Navigating and Negotiating the Middle East

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Emma Varvaloucas: What are the key pillars of the Trump administration’s Middle East policy and have they been effective so far?

Jon Alterman: We’re negotiating about everything. We’ll negotiate with the Iranians. We’ll negotiate to find a solution to Gaza. Everything is up for grabs. I think the administration wants to attract investment from the Middle East to the United States, and frankly in a region that could be pretty transactional, they’re pretty comfortable with a transactional American president. 

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of the Progress Network, joined as always by my cohost. Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network, and this week we’re gonna talk about something and talk to someone about a subject that clearly attracts an inordinate amount of negative attention, namely the Middle East. 

Emma, who are we gonna talk to today about the Middle East? 

Emma Varvaloucas: Alright, so today we are gonna talk to Jon Alterman, Middle East expert, middle East extraordinaire. His actual title is that he is Senior Vice President and holds the Brezinski chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, and is also the director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And he also has a podcast where you can hear him talk to all kinds of people from all over the Middle East. It is called Babel: Translating the Middle East. So let’s go talk to Jon and see what he has to say about a roiling and interesting region. 

Zachary Karabell: Dr. Jon Alterman what a pleasure to have you on What Could Go Right.

Jon and I are old friends, colleagues, acquaintances from graduate school, and you’ve become one of the more cogent, sane, sober, wise, levelheaded voices about all things in the Middle East about American policy toward the Middle East, global implications of that, and in a region that remains startlingly, hyperbolically heated, having that kind of sane sobriety is both rare and extraordinarily valuable.

Jon Alterman: I appreciate, you know, when we, when we got our PhDs, late 1990s, the Arab Israeli conflict had been solved. Oil was permanently at $14 a barrel. The Iranians had gotten over the revolution, and I was looking for a job in healthcare consulting because there was no career prospect for anybody to do the Middle East.

Things have gotten better, maybe not better for everybody but certainly, as you’ve suggested, a little bit better for me than I thought it would be in the, in the spring of 1997. 

Zachary Karabell: So here we are once again in. A certain amount of turmoil. I, unlike you, decided that I was gonna run as far away as possible from a career in Middle East studies because I didn’t wanna spend the rest of my life arguing about Israel and Palestine. And that was one of my few good calls because indeed, I would’ve spent the rest of my life arguing about Israel and Palestine in one form or another.

Jon Alterman: I don’t spend much of my career arguing about Israel and Palestine. To be honest, man, that’s just not, that’s not been the way my career has unfolded, but I think there’s some interesting possibilities in the Israel-Palestine conflict. But I think, you know, right now we have the, both populations are so much more traumatized than they’ve been, and quite much, so much more polarized than they’ve been for quite some time that I think we’re, there’s a way to go, but still some, some real possibility of, of, I think some movement. 

Zachary Karabell: Tell us about those. Like what, what are those possibilities from your vantage?

Jon Alterman: I think because there is an understanding that the conventional ways of thinking about resolving this conflict have kind of run their course. I wrote a piece a little more than a year ago arguing that, that we shouldn’t abandon the two state solution idea, but we need to modify the meanings of some terms like “two” and “state” and “solution” and the way I think this is going to play out, but it’s true if you think about it, there’s no way to draw a really clean border between Israel and Palestine, the border’s not gonna work in normal ways. The populations are too interspersed. 

The states that emerge from this are gonna have some compromises on their sovereignty that we’re not gonna be like normal states. I think whatever is governing Palestinian, Arabs will have some Israeli engagement.

I think there’ll be some international engagement, ensuring that Israel Is abiding by its obligations and in terms of a solution. You know, it’s not like you’re gonna be able to sign the agreement and walk away. It’s gonna be more like the Good Friday accords in Northern Ireland, where you have a small agreement and then you have volumes and volumes of how you’ve worked through additional regulations to work through additional issues.

So I don’t think you’re, you’re gonna, I don’t think we’re gonna come to a point where somebody’s gonna draw the perfect map. And then everybody will go to each corner and they’ll be on their sides and it’ll be fine. I think we’re beyond that kind of solution, but I could imagine a way that there are Israelis and Palestinians figuring out, we’re gonna have conflict, we’re gonna resolve the conflict of these kinds of modalities.

It’s not gonna be violent. We’re gonna constrain people on each side. And you know, ultimately people on each side feel there’s a prospect for a better life for them than their kids. One of the challenges of this, and it’s different from any place, I think there are two challenges to make it different from any place else in the world.

One is that you have a lot of people on both sides who feel that God is speaking directly to them about this conflict, and that’s unusual. The other thing, which in some ways is even more unusual, I think this is the only conflict in the world that literally billions of people have strong emotional opinions about, and that means that, that you not only have to resolve the conflict between the combatants, the adversaries, but you have to somehow engage billions of people on the outside who in some cases are egging on people on the margins of both conflicts, and, and find some way to, to, to sort of handle the outside disruptor piece.

I don’t know exactly what that solution looks like, but can I imagine how you move toward it? I can imagine how you can move toward it.

Emma Varvaloucas: Is there even political appetite at the top for what you’re talking about though? I mean, I take your point that ordinary Palestinians, ordinary Israelis. They wanna see a solution to this, speaking very generally right? But if you look at Hamas and you look at Netanyahu, it seems to me like there doesn’t seem like a whole lot of desire to come to a conclusion.

Jon Alterman: 70% of Israelis are pretty grumpy about where things are. They don’t like Netanyahu. The thing is, there’s no. More approved alternative to Netanyahu. He is, you know, in some ways the most popular politician in a country that has come to detest politicians, probably 30% of Israelis want him to continue, and the other 70% say it’s time for somebody else.

They can’t agree who somebody else is. He is a popularity star compared to Mahmoud Abbas whose popularity is now polling, I think, in the single digits. Abbas is well into his 80, I think he’s 89. There is going to be a political transition in Palestine, what that looks like, completely unclear. I think that’s the first crisis that emerges.

But what that creates, who comes after what the Israelis try to do to shape, what Arab states try to do to shape what happens on the Israeli side. I mean, I think we’re, we, a period that looks different. I’m not sure exactly how soon that will be. I’m not sure what role the US will wanna play. I’m not sure what role the Saudis will wanna play in others, but it’s not, it’s not a frozen conflict right now.

It feels like, you know, especially after President Trump had this, I won’t even call it a plan. I’m not even sure I’d call it an idea, 

Zachary Karabell: Concept of a plan, concept of an idea, maybe.

Jon Alterman: but that generated a whole. Bunch of work and thinking, saying, well, clearly that doesn’t work, so what else works? So I think we’re, we’re actually entering a period with a very transactional president where things might change. Now, you know, this is a world, like any world, people can die, people can have legal problems.

I think assuming that tomorrow’s gonna look exactly like today is often a good bet, but it’s not a sure thing. And I think we’re in a situation where things could well change and we could embark on a process that over time gets us to a better space. 

Zachary Karabell: So I was in, I was in Algeria in January, and then I was at a conference in Doha at the end of February, and I, particularly from the Doha side, took away I. As I did when I was in Saudi about about two years ago. You know, there’s this kind of palpable feeling, at least in the Gulf, and certainly oil producing areas a little less in Algeria, but Algeria’s interesting for its own reasons of, you know, something that I felt kind of tangibly in China in like 2002. And again, anecdotes are, everybody’s got an anecdote, everybody’s got a story. Generalizing from them is a human tendency, but usually a mistake.

Jon Alterman: You’re not gonna talk about cab driver told you right? 

Zachary Karabell: No. Right. But you know, there are 25,000 people at this conference in Doha, and it did feel like as, as, as it has, that there’s a degree of, at least in the Gulf region, a feeling of like, this is our moment. You know, a lot of younger people, clearly a lot of money.

Clearly some focus on the part of leadership and, you know, MBS and Saudi and the shakes of the Gulf to kind of carve out either a post oil future or a future that’s much more diversified beyond just pumping petrol and that you have a lot of young people who have bought into that. And yes, these are largely autocratic states and they do not look at all like anything resembling liberal democracy.

But again, is that, do you think that’s a rose tinted glass way of looking at that region? Or is there something that indeed, particularly because of Mohammed bin Salman and the kinda radical shift in Saudi domestic culture. Is there something to that?

Jon Alterman: As you point out the leadership of the Gulf, generally not people in their eighties, but people in their fifties or maybe sixties, MBS is, I think 38, understand that they urgently need to diversify their economies, that diversifying their economies is a talent game. They have to invest in their people.

They have to change expectations about work and productivity. They have to get people who are willing to take risks. They want to channel that risk-taking behavior and make sure it’s, it’s sort of economic risks and not political risks. And that’s something that’s, you know, there’s reinforcement going on in that way ’cause I think they are committed to authoritarianism, but they see authoritarianism as a way to foster more protected economic growth there. Yeah, this huge explosion. I don’t know how many times you’ve been to Saudi Arabia in the last few years. I’ve been going to Saudi Arabia for 25 years, and I cannot believe how different the place is.

There is a restaurant scene in Riyadh that rivals almost any place in the world on Ibn Nusair Street in Riyadh. There are two bagel stores, two. And if you were to tell me five years ago that there’d be a single street in Riyadh that had one bagel store, I’d say that’s crazy. But to have two bagel stores on one street in Riyadh, cafes with, with guys in man buns and vegan cafes and all kinds of thing, no, really.

I mean, this is Riyadh now, and there’s, there’s been this effort to show people that they can have a lot of excitement that I, I went to a, an outdoor mall in Riyadh. It was a sign. It says, no pajamas, no skateboarding, and if you have to remind Saudis no pajamas and no skateboarding, it’s not the Saudi Arabia that I was used to.

So the, there really is this. And I think one of the things the government in Saudi Arabia has done is they’ve tried to reach out to young people, get ’em really energized about the future is gonna be different, it is gonna be more exciting. The, there are a whole bunch of boundaries that are being blown through.

There are still boundaries. You still have to be careful and frankly, I still know Saudis who remain in jail for having the wrong kinds of thoughts about political reform. They are serious reminding people that there is a lot of surveillance and they have a corruption authority and you can report anonymously to the corruption authority.

And they keep reminding people and they keep suggesting to people we’re watching everything. But there’s also this sense of ferment, a sense of possibility. Women, more women join the workforce more quickly in Saudi Arabia than any peace time mobilization of women in the workforce in history. It’s incredible.

And young women who five years ago said, I’m not really sure I have a career, suddenly said, I can do anything in this country. And the women are good and they’re focused and they don’t have a sense of entitlement. So Saudi Arabia is a place of a lot of ferment. The UAE has in many ways been there and has been playing a talent game for 20 years.

So there is a sense, but there’s also a sense of urgency, a sense that we’re not gonna have the same options 10 years from now that we have now, and we’re gonna have even fewer 20. So we have to get this ball rolling. And so there’s a lot going on, but I think people are excited and people feel we’re in the most exciting place in the world right now.

And that’s the way I think a lot of Gulf Arabs really feel. Certainly young Gulf Arabs. 

Zachary Karabell: Just a follow up to that. Clearly Mohammad bin Salman had wanted, or was, was moving to some sort of accord with Israel, maybe like the Abraham Accords, maybe not prior to October 7th, 2023, and that obviously got put massively on hold because of, you know, tumbled in Gaza at all. 

Where, where do you see that going now? Like what’s the position of the Saudis relative to that? Are they waiting just for the conflict to kind of end, they clearly don’t care deeply about the plight of the Palestinians, but what’s the, do you have a sense of what the pathway is if you were to ask and if they were to actually answer candidly?

Jon Alterman: So I’m actually contrarian on this. I think for the Saudis, normalization with Israel is the goose that lays the golden egg. It was normalization with Israel that provided the way the Saudis dug themselves out of the hole of isolation from the United States with, with President Biden as a candidate in 2019.

So we’re gonna treat the Saudis like the pariah that they are, and it was the prospect of normalization with Israel that turned the US relationship around and normalized the idea, not only that the US would help Saudi Arabia have a civilian nuclear program, but also that the United States might sign a written defense agreement with the Saudis.

So I think for the Saudis, having the prospect of normalization and maintaining the prospect is a good way to keep the Americans engaged, to keep the Israelis engaged. You can still do a bunch of cooperation, but it feels to me when you have somebody like Mohammed bin Salman who expects to be in power for the next 40 years, the question becomes if you’re making that deal.

When is your time of maximum leverage? When do you get the most? I’m not sure. It’s right now. I’m not sure it’s with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think this is gonna stay out there as they continue to use it as a North Star for the US relationship. Keep the US engaged, keep the Israelis in the right place, cooperate with the Israelis on a whole bunch of security intelligence issues under the table, but it doesn’t feel like we’re anywhere close to a place where the Saudis are gonna say, now is our time of maximum leverage. Now we’ll make the deal. Now we will do what we’ll suffer whatever political price there is by normalizing with Israel. I don’t think we’re close that I, I frankly. I never thought we were that close prior to October 7th.

Although, you know, friends in the White House sort of looked at me and said, you just don’t understand. And I said, I’ve been dealing with Saudis for 25 years, I think you just don’t understand. 

Emma Varvaloucas: My follow up was going to be to ask how the bagels are in Riyadh. I’m actually genuinely curious.

Jon Alterman: So Le Bagel was really a donut and coffee shop that also had bagels, but I don’t think the bagels were very good. They were kind of cakey. Bagel and Board was closed for renovations when I was there, so I didn’t get to sample it. But honestly, at Bagel and Board you can get a bagel with a schmear. And again, it, it’s like, it’s just, there is a cosmopolitan ness that is coming to Saudi Arabia that they’re drawing in. Right? And they wanted, they wanna have gourmet Saudi cuisine, all these things, there’s, they’re trying to build a consumer culture. They’re trying to get people excited about novelty. And that’s not the way Saudi Arabia was. It’s. Saudi Arabia 10 years ago, the competition when you had a meeting was how many older people they could get in the room to show how serious it was ’cause you had all these guys with gray hair and that’s just not the mood of the place anymore. 

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m gonna move us to Syria because I’ve been wanting to talk about that for a while on this podcast. For anyone listening that’s not been following, the dictatorship was overthrown in December, and there’s been a caretaker government there since March, which is gonna last for five years I believe. 

So, I mean, for you, looking at things there right now, what is the path forward looking like, both in terms of stabilization, like if the caretaker government could really pull all these various factions together. And also in terms of, is this just gonna tip over into another authoritarian government like there was for the last however many years?

Jon Alterman: So we could, and I, I spoke to Nick Pelham, who did a big profile in the Economist Magazine who met with Ahmed al-Sharaa. Nick felt that I, I spoke to him for my podcast, Babel: Translating The Middle East. Nick felt that Sharaa kind of reminded him of Bashar al-Assad, that there was the same unease, the same uncertainty. I met Bashar al-Assad out a couple times.

I certainly detected that, that he, he didn’t come across as a charismatic leader, and Nick felt that  Ahmed al-Sharaa didn’t come across as a charismatic leader and thought that he was canny. He has an amazing ability to build trust with people. He convinced a whole bunch of really bad guys that he was with them.

So he has an ability to win trust. But what, where it ultimately goes, I think. Nick came away feeling it ultimately goes toward  Ahmed al-Sharaa becoming maybe ha again, so authoritarian, repressive, somewhat more tolerant. Not Bashar, not as bloody, but, but certainly not a democracy. There’re, there are a lot of Syrians, both who have been in the country, who’ve been in exile, who are hoping that, that there really can be a much better new Syria and, and that there will be space for that.

There are a lot of spoilers, not just the Iranians, some of the, the folks who had power under the old regime wanna come in where the Turks are. This is a little bit unclear. The Israelis have their own interests in Syria. The Russians have their interest in Syria. I think the future is pretty murky. I was talking to a, a senior Israeli who had this remarkable Middle Eastern food metaphor who said, you know, when you’re making tahini and you mix the, the tahini with some, some water and lemon juice and garlic and you start stirring and first it’s really murky before it, it sort of becomes smooth again. And that’s what Syria is. I’m like, okay, if, if that’s your metaphor, we’ll go with it.

Understandable to me, not sure it’s understandable to non Middle East nerds, but I think we are in for a somewhat sustained period of uncertainty. I think there are some upside possibilities. There are some downside possibilities. I think we probably don’t pay enough attention to the roles of spoilers and there’s been a pretty cautious approach to lifting sanctions and engaging with the Syrian government because of uncertainty about where it goes and, and sort of a sense that if you have some conditional support, that that gives you influence. One of the concerns I heard, by the way, was, I’m gonna shout, wants to, to keep Syria as a cash economy, which is a way to just embed corruption in the economy. And so, so, you know, people in the business world say you don’t want a cash economy. Absolutely not. 

So mixed signal, certainly better than Bashar. Bashar really ground the country into the ground, and was absolutely miserable after the uprisings of 2011, it got worse and worse and worse, and he’s basically running the whole economy by cannibalizing Syrians and then charging Syrians for everything from passports to permits, to corruption, to protection money, all those things, and selling Captagon, a narcotic, to other countries in the Middle East.

Those were the two ways the government supported itself and, and, and country’s getting worse and worse. So delighted Bashar is gone. Unclear how much better Syria will be, but certainly some green shoots, as I say, some expats are coming back. There certainly has been gestures of tolerance toward minority communities in the country.

Unclear. I think it’s gonna be unclear for a while yet. I always worry about the Iranian example in 1979 where it started off much more pluralistic than it, it turned into. But there are possibilities and there’s a lot of help if they keep doing the right things. 

Zachary Karabell: Another question about Syria is why does it matter so much to these various players? I mean, as you said, there are all these different proxies. They’re all involved in various ways in different parts of the country. You know, Turkey with the Kurds, Israel in the south, near, you know, the Golan Heights area toward Damascus.

And yet, Syria does not have vast mineral deposits. It doesn’t have lots of oil. It’s not a resource rich place. I mean, it has some stuff as every country does. It’s not really strategic per se. So it’s an interesting question of like, why does this matter so much to various proxies given those just fundamental realities?

Jon Alterman: A lot of it’s geography, right? I mean, it, it’s, it’s traditionally on the pilgrimage roots, it is connected to Israel and has been the way that Iran has supplied Hezbollah, which has been the forward front of Iranian deterrence of Israel. It’s connected to Jordan, which is important, you know, for Israeli security as well.

There’s the, the issue of, of Turkey and NATO ally, it’s traditionally connected to Iran, it’s contiguous to Iraq, so it, it’s kind of in a very important place and has a tradition of people moving through. You certainly have a jihadi presence, which frankly, Bashar al-Assad tried to nurture. And when I spoke to Bihar, the last time I spoke to Bashar al-Assad, I think was 2006, 2007, and the Syrians were sending jihadis, and then Ahmed al-Sharaa was one of them, sending jihadis from Syria into Iraq to fight Americans, and then turning to the Americans and saying, look, we can, we can help you with the this jihadi problem, but you have to engage with us. So on the one hand, they were having buses of jihadis going to Iraq, leaving from down the street from the American Embassy, and then telling the Americans, but if you work with us and you help us, then we can help you with your jihadi problem. And it’s, and there’s a residual jihadi problem, which helped overthrow Assad, ultimately. 

It’s partly geography. It’s, it’s partly that everybody has a stake. It’s partly that it’s a place that’s connected. To everybody else. You’re right. I mean, a little bit of oil, not a huge amount of oil, not other resources, but it, it’s kind of a keystone, right?

And if, if Syria, Tom Friedman is, is fond of the expression that Syria doesn’t implode, it explodes. And I think that’s kind of right, there, Syria is looped into everything and it’s certainly looped into Lebanon, where in many ways Syria was the political manager of a dysfunctional Lebanon, and when Lebanese couldn’t figure out how to resolve conflicts, they went to Damascus and the guys in Damascus sorted out the Lebanese conflicts.

Emma Varvaloucas: So when you said earlier that you think that people aren’t paying enough attention to spoilers here, are you mostly thinking about Iran or are you thinking about other players like. Like that Zachary mentioned like Turkey or Israel, something like that.

Jon Alterman: Iran, Russia. You know, Russia had two very important bases. I think Russia wants a foothold in Syria, and the advantage of Russia as a partner to Syria is if you want a totally amoral transactional country that will defend you in the security council, the Russians would love to play that role. And I think a lot of countries feel that’s not a bad ace in the hole to have. You at least want aligned with the Russians in case you need that kind of service.

So I think the Russians are gonna play their game, the Turks are gonna play their game. The Israelis have their own interests. They say the Iranians are very interested in, in maintaining some connection to Lebanon. So there are a lot of external players. And then the, the Qataris have their own relationship to both some of the Salifi groups and to the Turks and the Saudis have their own views.

So it ends up being a place, I mean, almost like, like Casablanca, right? In the movie. That’s sort of everything, everybody has agents, everybody messes around there. 

Zachary Karabell: We touched on Iran a little bit, but let’s go further East. Jump over Iraq. It is interesting by the way that Iraq is so undiscussed. I mean, I’m sure it’s, it’s discussed by people who are experts in the region. It’s kind of dropped off the radar of discussion strategically for most people and for most westerners, even though it remains, you know, just what it was, an oil producing major state with a lot of Iranian influence.

So the Iranian regime has been in western media worlds chronically, constantly on the verge of collapse, overthrow, protest, unpopularity, and it doesn’t seem to be that way. 

What is the reality of the resilience of the Iranian regime, contrary to expectations, desires, wishful thinking that it was on the verge of collapse at, at various points over the past 10 years?

Jon Alterman: You know, in my experience, authoritarian regimes fueled by oil are more resilient than you’d think because they not only have the coercive power of the state, but they have all the patronage money, they control the economy. Venezuela, the government is, Maduro’s, not the president of Venezuela ’cause he’s good. He’s the president of Venezuela ’cause he controls the economy, controls patronage. 

And the government of Iran has huge amounts of not only coercive power, but patronage power that it uses to maintain its control. When they had the Masini protest, they were protests, but they were spectacularly unorganized, disorganized.

It was sort of anti protest. It was, people weren’t gathering. There’s a lot of discontent. I think a lot of people are trying to vote with their feet. Talented people are trying to get the hell outta Dodge. If I can find any way to get a a Visa passport, get me outta here because I see no future for myself or my kids, but I’m not sure that this regime is, is going to have a revolution.

You know, partly because there are enough Iranians alive who remember the last time they had a revolution, in their mind, it didn’t turn out so well. It didn’t lead to greater liberalization. It led to much less liberalization. When I talk to people who’ve been in Iran and certainly the, the diplomatic, the foreign diplomatic corps in Iran is very pessimistic about where things are and where things will go.

They think ultimately this thing will collapse. What it will collapse into, unclear. It could be something run by the Revolutionary Guard. It could be sort of a mafia state without much of the religious window dressing. I’m not really sure how this all turns out. One thing I do wonder about in the longer term is how the energy transition really affects the Iranians, because while the Gulf states are really investing in human capital and investing in a time when they need a much more diversified economy, the Iranians aren’t.

And so I wonder if, if the Iranians are gonna encounter a moment where there’s sort of like Wile E. Coyote has run over the cliff. Legs keep spinning and suddenly they look down and there’s nothing below them and they fall down in a cloud of dust. If that happens, does the government of Iran behave better or worse with regard to the neighbors?

I don’t know. Guessing that, that they’re close to collapse, I think is sort of a losing game. But thinking through what does regional security look like over 10 or 20 years is a quite reasonable. Set of questions. The supreme leader is slowing down. He’s in his mid eighties, has been ailing, whether he’s replaced by his son, how much power his replacement would have, some people have said maybe it would be replaced by committee. 

There, there’s going to be a rejiggering of power in the Islamic Republic, whether it stays in Islamic Republic after that or not, it is unclear. But I think we’re gonna be looking at an Iran that is at least of a different coloration in 10 years, if not really different behavior, and hopefully it’ll be better behavior.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think Iran’s a good segue into the Trump administration, which we haven’t touched on yet. We’re filming this right before talks are set to occur between the Trump administration and Iran over the nuclear issue. But I wanted to ask you more generally, you know, we were talking about this before recording started.

What are the odds you think that the Trump administration can achieve some, some peace or achieve some things like a nuclear deal that the Biden administration hasn’t been able to accomplish?

Jon Alterman: I think you can certainly make an agreement with the Iranians. To my mind, the goal of the Iranians is to be in negotiations with the United States where the negotiations are getting attention, there’s stuff they can trade, they can sort of modulate what the relationship is. They can be more aggressive, less aggressive for the Iranians.

To my mind, the worst case scenario is being let alone in the corner while your economy’s deteriorating and nobody’s paying attention. And when the Americans are engaging and there’s stuff going on, I think the Iranians feel a sense of possibility. I worry that they have a lot more patience and attention to detail than the Trump administration is going to be able to summon.

The Iranians negotiators I’ve watched are really good at using time and manipulating urgency, and you have an Iranian team that has been negotiating over the nuclear program for two or three decades, and an American team that is coming to this fresh, and in many cases seems not to put a lot of stock in institutions and in the people who came before them.

So it’s hard for me to imagine, for example, that Steve Witkoff turned to somebody and said, now I want you to go through the Obama Administration’s negotiating record, and I want you to map out the kinds of offers the Iranians made and what they meant and where it went, and let’s, let’s figure out their game plan, right? I mean, sort of like football coaches studying the films. I don’t think Steve Witkoff has a team studying the films on the Iranians. I guarantee you the Iranians have very elaborate playbooks, not only from working with Americans, working with the Europeans, working with the IAEA, they know the playbooks. They know the language. They know what people fall for. They know what gets people excited. They know what gets people turned off. 

These guys are good and this is the most important strategic issue for Iran. it’s not the most important strategic issue for the United States, and I think that gives the Iranians a certain advantage. I think you can certainly be in a negotiation with the Iranians and good things can come out of it. It feels to me like the, the administration is a little bit overconfident that they can negotiate a much better outcome than anybody else could, just ’cause they’re good negotiators. And one of the challenges they’re gonna have as they’re negotiating is how do you keep the Iranians engaged and how do you keep the Israelis reassured?

‘Cause one of the things that could come from the outside lane is the Israelis become very agitated at where the negotiations are and they decide to disrupt them by some either direct military attack in Iran or having a, a military engagement with Iran that draws the United States into military engagement.

And for a Trump administration that really doesn’t want to get involved in war in the Middle East, it’s possible, possible that the negotiations lead to a set of circumstances where the Israelis draw the United States into an armed confrontation with the Iran and the Middle East. If that’s not what you want, then you’ve, you know, it makes, it’s, and that could come outta the negotiation.

So that’s another factor to engage, to think about as you’re engaging with Iranians. This is tricky stuff. Steve Witkoff, I think, is a very good negotiator in general, but the challenge of this is not just negotiating skill. The challenge of this is partly the Iranians and, and the difficulty of negotiating with Iranians, the difficulty of this issue, and it may be the world’s best negotiator just can’t arrive at a deal ’cause the problems are too hard.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, it’s clear the Trump administration doesn’t wanna use force except for bombing the Houthis, which seems to now be. What you do as an administration. ’cause Biden did this as well, and obviously the Saudis did it a lot. It’s like what you do when you want do something but don’t wanna do a lot.

Jon Alterman: We spent about a billion dollars bombing the Houthis and haven’t really changed their behavior substantially yet. Now, will we? 

I don’t know. There challenging target set and. To my mind, one of the, the biggest challenges of the Houthis is understanding their mindset and understanding their cost benefit analysis.

And one of the big benefits the Houthis get is to their population. It looks like they’re not only in a battle with the United States, they’re surviving a battle with the United States, which means they’re in the big leagues. You thought that we’re a miserable government that can’t supply food and water and, and services and all those things, but we’re in a war with the United States on behalf of the Palestinians, and we’re actually, we’re still fighting.

So we are a serious global power. This is the Houthis argument to Yemenis and I, I’m not sure the guys in in the White House, the guys in CENTCOM have totally figured out the Houthi mentality and the Houthi political game that keeps them in power in Yemen, I think there’s an assumption that they’re gonna fold.

But when I talk to people who are more familiar with Yemen, they say, this is what the Houthis want. They wanna be in a long, inconclusive battle with the United States because that elevates them.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think we’ve kind of did a tour here of all the big topics, but I was wondering if there’s anything, you know, with you looking at the Middle East now that is going on, that’s under the radar, but is certainly on your mind for one reason or another.

Jon Alterman: I’ve thought a lot about the, the energy transition and how that unfolds and how countries engage with it. I’ve thought a lot about the, the efforts of a number of countries in the Middle East, the Emiratis, the Saudis, to think through what world order is going to look like. And they’ve been talking a lot about their connections to the global south.

I think the Emiratis in particular have been trying to triangulate between the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese, and arguing that we can be close with all of them. And they are close with all of them and, and they kind of get away with it. So is that a harbinger of what the world looks like? I think, to me, a lot of these Gulf states look at Indian farm policy and they look at Minister Jaishankar, the the Minister of External Affairs, and they say he articulates what we think. 

But, but I think there’s something going on in the Middle East, especially among some of these Gulf states where they’re thinking about a different kind of relationship with the United States, a different kind of relationship with Russia, a different way of aligning in the world, and a way of deepening their ties to places like Africa where the, the Gulf Arrows are making huge investments for, for a whole set of reasons. But I, I think that the Middle East is a place that, to a remarkable degree, is looking beyond the period of American dominance and trying to figure out what it’s gonna look like while keeping the Americans involved in a security relationship with them.

I’ve done a whole bunch of China Middle East work, which is on the, the CSS website, which has certainly been interesting for the last 15 years. And look, and, and I think where young people are in the region is changing and it’s interesting and it’s, there’s a lot more individualism, there’s a lot more sort of people exploring what it is to, to, to have different kinds of relationships with authority.

I’m not sure where that goes. I don’t think it’s gonna go to an obvious place, but it, it does feel to me like this is a region that is in some degree of, of rethinking about how it’s gonna work. And I do think that the rules are being rewritten and part of the way they’re being rewritten is you’re having the government try to use social media as a means of control rather than as a means of expression.

And in some ways, satellite. I did a, a book on satellite television in the late nineties. That was just, you know, suddenly there are zillions of conversations out there where there only used to be state broadcasters. Now the states are trying to, to take over social media and shape social media, direct social media as a way not to keep, not to censor what people know, but to influence what people know.

I think all that is is in place. So it’s a very interesting, there’s a lot of interesting things going on. And it’s an interesting period of transition. 

Zachary Karabell: Foreign policy has been an area of real expertise in Washington. There has been a sort of a foreign policy community that has deepened and emerged, really starting in the sixties or the fifties, that in many ways, for a lot of time it wasn’t bipartisan per se. Right? But it was more of a community that articulated and tried to understand America’s national interest in the world, irrespective of whether it was a Republican president, Democratic president.

There was a little more interplay there. 

Jon Alterman: And there was a sense that politics should end at the water’s edge, right?

And that, that there should be an American interest and, and we certainly have a foreign service that serves whoever the president is. 

Zachary Karabell: I mean, it does seem certainly with Trump One and then Trump Two with the brief Biden interregnum, that expertise, that sense of like knowledge, you alluded to the, the negotiating team around Iran, the negotiating team around Iran may or may not have looked back and delved into the corpus of knowledge.

And I think that itself is just an an indication of a changing attitude toward expertise, expertise and experience. And so I wonder, you know, given that you’re in Washington at the epicenter of all this, do you feel like there is in fact going to be a more permanent change in how we make foreign policy?

Are there fewer people sort of coming up from schools that are really interested in it? I mean, obviously you and I know that a lot of traditional academic departments are not particularly interested in international relations, not particularly interested in that expertise, although you do have schools like SAIS at Johns Hopkins and SIPA Columbia and the Kennedy School, so you have kind of international relations professional schools.

I’m just wondering what you, what you feel about, you entered all this at a particular time where it seemed like the world was solved and then it wasn’t. Like, what’s the next generation going into this? Are they, are they dispirited? Is, just what does it look like in that sense as a profession?

Jon Alterman: So I think several things are going on. You know, one, one thing that always struck me, I have the, the Brzezinski chair at CSIS. I had the excellent advice when I got the chair. About 15 years ago that I should use it as an excuse to develop a relationship with Brzezinski, which I did. And we used to talk quite a bit and, and what was remarkable to me that, that Brzezinski and, and Henry Kissinger, who was a trustee of CSIS who I used to see several times a year, you know, they all came out of a knowledge base that was 19th and early 20th century European political history.

So if you were doing international relations, it sort of started with the, the revolutions of 1844. Right? And it, it continued through all the things that happened with Germany and Russia and all, but, but it was pretty contained and everybody was coming from the same fundamental pool of knowledge. Now when you’re talking about foreign policy, it is partly about Europe, it’s partly about technology. 

It’s part, I mean, the sort of the, the, the number of different kinds of expertise you need in the, in the room to say anything thoughtful about foreign policy has exploded. And so that’s one challenge I think makes things very different is that, that the focus is different.

You know, there is a move to Asia, but the different kinds of expertise that you need to have means there’s not an obvious preparation to be a, a foreign policy person the way there might have been, and even, you know, issues like public health, I mean, all kinds of folks who are involved in this discussion who never involved in the discussion 20 or 30 years ago.

The other thing that’s happening is just the explosion of easily accessible information, which is partly about the rise of, of, of Google. The ability to, to look up anything at any time. It’s partly about the explosion of social media. 

It’s partly about the explosion of emails. I don’t know how many you get. I get about 250 a day. People are sending emails all the time. They’re learning about things through email. There’s everything is going on in text every, say all this social media stuff for a long time, as a think tank, we’re competing against sleep. People just don’t have time to absorb it all. So how long a message should we be sending?

I can certainly write a 60 page report. Can I get any of the people I care about to read a 60 page report? The answer is absolutely not. Can I get them to read three pages? Probably not. So if you’re splitting up messages, how much are distilled messages that you’ve worked on for a long time? You say, okay, here’s what you really need to know.

How much of it periodically sending out little tidbits that accrue to something. A lot of it still, a lot of the influence comes not from what you do and say, but how you use that to get legitimacy to then be in a room with somebody who has a decision to make. So I think a lot of it is changing, but to me the most important thing is that there used to be a conversation and now there’s a cacophony.

Huge numbers of actors, huge numbers of topics, huge numbers of focuses, and everybody in government, everybody in government is drinking from a huge fire hose. You have all the unclassified stuff and then all the classified stuff, and it’s just too much for brains to handle, and that’s become completely the norm.

And the question becomes, how do you keep people from saying, well, none of it matters. I’ll just pick and choose what I like. And sometimes it feels like, like there are people who say, as long as I can find some justification, that’s enough. And when you get to that point of view, I think we’re in a very different place.

Zachary Karabell: So Jon, I want to thank you for your time today and your wise and thoughtful commentary about a region that seems chaotic and in flux, although, frankly, much of the world is chaotic and in flux. So the particularities of the Middle East being that versus the rest of the world, seem smaller than they might have been at other periods of time.

There’s also a degree of kind of positive foment and stability and change in a way that is, I find rather heartening, in spite of the optics of what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and maybe what’s going on in Syria. So there’s, you know, it’s, it’s more of a mixed bag and as usual, the headlines are dominated by the negative.

They’re dominated by the conflict, they’re dominated by the crisis and all the things that could go wrong. But as we’ve talked about here, there’s other things going on, and I like the ending of the changing nexus of how policy is made and expertise. Not necessarily the decline thereof. So I wanna thank you.

I wanna urge everyone to read Jon’s many writings either on the CSIS site or wherever they appear and.

Jon Alterman: And listen to my podcast, Babel: Translating the Middle East. 

Zachary Karabell: Babel. Absolutely. That’s, that was the plug we were gonna give, so definitely do that as well. And thank you for your time. 

Jon Alterman: Thank you, Zach. Thank you, Emma. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, thank you, Jon. 

Our discussion of foreign policy turned into a discussion of information overload and that even foreign policy experts are suffering from the same quandary that ordinary people are.

I find that a little bit alarming, like you’d think, I don’t know. I perhaps had an idea in my brain that people in Jon’s position would have found a way to. Trim down on the fat or like cut through the noise, but it just seems like everybody is in the same cesspool or whirlpool of information that we are all in.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Hopefully it’s more of a whirlpool and. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. 

Zachary Karabell: That may be one reason why you have fewer experts and more just people who claim to be informed making foreign policy. I mean you, you certainly see that in the Trump administration. Truly the Biden administration was much more of a throwback to 20th century Mandarin experts making policy.

And I think the question going forward is gonna be, is Trump One and Two a new mold or just a pause in an old mold? And none of us know that. I, look, there’s a lot of people who do believe that the foreign policy establishment writ large made a lot of mistakes that are part of the reason for the pickle that we’re in and that you shouldn’t be looking back romantically at that because between the Iraq war and thing after thing after thing, obviously Afghanistan, maybe the way we dealt with China, that there’s not, it hasn’t like covered itself in glory in a way that you should mourn its passing. This has nothing to do with Jon and expertise. This is just sort of a, sort of a generalized comment about the foreign policy community in Washington and its feed whoever feeds into it, so it’ll, it will be interesting to see where that goes, obviously. Again, whether the Trump period is a break or just a pause.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, I mean, it’s interesting to me because it’s like whether Trump is really a new mold, I would say like the Trump’s first term was new mold, new moldy, new mold ish. Um, but Trump’s second term seems to me like there’s not a dramatic departure between what Trump is doing and what Biden did. I mean, we’re still sending a bunch of money and weapons to Israel.

We are still bombing Yemen. You know, I, I don’t really see that there’s much of a breakaway there. We are early days, but. 

Zachary Karabell: Well, the breakaway clear is. Is economic policy, which weirdly enough has not usually been what the foreign policy community makes, even though it has total implications. And that too is, I mean, that’s an interesting subject for another conversation in that the most dramatic thing that Trump is doing in foreign policy is economic policy.

And the way Washington is structured, economic policy was always a second fiddle to foreign policy. Like you never had an economic person on the NSC. You didn’t, it, like it wasn’t part of the inner circle of national security, the commerce secretary, right. Howard Lutnick is front and center about tariff policy, like commerce.

Secretaries were never front and center about anything. It started having a little bit more with Biden and Gina Raimondo, but like Commerce secretaries were what you gave the, you know, usually the guy who you wanted to reward, but send. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Don’t put ’em on tv. 

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Not exactly. Intelligent genetic. Yeah. 

Zachary Karabell: So you know that that’s a real shift in that the most dramatic thing is economics, not not foreign policy.

Yeah. Anyway. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s a good point. 

Zachary Karabell: Good discussion. I encourage all of you to pay attention to Jon’s writings and to his podcast. He really is a unusually informed and sober voice, and it was great to have him. Thank you all for listening once again to our What Could Go Right longer podcast.

Please tune into the shorter form Progress Report where we highlight news of the week and send us your comments, your complaints, your criticisms, your thoughts, and we will digest and integrate them. 

Thank you to Podglomerate for producing, Emma for co-hosting, and all of you for your time, and we’ll be back with you next week.