We have to strengthen those institutions in Israel. I’m quite pessimistic on a number of issues, but I’m not pessimistic on some very large questions.

For example, 10 years ago, even though we had laid some of the groundwork for what we now call normalization, the fact is that we have normalization, and that the four countries that normalized in 2020 haven’t walked away. The Saudis are still interested, which means that even they are thinking about a different kind of region.

Now, you have a kind of mercurial leader in Riyadh who’s trying to change that place. Now, on the one hand, he also brutally killed a Saudi-American journalist. On the other hand, things are changing in the kingdom. And there’s a more open willingness to talk about that change, including the change with the state of Israel. it’s, you know, the phrase we’re in a bad neighborhood should motivate some of the military and security thinking, but it really, I hope, will not ever motivate the larger social cultural fabric of the societies that we’re talking about.

Yehuda: I tend to not give Trump the benefit of the doubt about the decisions he makes. I think that he shoots from the hip, responds to particular stimuli in the moment, I think that’s the way he leads. But is it possible there’s a grand bargain being played out here? That the sending of B-2 bombers and bugger busting bombs, the quid pro quo is enabling American leadership to end the Gaza hostilities to bring towards a process of Saudi normalization? Right, certainly the Saudis appreciate what a North American is doing to Iranian power. And if that’s the case, it changes the whole calculus. This was not, you know, we’re going to enter this war indefinitely, but I’m making a real trade here.

You heard in one of his Truth Social posts over the weekend was referring to the phrase, the Nobel Prize Prize five times. He’s desperate for that to be his legacy. Is that possible that that’s what’s going on here? That that’s the invisible story that we’re just not privy to a party to?

Daniel: You know, if I had any sense at all that Trump was a rational actor who did not operate simply from whatever his instincts told him on a particular day or at a particular hour on Truth Social, then, you know, we could play this out because there is a moment, you know, it may not be a large moment, but there’s a moment here where what you suggested could happen.

But you need a strategy. And so far there hasn’t been a strategy. Now, we’ve heard or we do know that Witkoff, the envoy, stayed in touch with the Iranian foreign minister, Arakhshi, even during the Israeli attack. I don’t know if they’ve been in touch since. So if there’s a strategy at play, then this, what you’re suggesting may be out there. It may be possible. I just have even less confidence than you in the opening of your question that Trump has a vision that extends beyond himself and beyond today about what needs to be done.

You know, just in the middle of the Israeli attack to talk about, to post on Truth Social “unconditional surrender,” you know, that’s not going to help the Iranians make a rational decision. Because you’ve already hinted that there’s nothing in this for them other than to give up and essentially roll over and play dead. So I hope that there is a strategy. I hope there is a game plan.

I’ll only tell you one reason why—you know, the expression, “tamid yesh tikvah aval ein lecha chance,” “there’s always hope, but not necessarily a real chance?”—Is that he has gutted, Trump has gutted the expertise in the government that might have fed him or might be feeding him good ideas. They fired people from the National Security Council. There’s nobody running the Near East Bureau at the State Department. So I don’t know who’s going to develop that strategy when we know that Trump does not think strategically.

Yehuda: Yeah, I guess I see the Trump approach a little bit differently, which is in the middle of the 20th century, and I’m sure I’ve quoted on this podcast before, so I’ve been kind of obsessed with it. Hannah Arendt writes that we are of the first generation that understands what ultimately happens when you collapse means and ends. Now, she’s wrong, that happens a lot in times in human history.

But there was a certain kind of post-enlightenment sense of like, no, we figured out that actually the means by which you achieve change in the world actually do matter. And it’s not just the ends that you try to achieve. And I think Trump represents the ultimate antithesis, the ultimate villain in that story, which is a fixation and ends, by any means necessary. Doesn’t care at all about means, doesn’t care about due process when it comes to his immigration policy and his deportation policy, doesn’t care about war powers in Congress, doesn’t care about any of those means, and therefore is always gonna talk about ends. So “unconditional surrender” is not him saying, that’s my strategy. He’s just telling you what the end is that he is trying to achieve, and then that permits any means necessary.

And it actually really does put people like us who have a liberal democrat, lowercase-D, the orientation towards these questions who are institutional people. You’re an institutional person. I’m an institutional person. You need all of that framework and a bureaucracy not to slow things down, but to do things correctly. It puts us in this bind because sometimes you’re like, well, I’m okay if that’s the outcome on certain things. I just think that the corrosion to the process actually doesn’t position us to replicate that success in the future and makes you feel a little bit queasy about the process by which that’s been achieved.

Daniel: I hear you and you’re right and you know from our conversations that the high and low point in my own career was working for George H.W. Bush and James Baker. It was an incredible experience working for people who knew how to think strategically, who knew how to work organizationally, who made the U.S. function properly, the reunification of Germany, the Madrid Peace Conference, it was an extraordinary moment, but the reason it was a low point is that we haven’t seen anything like it since, where Trump is now the worst example of those who are operating the way you discussed.

But many of his predecessors were also operating, shooting from the hip and failing to understand the incredible interconnection between strategic thinking, tactical implementation, short and long term issues, military strength and political power, maintaining some degree of comity at home so that you could build a policy that would withstand the next election. You know, we’re in an age now, it’s anything but the predecessor, which has been extraordinaril y challenging for any of our policies over time.

Yehuda: Those of us on my side, lay people, some of my audience, who are trying to follow the story and understand it, we have like the big, it’s easy to follow the big moves, the big rhetoric. What should we watch for to understand what’s unfolding over the next two to three weeks? What would be signs or indicators of increased escalation, maybe de-escalation, or even signs that there are some larger plays that are taking place in this region that could portend a different future.

Daniel: Well there are two immediate things to look for. Right now, in a sense, the ball is in Iran’s court. If or how, when and where they decide that their national interests, their self-respect requires them to do something. You know, previously they chose fairly carefully. You remember the first attack against Israel in April. They telegraphed it by kind of letting everybody know, we’re really going to do this. We’re winding up. They didn’t do that the second attack and they’re probably not going to do it now. But what target they choose will tell us a great deal about whether or not they see this as a war that has to go on to the end.

And the second thing to watch for is the rhetoric on the part of Netanyahu and Trump that carries over into action with regard to regime change. If you start seeing Israeli attacks against regime targets rather than military and security targets, you know, it’s one thing to take out the clock on Palestine Square. And you know, that’s great, Kol Hakavod. It was important to do that. They also ought to knock down the street signs that hail the assassin of Anwar Sadat. There are some symbolic things that they can do.

But if they start going after serious regime targets, and if Trump ups the rhetoric with regard to regime change, then we’re in for a much, much more challenging time ahead, and you know, it’s anybody’s guess how it ends.

Yehuda: Let me ask you one more big question, which is, you were in the field representing US policy following 9-11, in a kind of almost like a sleight of hand bait and switch, the second Bush administration turned 9-11 into what we now see as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq, the construct of the axis of evil, and a long entanglement in a conflict in Iraq that did lead to regime change and was premised on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. But they needed that narrative of weapons of mass destruction. We also know, we have all of the records, that they had military war plans for an invasion of Iraq well before 9-11, and this was very much a pretext.

That, to me, feels like one of the biggest fears about all of this, that there is military war plans that were waiting for a prompt and a cause. Maybe that’s Israel’s motivation here, although October 7th does change the calculus for Israel. How much do you think we should be looking at that case as an analogy to the present? There are certainly things that are similar and things that are different, but what do we have to be cautious about in this moment about the replication or the repeat of that very, very bad story?

Daniel: Yeah, no, I think you’re right. In fact, the prompt here, you know, Israel had been arguing for some time that the danger of the Iranian program was growing and then you had that International Atomic Energy Agency report literally a day before Israel started bombing, and they then were able to hold that up and say, look, we now have proof from the international community.

But I think a reference to 9-11 and the post-9-11 period is very apt for a couple of reasons. Number one, the degree to which highly motivated, partisan people can steal an agenda. The people who wrote the agenda for President George W. Bush had already written the script back in 1998 when they published a paper that it was necessary to go after Iraq. So you had 9-11 and the people who wanted to go after Iraq had to be patient until we went after Afghanistan and then in 2003 they got their way.

And therefore your question is correct, Yehuda, in that this could really just go off the rails. If the idea of what some people are calling escalation dominance, Israel has the military power so let’s use it. If that becomes the watchword, and if Trump wants to now glom onto it as he did, you know, as soon as Israel showed some success after June 12th, June 13th, all of a sudden Trump said it was ours. You know, we had made the skies over Iran open and it was American technology.

And so we do run the risk of this getting away from us instead of heading it back towards a point where Israel can feel more secure, but does not have to go after every threat with its full power without the use, coming back to where we started, the use of diplomacy to bring about an end game that concretizes the outcome.

Yehuda: Thanks for being on the show, Abba. I appreciate it.

Daniel: It’s my pleasure. It’s great to see you.