For decades, Israel has wanted the support of the US in bombing the Iranian nuclear program. And for decades, every single US President has said no. I have always said that all options are on the table, but the first option for the United States is to solve this problem diplomatically. Military action would be far less effective than this deal in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon to support an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites by Israel. The answer is no. And then last week, one President Donald Trump said Yes. Breaking news. And after days of uncertainty, the United States have completed three strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. It’s mission accomplished for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who thanked President Trump today. Your bold decision to target Iran’s nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the United States will change history. Iran’s response came in the form of a missile strike targeting Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military base in the Middle East. Experts call this attack mostly symbolic. Qatar did get a heads up hours in advance. Seconds ago, the president went to Truth Social and typed this. It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a complete and total ceasefire. The mutual ceasefire between Israel and Iran is now officially in effect, but it appears the terms might have already been violated this morning. What we have, we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that. Do you understand how much damage has been done. This is a real question. It’s also a political question. The Defense Intelligence Agency has assessed that the core components of Iran’s nuclear program are largely intact, and that Iran’s nuclear program has essentially only been set back by months. So why did Donald Trump say Yes. And what are the long term consequences of that decision going to be. My guest today is Aaron David Miller, who worked on negotiations and policy in the Middle East across four successive presidencies from 1985 to 2003. He has since written a number of excellent books on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians and American leadership, and he’s a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he joins me to talk through what all this has meant for a region that is in profound flux. Aaron David Miller, welcome back to the show. Great to be here with you, Ezra. So we’re speaking here on the morning of Tuesday, June 24. Now, just let’s start with where your head is at. What are you confident the bombings achieved. What are your big points of uncertainty right now. Give me your overview of the landscape. Yeah, first of all, I don’t believe in game changers, inflection points, sea changes and transformation. Most of what happens in life is transactional, whether it’s marriage, diplomacy, business, and it certainly applies to the Middle East. Big changes have been afoot since October 7, and I would argue there’s some trend line headlines and trend lines that have never existed before. The first is Israel’s escalation dominance, which I think is the most important thing that has happened. And everything that we’re now talking about. Israel flows from the notion that for the first time in its history, Israel controls the pace, the focus, the intensity of military conflict with its three key adversaries Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The Houthis provide somewhat of an exception because of the distance problem. But the reality is the Israelis can escalate in ways that these three adversaries cannot, and the Israelis can deter that escalation, which I think is what we witnessed in. During the course of the last 12 days. So right now I think you see a situation where a situational and transactional President Donald Trump, who has no real effective strategy, no Grand design with respect to what to me is this broken, angry and dysfunctional region where by and large, American ideas on war making and peace making have gone to die. But he has managed, as a consequence of Israel’s escalation, dominance, which he was wary about and has been for the last six months to ride the tiger of Israel’s owning the skies. As one Israeli retired General put it, we’re playing soccer with the Iranians, but the only difference is they don’t have a goalie. He’s managed to ride the tiger of Israeli escalation, dominance in Lebanon against Hezbollah and now in Iran. And I think he now fashions himself and seize a moment. A moment that arguably is historic. And he has expectations, which probably go well beyond his capacity to formulate an effective strategy in this region, to turn that escalation dominance into what transactional arrangements, understandings, political accommodations, even peace treaties. So I think we’re on the cusp of something that has enormous potential. The real question is whether or not we have the leaders in Israel, among the Palestinians, in Iran and in Washington that know how to use that moment. Unless there is leadership designed to implement something more coherent and cohesive and enduring, you and I probably are going to be having the same conversation next year at this time. What does Israel want and what is Iran want. The Israeli calculation is a complicated one. Benjamin Netanyahu, I think high on the notion of what the Israeli military has achieved in Gaza at tremendous cost, to be sure, among Palestinian civilians in Lebanon and in Iran, now sees a moment to emerge and to essentially realize one of his two major foreign policy goals, and that is to free the people of Israel. The state of Israel, from the shadow of an Iranian bomb. Aspirationally I think he wants to see a different regime in Tehran, but he’d probably settle for making a virtue out of necessity of whatever damage the Israelis and Americans have managed to do to Iran’s nuclear program. And let’s be clear, the only person I trust on this right now is Rafael Grossi, who’s head of the IAEA. And even he is. Can you say what that is. Yeah the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even Grossi is unsure about the degree of damage and destruction that the Israeli and American effort has done to the program. And if Grossi is unsure and and I think, again, I trust him more than the president’s assessment. We have, quote, totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. I think that’s wrong. I think Iran right now, Ezra, is a nuclear weapons threshold state. That is to say, it has all of the elements that are required to assemble a nuclear weapon. And again, the kind of nuclear weapon that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not a sophisticated weapon that could be a miniaturized warhead, a physics package that could actually be on top of a missile but dropped from a plane, whether it’s six months, eight months, a year, two years, I think Iran has the capacity. The question that everyone asks is the Iranians have chosen. So far to remain my image here one screwdriver’s turn away from producing such a weapon and they’re still not there. So Netanyahu would like a different regime. I think he understands that’s very difficult. Had this continued, maybe he could have gotten regime destabilization, dysfunction not going to get regime change. It seems to me Netanyahu won’t give up on the regime change. And let’s be clear, the longest governing prime minister in the history of the state of Israel on trial for bribery, fraud, and trust in a Jerusalem district court five years running, the most ruthless, politically savvy politician in Israel today sits astride Israeli politics and the us-israeli relationship for now some Colossus. And it is extraordinary to me, given the disasters of October 7, that there has been absolutely no accountability for this intelligence failure, no accountability for the fact that the prime minister, in my judgment, I’m an American here. I don’t play an Israeli despite some of my critics on TV or in the media, this prime minister has managed to prioritize not ending the war in Gaza, in large part because of his politics and the right wing coalition over whom he presides. He’s prided, I think, in prioritized, avenging the dead rather than redeeming the living. And the fate of those people get sadder and more tragic and more fraught every single day that they remain in Gaza. So Netanyahu, I think, comes out of this for now, extraordinarily powerful. An 86-year-old Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader, made a judgment to respond in a way that’s calibrated, not to validate Iran’s honor. It’s too late for that. The Israelis have revealed its sheer vulnerabilities and weaknesses. But to preserve the regime, my friend Karim Sadjadpour from Carnegie, my colleague, argues that even the most extreme revolutionaries the day after the revolution become conservatives because preserving and conserving the resolution revolution, and that is Ali Khomeini’s objective becomes if you’re a Star Trek fan, the prime directive. To what degree are we looking now at a new Middle East. You talked about Israel as an almost hegemonic military force. You have Iran, which is seen its proxies functionally devastated practically Hezbollah, but also its own power revealed as much weaker than people thought, say, five years ago. And you have the Gulf states, which are in a very different place than they were 10, 15 years ago. You think about where the Gulf states were in 2000. They are richer. Their relationships with Israel and America are much, much stronger. They’ve modernized in many ways. It would have been unthinkable back then. When you think about the geopolitics of the Middle East that you worked on for much of your career. And you look at how it looks now, what makes it different and what possibilities and dangers are opened up by that. I mean, the one continuity between the period of mid 80s to 2003, when I left government. One continuity, at least in terms of how you could produce a new Middle East. I don’t believe in it because in a way, in so many respects, this is a broken, angry and dysfunctional part of the world. You have five Arab states Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in various phases of state dysfunction. You have extractive leaders and authoritarians just about everywhere. Hopes of the Arab bring in Tunisia and Egypt have been essentially overturned. The authoritarians reign just about everywhere. You’ve got gender inequality. You’ve got key. The key. Major terrorist groups still emanate in the Cia’s rankings from this region. I would have argued and still do, even though Iran has been hollowed out, that the following that in the old days, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were the three prominent Arab states that vied for influence and power. Now, in my judgment, Iraq and Syria are basically offline. They cannot project their power, although there may be some hope in Syria for a better ending to what happens when an authoritarian is thrown out of office. I’m keeping my expectations pretty low there. And Egypt, which is burdened with many, many problems. And no longer, despite its geographic centrality in the peace treaty with Egypt, no longer is the central actor in US foreign policy when we travel. When I travel with half a dozen secretaries of State George Shultz through Colin Powell, the first stop we always made was Cairo. Not the case anymore. It’s the Gulf. So this fracture, this dysfunction in the Arab world has led to two important changes. The one you referred to as the Gulf. It’s stable authoritarians who can make decisions. It’s rich. It’s got hydrocarbons. The Emirates and the Saudis are vying to become the new entrepots of the financial world. That’s 1 power center that has emerged. But these are also very weak states with respect to geographic proximity to the Iranians. The other argument I would make is the rise of the three non-arabs. Turkey, a member of NATO. Israel, America’s closest ally. And Iran on their back foot. To be sure to say the least. But the three non-arabs are still keepers. They’re not going anywhere. The only three states in this region that can project their power abroad. They all have tremendous economic potential. They all have competent militaries and Intelligence Security organizations, and they have and can have tremendous influence for good and for ill. So those are the changes that I think are afoot. But again, converting what we’ve seen since October 7 and in the wake of the last 12 days into something that normal humans would regard as functional agreements, the end of conflict. Governing empty spaces when things change, if you want to talk about the new Middle East in any serious way, you really need to talk about leadership. Leaders who are masters of their political houses, not prisoners of their ideologies or their politics. Leaders who are prepared to risk, but leaders who care about the security and prosperity of their publics rather than prioritizing keeping their seats. And the reality is, when I look around and this region, I don’t see that kind of leadership, which is why converting escalation dominance into lasting political arrangements, let alone peace treaties, cannot be done without leaders in Israel. We do not have one among the Palestinians that is so fraught. The Palestinians are faced with an unpalatable choice between Mahmoud Abbas on one hand and Hamas on the other. And they won’t get to choose shoes because the notion of elections or a coherent Palestinian governing authority. Now basically is a thought experiment. There’s a degree of dysfunction here, which isn’t going away. Your colleague Steven Wertheimer made an argument I thought was interesting. He wrote that Israel acted less to preempt an Iranian bomb than to preempt American diplomacy. A new nuclear deal would have lifted sanctions on Iran’s battered economy, helped it to recover and grow. A deal would have stabilized Iran’s position in the Middle East, and potentially strengthened it over time, precisely by succeeding in preventing Iran from going nuclear. A deal would have advanced Iran’s integration into the region. In this telling, Netanyahu’s real aim here is keeping Iran isolated and weak. Do you buy that. I mean, I buy the final comment and and I like and admire Stephen. I don’t buy the argument because I’ve been around negotiations for a very long time. I understand what is required. Mostly we failed the negotiations that I was a part of with the exception of four extraordinary years under Bush 41 and James Baker. The last time, I might add, we were admired, feared and respected as a great power. And I’ve not been involved during the Obama and Biden administrations in Iranian US negotiations. But the reality is want to make a negotiation work. You need four things. You need two parties who are willing or able. You need a sense of urgency. You need a mediator who’s prepared at the right times to apply ample amounts of vinegar and ample amounts of honey. And you need a balance, a negotiation, and an end game of the negotiation based on a balance of interests. The last five rounds of Trump administration negotiations mediated primarily by Steven Witkoff, the envoy for everything. In my judgment, given what was on the table, never had a chance of succeeding. The ultimate bridge between Iran’s demand obsession, determination against every conceivable force and odds to maintain its right to enrich and actually to enrich, fundamentally, came in conflict with the Trump administration’s notion that no Iran will have zero enrichment capacity and forget the right, the capacity, the actual reality of enriching on Iranian soil. They never figured out how to bridge that gap. And you can’t do this in six rounds of negotiations, separated by a week and a half. You needed more time, a more serious effort, and a willingness on each side to be more flexible. And since there’s no trust, no confidence since the prime directive for the Iranians is he pulled out of the last agreement. How are we going to ensure that he won’t pull out of this one problem. The Iranians view of negotiating with Americans was, I think, traumatized by the withdrawal. So you had a lot of odds stacked against you. And Yes, there’s no question that negotiation impasse afforded both Netanyahu and the President Trump an opportunity to essentially deal with the problem in a different way. But I do not subscribe to the narrative that a clever, crafty Israeli Prime Minister willfully sandbagged a naive president into abandoning negotiations which were somehow on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Trump played an active role in the fiction, and the ruse that the Israelis required to implement the first phase of their military campaign, which was the decapitation strategy. Trump’s insistence right up until June 12, the night of June 12, 13, when the Israeli strikes began, was that there would be a sixth round in Ahman. And I think the Iranians will lulled into believing that there would be no Israeli strike until after those negotiations concluded, and the president made a judgment that they had succeeded or failed. So no. Trump rode Netanyahu’s tiger once he saw precisely how much damage, how much skill, how much operational capacity the Israelis had. Fareed Zakaria described it as FOMO, that’s what essentially motivated Trump. Fear of missing out. He wanted some of that. I do believe I think you’re saying two things that feel like their intention to me. One is that Trump was an active strategic participant creating a ruse to allow Israel to execute an attack. We were it was not long ago that we saw Trump with Netanyahu saying, you have to wait. I’m negotiating. I do not want you bombing Iran. That happened in public. It looked like a public rebuke of Netanyahu. So one version, which you sometimes heard from the Trump White House, I feel like I’m hearing it from you right now, is this was all a ruse. And Trump was strategically operating alongside Netanyahu to lull the Iranians into a false sense of complacency. The other interpretation is that Israel acted without the US’s full blessing. Certainly without our full cooperation began the began the bombing. And then Trump, in some reports watching Fox News, seeing how much the Israelis were succeeding in the objective, decided to jump in and be part of it. Those are two, I think, quite different interpretations of what Trump was doing. Either which do you subscribe to or how do you synthesize them. Well, timing is a critical, important piece here. For the last two months, Trump did warn Netanyahu off. I think the Monday before the Thursday that the Israelis struck, I think he was quite uncertain about whether or not this was a good idea. But let’s be clear, Donald Trump in the last two months has done things to Israel and without Israel’s coordination and consent, that no other American president that I ever worked for, Republican or Democrat, has done. He has essentially he undermined two of the three political laws of gravity that have governed the us-israeli relationship. Number one is the no daylight policy. We must coordinate everything with Israel. Donald Trump sanctioned his own hostage negotiator in March to open up direct negotiations. Three rounds with Hamas. The external leadership, over and above Israeli objections or without Israeli even acquiescence, he cut a deal with the Houthis without Israel’s knowledge, which essentially implied that as long as the Houthis restrained from attacking US Naval assets and US flagged or owned commercial shipping, they could basically continue their campaign to launch drones and ballistic missiles at Israel. And he announced, in the presence of an Israeli Prime Minister, probably over his objections, that he was initiating in April a negotiation. And then finally, over Netanyahu’s objections, he lifted quite to the Israeli surprises and most of the surprise of Washington sanctions lifted sanctions on the regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa in Syria so that no daylight policy. He blew through the second law of gravity, which was attention to domestic political constraints. If a Democratic president had done any of the things I’ve just identified, let alone all of them, there would probably be a move on the part of the Republicans to impeach him. So Donald Trump, in my judgment, had the personality, had the will to say, at least to the Israeli Prime Minister, look, I understand what you want to do. You’ve got a compelling case, but you need to give me more time. You need to give me another two months. But Trump basically handicapped his own argument by setting this completely unrealistic deadline of two months. This was two months to negotiate with Iran. Exactly and the truth is, we saw it play out in the last 12 hours. He compelled the Israelis to tone down their response to the deaths to ballistic missiles in Beersheba that caused the deaths of 3, 4, five Israelis. So, no, I don’t buy but in large part, what I’m saying to you, I think, is that Donald Trump is transactionally situational. He doesn’t have a strategy. There’s no core. Biden could not bring himself for over a year to impose a single cost or consequence on Israel that normal humans would regard as serious or sustained pressure. He could have restricted or conditioned US military to Israel. He didn’t do that. He could have introduced a UN Security Council resolution or voted for someone else’s. He didn’t do that. He could have unilaterally recognized Palestinian statehood. He didn’t do that. He could have marshaled a rhetorical campaign day in and day out, basically questioning the fact that Israel is not a reliable. He didn’t do that. Biden had a core. I’m just reporting here, so don’t shoot me. Biden had a core, and the core was a deep and abiding emotional and political commitment to the security of Israel. The people of Israel. The idea of Israel, that was Joe Biden in the Senate for decades. That was Joe Biden’s father telling him that silence in the face of evil, the Holocaust, is complicity. That’s Joe Biden, who was a part of Israel’s story and felt himself to be a part of it. That’s not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a trans actor, and if you get in the middle between him and something he really wants, this is a president who in six months has sidelined Israel, has pressured Israel, and has supported Israel. And let me interrupt this for one second because I think the thing if you’ve been watching this, you will think hearing this is Yes, there are things Donald Trump wanted for America. He wanted to negotiate the return of a hostage. He wanted our shipping to not be endangered by the Houthis. But Donald Trump has put no serious curbs on what Israel is doing in Gaza or the West Bank, to be very clear. And he just gave Israel the thing that all these other presidents, including Joe Biden, for all of his deep seated Zionism, did not give Israel, which is American participation, and using our most powerful depth penetrating munitions in a bombing campaign to destroy as much of Iran’s nuclear program as we could. So for all the Trump does not follow protocol in the way other presidents do. He is much freer with his language than other presidents have been. But if you ask who gave Israel what they really wanted, the thing Netanyahu could not get from George W Bush, from Barack Obama, from Donald Trump, number one, from Joe Biden, it was this. That’s my point, though. He removed sanctions on settlers. He restored the shipment of 2,000 pounds bombs. He basically has given Israel a free hand in the West Bank. No, no, I’m not here to argue that Donald Trump is somehow only interesting that he’s the new Eisenhower, that basically he’s the only American president ever to threaten serious and sustained pressure against state of Israel, as Eisenhower did in the wake of Suez. The only one no American president has gone beyond what Eisenhower was prepared to do. My sense was Donald Trump has no core, which is why he is the ultimate transactor that he could do both and not blink an eye, that he could basically call up an Israeli Prime Minister and say, don’t overreact. I don’t want you. I don’t know what the Israelis were prepared to do, but I guarantee you it would have been as devastating. A strike in response to the deaths of five Israelis, which were the fifth of all the Israelis who were killed over the course of the last 12 days by Iranian ballistic missiles. It is the absence of a core. It is Trump’s response to situations. It’s the absence of an effective strategy. And I would have bet you that had the Israelis not struck June 12/13, he would have tried to find a deal with the Iranians that would have parked the nuclear issue, parked it. A transactional deal, not a transformational one, parked the Iranian issue until the end of his hopefully his final term, his hopefully his final term in office. So I understand exactly what you’re saying. And I’m not here to whitewash Donald Trump as someone who is a stand up guy when it comes to Israel. And that’s exactly the opposite point I’m making. Well, the thing I’m trying to get at here is because I’m also I don’t think you’re trying to whitewash Donald Trump. That’s not my view is that there is a question of whether or not Donald Trump is trying to achieve something here. He’s been working with Netanyahu hand in glove, and maybe it’s that he wanted to set back the Iranian nuclear program. You could see Donald Trump is acting here with a goal, and you can see Donald Trump here as making decisions day by day by day by day, without really a theory of how they’re all going to work out. And I think what is worth thinking about or the thing I have been trying to think about is Trump just gave Israel something that every other recent president, including Donald Trump, thought was too risky to give them. And is that because bombing Iran, given Iran’s current state, is no longer that large of a risk because they cannot project power as they once could, because Israel has decapitated so many of their proxies. Is that because Donald Trump has a higher risk tolerance, or wants something different, or want something more than the other presidents did, or than he did during his first term. We have just seen a Smassive change in US policy towards Iran. Well, we went Yeah, we went to war with Iran Yes What is that change in service of. I mean, and how do we know if it will have worked. Well, so. But doesn’t that offer. Well, that’s a separate analytical question. The first one is theoretical. I think Trump saw an opportunity and he and he took it. Was Trump right to take the opportunity. Well, that’s another question as to whether or not what we’ve done. Ultimately, we’re down to an advancement of American national interest or retardation of those interests. What is our interest. We have well, I would reduce our interests in the Middle East without being sentimental. Our vital interests, that is vital regarding a situation where American presidents would risk putting Americans in harm’s way. We have three interests in the Middle East. Number one counterterrorism. Number two, maintaining access to hydrocarbons. And number 3, ensuring that there is no regional hegemon with a nuclear weapon. That’s not to say we don’t have an array of other interests. I worked on one of those interests for my entire career, but it was never deemed to be a vital national interest, which is one of the reasons, I think that in so many administrations, there was never a serious effort to look at the israeli-palestinian arab-israeli issue as a national interest, particularly at the end of the Cold War. It was viewed as a discretionary problem. It would be nice to have you say one of our vital interests is preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon, probably in this case, Iran with a nuclear weapon. First, why is that our vital interest. I mean, it seems obvious, but I think it’s worth spelling it out because as much as Trump did diverge from other presidents here, not allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapon has been a very, very consistent view of every recent American president. And second, when you say there can be no regional hegemon with a nuclear weapon militarily, isn’t Israel a regional hegemon with nuclear weapons. Yeah I mean, I use the term escalation dominance. It probably shouldn’t have used the term regional hegemon. Israel is not a regional hegemon the way the former Soviet Union was in Eastern Europe. But Iran wasn’t going to get there either with a weapon. But Iran would emerge. My definition is Iran emerges in a competitive and in an antagonistic way, as a threat, as a threat to Saudi Arabia, as a threat to Israel spreading its ideology and expansionary power with a nuclear weapon. Yeah, that’d be a better way to frame it, right. Yeah an expansionary power with a nuclear weapon because that threatens our core interests. I mean, Iran is clearly has an ideology which seeks to influence and convert this so-called Shia axis. Baghdad, Beirut, Sanaa, Sanaa with the Houthis Damascus that seems a stretch. These days, in large part given Russian retrenchment, given Ahmed al-Shara’s rise. You’re now talking basically about a Sunni regime in Syria. I don’t see and you now have the hollowing out of Iran’s ability to project its power abroad. So I don’t think that is as critical an interest. But Iran’s pursuit of the weapon and Iran, 90 million people. Iran’s a keeper. It’s been a keeper for centuries. It’s a real country. Is Israel an expansionary power with a nuclear weapon. Israel has a new definition of border security, which I find to be very intriguing. I mean, and it goes beyond their security doctrine that they have. They will preempt or prevent. But if you look at what the Israelis have done in Gaza, they are there for an indefinite period of time in the West Bank. They are now more entrenched than they’ve ever been since the Second Intifada in Lebanon. They still have not withdrawn from the 5 strategic points obligated to withdraw, and the Trump administration has acquiesced in that. And in Syria, they’ve declared much of the area Southwest of Damascus as a no go zone. It’s a fascinating anticipatory hedge against October 7, and partly also because it does advance Israel’s operational and offensive capacities. So an ongoing israeli-iranian conflict is basically going to endure, even if the Iranians don’t make a major effort to try to reconstitute the program or worse, push for an actual weapon. And as somebody with long experience in the region who has thought deeply about these questions, do you think it served America’s national interest to draw up bunker buster bombs in Iran, given the fact that we don’t know what the damage was, given the fact that we don’t know what the end state is. It’s a highly arguable proposition. At the same time, given the results again, it’s an in my case. And I want to be honest here, I would hope I want to be honest, it reminds me of the guy who jumps off the 10 story building. And as he’s passing the fifth floor, somebody yells out, how are you doing. And he responds, so far, so good. I think the case, I think, was a judgment call. I think that, and it was not, in my judgment, a slam dunk judgment call. I think that on I guess if I were running the railroad, I would have asked for two more months to determine whether or not Iran was serious about this negotiation. I would have probably varied what I would put on the table in an effort to get the Iranians to agree. It wouldn’t have been anything like the JCPOA. And then, which was the Obama era nuclear deal with Iran that the Trump ripped up. If the Iranians were not interested, I think I would have agreed with the decision. So there’s an argument you’ve heard it made recently from a number of Democrats that, look, Obama signed this deal with Iran, that a lot of other countries were counterparties in this deal in some way or another. We had inspectors there. There was a framework. There was a structure. Trump ripped it up and then was trying to make a New Deal that sounded kind of like the JCPOA and then ended up bombing during the deal making process, which probably it makes it very hard to imagine that you will ever convince Iran back to the table in the future. So first, do you buy the argument that the deal we had was fine, and the problem was just Trump ripping it up and causing a problem that he now needed to solve. And two, since you said if you were running negotiations, you would create something very different. What would have been different about it. Well, first of all, the JCPOA was flawed but functional. It restrained it, constrained it. It created a degree of intrusive inspections that I think, frankly, were working. That doesn’t mean that the Iranians weren’t cheating. Of course they were cheating. Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, in my judgment, never had a good answer. This is not the best answer, either. And it leads into the analytical question of how. How do you permanently ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon. There’s only one way to do it, and it’s tethered to a galaxy far, far away rather than the realities back here on planet Earth. And that is to fundamentally change the regime and create one or the Iranian public will create one that isn’t is not interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon, I might add. The Shah was well on his way and wanted one as well. Iran has a profound sense of entitlement and insecurity that is a very bad combination in any nation, profound entitlement and profound insecurity. And I think that the Iranian program is not dead. It hasn’t been totally obliterated. The 800 pounds of highly enriched uranium fissile material went missing. Where is it. How many centrifuges advanced centrifuges survived uranium. I think over time, even though it’ll be very difficult given Israel’s command of the airspace. But if they don’t deal with the IAEA any longer, or they withdraw from the NPT, the non-proliferation treaty, you can see that this operation, which is now being touted as an unqualified success. I certainly wouldn’t call it that, is going to be looked at quite differently, which is why in the end, as we come back to the same two, in my judgment, you talk about the new Middle East, we come back to the same two unanswered questions. How do you translate this escalation dominance into something more enduring that reflects a better balance of interests. And number two, do you have the leaders to convert that. And it seems to me we don’t. Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested. He’s already demolished Israel’s enemies. Now he seeks to become the peacemaker. I don’t see it because it assaults at least one of the core principles, which is there is not going to be a Palestinian state, and there will be no division of East Jerusalem, and there will be no major Israeli concessions with territorial concessions on the West Bank. I don’t see it among the Palestinians. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 86. Every Iranian expert I talked to tells me that if there is regime change, it’s likely to be, particularly in this environment. It’s going to be IRGC, heavily military securitized regime and figure that the only borrowing a page out of Gaddafi’s book the one Gaddafi didn’t read, but one that one Kim Jong Un did read. Basically, you need a new need a nuclear weapon to guard against hedge against regime change. I don’t see the leadership. I want to say, from my perspective, I just claim no knowledge of how any of this will turn out. I feel very I’ve actually felt even in preparing for this conversation. It’s just it’s hard to find anything that feels like strong commentary to me because everybody’s just speculating. Ezra, you’re. I mean, You’re a very wise man. Thank you. If And one of the lessons I’ve learned after decades of failure in negotiations, you really need to risk respect, not admire, not countenance, but respect the degree of difficulty that the issues and the leaders in this part of the world pose. It is more often than not, a place where American ideas on war making and peacemaking go to die. No one that I and I’ll put myself at the top of the list, is prepared to make predictions hard and fast predictions. The Israelis now believe that what’s happened to Iran is going to open the door to a dramatic expansion of the Abraham Accords. I don’t know exactly what Middle East they’re looking at. One version of what just happened. There’s a precedent in Israel bombing the Iraqi nuclear program back in the 80s. Is this sets things back quite a bit. And it just kind of defers it. And people are able to keep it contained and keep it in a box. There is a tension there. I mean, you’ve spoken to the Israelis about the Iranians much more than I have, but I’ve spoken to them enough about the Iranians that the completely universal opinion within the Israeli security class is that America does not understand Iran. Iran is a patient strategic power with an imperialistic past and deeply ideological hegemonic ambitions. And they will wait, and they will strategize, and they will act on a longer time frame than America ever acts upon. It seems to me that if you believe that, then a bombing campaign that depending on who you believe set Iran back six months, two years, but at the same time, made it almost impossible for the Iranians to ever trust diplomacy with us again. You knocked out the idea of a deal. And so what, you’re left with either regime change or the expectation that the thing. Iran is not going to do is wait, one screwdriver, turn away, that when the new hardliners come in or when there’s quiet or is it or America is distracted by something else, they’re going to sprint to a bomb. And that what they’ll do is what Pakistan did, what North Korea did, which is like emerge one day and say, we’ve got one now. And so now you can’t attack us. Now maybe that doesn’t happen, but that seems very plausible from where we sit, because making diplomacy into a ruse seems like it has at least one very obvious problem, which is that if you ever need diplomacy in the future, how do you persuade your counterparty. It’s not, again, a ruse. Well, ever is a very long time. Sure declaring the end of anything is a hard proposition. Because the truth is, neither you nor I can see what’s in front of us. I was in Israel on October 6, 1973 until now, the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the state of Israel. And within six years, I watched Sadat begin and Carter sign a full treaty of peace on the White House lawn, September 13, 1993. And in that case, trauma for the Israelis turned to hope. I sat on the White House lawn in October, September 13, 1993, watching Rabin, Arafat and Clinton signed the Oslo declaration of principles. And yet everything on that day now lies somewhere broken, bloodied and battered. In that case, hope turned to trauma. So what do you conclude from this. Well, you conclude that we occupy a tiny space on the planet for a very short period of time. You can say you never say never. That is a very strong proposition in of my worldview. I have two kids and for grandkids, I’m not going to mortgage their futures by saying the American Republic is doomed to failure, or Israelis and Palestinians cannot find a way forward. I don’t have the right the moral right to do that. So in answer to your question, I’ve been around the Middle East to know it doesn’t offer up very often transformative, of happy or Hollywood endings to everything. So when people talk about a new Middle East, I shake my head, but I listen. I listen a lot more now. I have a lot more uncertainty and a lot more humility. But this is one complicated region and we are very often a modern day Gulliver wandering around in a part of the world that we don’t understand, tied up by tiny powers, some large, some small whose interests are not our own. And more than that, Azra, burdened in essence by our own illusions. Donald Trump, unlike any American president that I ever worked for, doesn’t. Look, let’s be very clear. Doesn’t look at Israel. The way any other American president looked at Israel. I don’t think he has this emotional sentimental view of the Israeli story. I don’t think he’s that attached to the idea of Israel as Biden was the identity, the security, the people of Israel. Because I don’t think Donald Trump is attached to much beyond his own immediate circumstances. I think that is a place to end, always. Our final question what are three books you would recommend to the audience. I actually prepared for this. I have two books. The rest are just winging. I have two books on how to do successful Middle East diplomacy, since that’s what we were talking about. Martin Indyk, “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy“, and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s masterful, “The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James Baker“. Those are the two books I would recommend about. There are real lessons there about how to do successful diplomacy. I have a third book, one that isn’t out yet, that argues that the US, including many who worked on this process for a very long time, has gotten it profoundly and utterly wrong when it comes to peacemaking. It’s called “Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine” by Hussein Agha. And full disclosure, my friend of many years, Robert Malley. Those are the three I would look at. Aaron David Miller, Thank you very much, Ezra. You’re a great, phenomenal questions. Love the conversation.
