Talking Geopolitics

Jacob L. Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari make sense of the numerous geopolitical developments that occurred in the world's most volatile region this week. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am joined this week by Kamran Bokhari, thanks for joining us Kamran.

Kamran Bokhari: Good to be here.

JLS: What we’re going to do this week is we’re going to try and sort out some of the mess that’s been going on in the Middle East. It’s been a very chaotic week in the Middle East and we thought we’d take a step back and try to explain it to listeners in about 30 or 40 minutes. It’s a tall task but we’ll see how we go.

Kamran, I think the first thing that you might be able to help out with our listeners understanding is understanding a little bit more about the history of Qatar – the history of Qatar’s relationships in the region, how it’s always sort of been on the outside looking in – but what exactly Saudi Arabia, and the states that Saudi Arabia’s convinced to go along with this diplomatic isolation of Qatar, are seeing that upsets them so much.

KB: So ever since 1995, when the father of the current emir of Qatar took power, his name was Sheikh Hamad Al Thani, and he actually overthrew his father in ’95 and ousted him and took power. Qatar has been on a strange trajectory. I say strange because it’s not normal for the Arab world or more specifically the Persian Gulf Arab world, the Khaleejis, to behave in this way. I am referring to an openness for lack of a better term. I mean Al Jazeera was started by the current emir’s father and it became sort of the standard bearer of 24/7 news in the Arab world. That made a lot of traditional Arab leaders, both Republican regimes and of course the monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia, very, very uncomfortable because it was not the way that they had ran their political economies. There’s no concept of having discourse.

But to make matters worse this new regime post-1995 began with a very what I would call pragmatic approach to the region. It could afford to do because it is the world’s largest LNG exporter, that brings in a lot of money. The population, those who are Qatari nationals, is very small – less than 300,000 people. In fact, there are more expats in that country, which is also true for a number of other GCC states.

But in the case of Qatar, what happened is that this allowed for the regime to flirt with all sorts of radical political forces ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to more radical elements along the Islamist spectrum. And even give air time to what we used to call secular left-wing Arab nationalists and it began a policy of opening to Iran, developing a relationship that was out of step with the GCC consensus, if you will. And steering towards an independent foreign policy. And a lot of people say, Qatar has been punching above its weight when it comes to foreign policy. It’s a tiny, little state. But it’s been trying to play major league geopolitics. That’s a fair assessment. But I would say that the Qataris are cut from a different cloth if we are to compare them to the rest of the Arab regimes.

JLS: Yes, although I think one thing that you perhaps left out was that there’s a regional headquarters for U.S. Central Command in Qatar and that Qatar is for all intents and purposes it’s sort of in the U.S. camp in the region, or generally has been. And that the U.S. has been able to use Qatar at times in order to have unofficial dialogue with some of these groups that are considered beyond the pale for normal political discourse, right?

KB: Absolutely, that’s important to note that when Qatar is reaching out to these unsavory characters, from the point of view of the region and the international community, it’s not doing so in defiance of the West, it’s doing so in concert with its great power ally, the United States. And mind you, that base at Al Udeid where the U.S. Central Command has a major hub in the region, in fact, the regional hub is based in Qatar of Central Command, and that happened after 9/11 and the decision of the United States government, the Bush administration, to pull out of Saudi Arabia. There was a huge base in Saudi Arabia, and Qatar offered space so it was just a minor relocation.

At the same time, there are relations between the Qatari government and Israel. There are a lot of rumors about the nature of it. Nobody officially denies or rejects it. But it’s well known that there’s some form of relationship there. So, Qatar has been reaching out to all sorts of entities and Qatar is the one Arab state that also sees eye-to-eye with Turkey in the region. And so it’s had a really diversified foreign policy portfolio.

JLS: I want to bring it back to Turkey in a minute but I’ll just ask one more thing about Qatar which is that you know you’ve pointed out that they’ve always been reaching out to these different groups and they’ve always had a more independent foreign policy. I think that one of the things that we were discussing internally was that it was very hard to read whether Qatar had simply done something that had gone too far beyond the pale for Saudi Arabia or whether this had sort of been planned for a while and that this is really more of a reflection of the Saudis weakening and not being willing to tolerate Qatar breaking ranks.

I noticed recently that Qatar actually asked a lot of people from Hamas, who nominally are based in Qatar, to leave. And it seems like Qatar has actually done some things and has been very open to trying to solve of this diplomatic spat, especially in terms of the United States. So do you think that Qatar actually did something, that it flirted with Iran in a serious way, that both Saudi Arabia and even perhaps the United States didn’t mind Saudi Arabia sort of dinging Qatar on the head and saying, nah, that’s too far? Or do you think that this really has more to do with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia trying to consolidate control at the diplomatic level in the same way that Saudi Arabia wasn’t going to tolerate internal unrest in a country like Bahrain in 2011?

KB: I think it’s the latter. I don’t see the Qataris doing anything new. The Iranian relationship has been there, there’s more made out of it in terms of the public discourse than there is actually. The whole idea of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, that’s old stuff, that’s been going along for a long time.

I haven’t seen anything fresh that would suggest that the Qataris crossed some sort of red line. I think it’s a lingering dispute and if we go back to 2014, for the better part of that year, the Saudis and the Bahrainis and the UAE, they downgraded diplomatic relations in that year in the spring. And it was not until the fall that they had an agreement of sorts, which was never made public, but according to the reports Qatar had agreed to scale back its involvement with all these groups and not encourage them to where that damaged the interests of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and others.

And so, I think that that’s a long-standing dispute and I think that now Saudi Arabia is getting desperate because things are not going well for Saudi Arabia. And the last thing it wants is one of its own GCC members doing things that undermine its collective efforts. So, number one, and I think this is foremost, is Iran. If you go back to the Trump visit that was like three weeks ago to Riyadh and there was a gala event attended not just by Middle Eastern leaders but also from the wider Muslim majority countries. It was very clear that Saudi Arabia had finally got the United States to where it wants to be. Remember that under the Obama administration, the Saudis had a terrible relationship with Washington. Under Trump, they know think that they now have Washington where they want it to be and they want to move forward in isolating Iran. And Qatari dealings with Iran really poke holes into the Saudi strategy.

So, I think that this is a case of the Saudis not being able to take it anymore and saying you know enough is enough. If the Qataris are not behaving, we have to up the pressure to twist their arm.

JLS: Yeah and I think this is a move that could really backfire on Saudi Arabia. You already see it backfiring a little bit in the sense that they were able to assemble an impressive coalition of countries in this diplomatic offensive against Qatar, but they have not really been able to extend the diplomatic offensive outside of its immediate vicinity and outside of those countries that are immediately dependent on it. And even some of the other GCC states have not gone along to the same extent that Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and the others have gone to.

But you bring up good points with Iran and Turkey and this is another reason why I think this might backfire on the Saudis, which is because if Qatar is looking at this and if Qatar is trying to establish some kind of independence of action, Saudi Arabia is really on a downward slope. Especially when you consider that oil prices right now are continuing to go down and that Saudi has basically proven ineffective in getting the price of oil to come back up and that really is the source of Saudi power.

Qatar, as you said, has a close relationship with Turkey. Qatar as you also said also has a closer relationship with Iran than perhaps any of the other Arab countries in the region. You brought up the specific point of the fact that Qatar and Turkey have seen eye to eye for a while right now. I know that there’s a lot of stuff there in terms of the political ideology that both Qatar and Turkey favor that you can shed some light on. So how about you go a little bit more in depth into how Turkey and Qatar see the region in the same way, and what is the way in which they’ve been trying to reshape the region, not just recently but for many years now?

KB: From the point of view of the Qataris, they’re not so much in ideological sync with the Islamists, they take a more pragmatic view. Unlike Egypt, unlike Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab states, the Qataris say, look, you know we can’t dial the clock back. And what do I mean by that is that the Saudis are using tools that used to be effective back in the day, pre-Arab Spring, where there was no opposition of any sorts to the regimes in the region.

And Qatar looks at that and says that thing, that tool kit, that approach is useless because it only makes matters worse. Qatar says, look, these forces, the Hamases of this world, the Muslim Brotherhoods of this world, they are a reality and we can’t wish them away and we can’t suppress them because it only makes matters worse and we need to somehow reach out to them in order for, and this is based on my conversations with Qatari officials over the years, their view is that these are realities and if we don’t control them, if we just leave them to their own devices, then they will do things that will undermine the interests of the region and the security of the regimes. So it’s sort of flipping the Saudi argument on its head. The Saudis say well you need to keep them under lock and key and that’s the way to go.

As far as Turkey is concerned, Turkey is more ideologically in tune with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas because the ruling AKP party comes from an Islamist heritage although it’s not an Islamist party, its roots lie in Islamism. So there’s a meeting of minds. And Qatar realizes that it’s a small country and the rest of the Arab states are not really getting it. And they realize that if there’s going to be a counterweight to Iran, it’s going to be Turkey. And the Qataris have accepted the fact that the Arabs do not have any intrinsic power of their own in the region and therefore they must piggyback on Turkey and hence that relationship. So it’s a convergence of interests and ideas.

JLS: Yeah, although I want to push back a little bit because I think you’re right that Qatar reaches out to a lot of different groups that other countries in the region and most countries in the world wouldn’t do business with, right? But I don’t think when it comes to more Muslim Brotherhood-oriented groups that Qatar sees them sort of as redheaded stepchildren that it’s going to let into Qatar. I think there, Qatar has actually more of an affinity to some of those groups and has used some of those groups in order to push Qatar’s influence throughout the region, which is why I suggested that perhaps Turkey and Qatar see more eye to eye ideologically. Do you think I am taking that too far or would you agree with that assessment?

KB: I think that your argument has some merit to it, and actually a lot of merit to it, but when I was saying ideologically I was meaning the ideology of the ruling family or the regime in Qatar. They’re not Islamists. They don’t share those ideologies. If you go to Qatar you know it’s fairly Westernized and it’s fairly open and so it’s not necessarily Islamist but they see these actors as, what you just said, tools to pursue their foreign policy agenda, to be able to have influence.

And in my conversations, I did feel that the Qataris really believe that there is no way around these actors. Qatar has sort of, in a self-styled manner, appropriated this task of bringing reconcilable – what they call reconcilable – Islamists to the mainstream. And so that’s also a foreign policy offering that Doha sort of says that this what we can do for the world. And they find reception in circles in Washington. Back in 2013, the United States Department of Defense dealt with certain Islamist factions within the Syrian rebel landscape in order to find common ground because of the fear that we’re not going to get secular Syrian nationalists under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. And that was mediated by Qatar. And if you look at the Taliban relationship, clearly that was very openly Qatar helping the United States deal with the Taliban. It didn’t go too far because of other complications, but nonetheless, it’s a great example of how Qatar is trying to say: this is our value proposition that we bring to this region and to great powers who are stakeholders in this region.

JLS: Yes, although the flip side of that is it means Qatar is playing with fire. I mean I really, I was really struck by what you said that the ruling family is not Islamist. But that Qatar thinks of using the Islamist groups as tools in order to develop Qatar’s power or to protect Qatar’s position. I cannot think of a more secular entity that used Islamists that didn’t have the Islamists come back to bite them in the end.

We have seen over and over and over, whether it was the United States, whether it was Saudi Arabia, whether it was Turkey, it doesn’t really matter if the country itself was Muslim or if it’s Western or not. It’s very, very difficult to control Islamist groups once they get going. So the idea that Qatar is going to be able to use these Islamist groups when they want to use them and is not going to face backlash from them, especially because Qatar is playing such a dual game and is really dealing with all sides. It seems to me that that’s, I don’t want to say shortsighted and I don’t even say it’s not going to work. I just can’t think of another example of that actually working in the long term for a country’s foreign policy. Can you come up with any examples?

KB: I can’t, and you are absolutely right. I mean this is almost like they are holding up and trying to balance two parallel universes. And it’s difficult. But I think that, if we look at it geopolitically, from their point of view, they have no other choice. They have to do this and I think what gives them a bit of hope is that they’re a small country. They have enough money to where people don’t indulge in politics so this is not going to undermine them domestically anytime soon.

But yes, for the region, this could all blow up in their face. And I actually believe that it will. Because there’s just no way, given the scale of chaos in the region, that somehow the Qataris will be able to fine tune these Islamist proxies to where they will live in a Muslim democracy of sorts. I just don’t see that happening. So you are absolutely right. I don’t disagree with that. I was just trying to explain the perspective of the Qataris.

JLS: Yeah, but that also explains the perspective of not just the Saudis but even the Emiratis and Bahrain and some of these other groups, for whom, they see Qatar messing around with the Islamists and are sort of asking themselves what on Earth are you doing? We’ve already seen what happens when we mess with these things and now is a time to close ranks and tighten up against this, not to invite them into our own space.

But that’s a good segue way into a second…

KB: I just want to point out one thing and for our listeners, the UAE making this case is more genuine. But the Saudis accusing the Qataris of doing this is like the kettle calling the pot black or vice versa. The Saudis are still playing with this fire, so they don’t have the argument. So yes, they are not with Hamas, they’re not with the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are the biggest exporter of Salafism and jihadism on the planet.

JLS: Yes, and it’s a good segue way into you know sort of the other major developments that have been changing things in the Middle East this week, which is ISIS, which Saudi Arabia you know you can’t directly prove that they had a role in helping ISIS develop, but certainly Saudi Arabia and some of the groups that it was funding and some of the things that it was doing when it was involved in Syria supporting different proxies, had a role in the Islamic State coming to the prominence that it has. But you know we saw two major things from the Islamic State this week.

We saw, first of all, that the Islamic State is finally coming under some serious existential pressure in its self-declared caliphate. Raqqa has really been the capital and center and focal point of ISIS operations, but you’ve got the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are made up mostly of Syrian Kurds under the YPG group (there are so many acronyms here that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of) but we’ll say the SDF, those are the Syrian Kurds and they are U.S. backed, and then we’ve also seen, surprisingly, the Syrian army has been moving on multiple fronts to get closer to Raqqa. The result of all this is that the Islamic State’s position in Raqqa is pretty weak and we’ve seen them pulling back and we’ve seen some relative successes for the U.S.-backed forces as they get closer to the city.

That was one major development we saw this week. And then the other major development was really the unprecedented IS attack they claimed in Iran. So, I want to tackle both of those things. Maybe let’s start with the second one first because I know you were looking at this very closely. Talk about why this is such a big deal and why this isn’t just another ISIS terrorist attack in the region. What are the greater implications of ISIS hitting Iran the way that they did?

KB: I would begin by saying that this is not something that ISIS just sort of said – oh, well I want to attack Iran tomorrow and let’s do it. This is something that speaks to the sophistication, especially as an intelligence entity, of ISIS. The Islamic State has been cultivating these assets for a while, and not just in Iran. We see this happening in as far-flung areas as the Philippines as well. So this is something that’s been in the works for a while.

They’ve devoted a certain amount of resources to this project. I suspect that over the years that they’ve been based in Iraq and they’ve had proximity to Iran that they were cultivating this. And they saw an opening in Kurdistan, and I am talking about the Iranian province of Kurdistan, and there’s more than one province where Iranian Kurds live and they’re mostly Sunni and over the years what I’ve learned is that is Salafism and even jihadist ideology has made its way into the Iranian Kurdish community. And the Kurds are, there’s an alienation that they feel, as an ethnic community as well, from Tehran and there is this sort of deep resentment that ISIS really exploited and was able to set up at least this cell. I suspect that this isn’t just one cell. There are probably others that ISIS has in its tool kit and will activate at some point in the future, so this is not the last attack in Iran.

But what is significant is that Iran is not an Arab state. One of the biggest sectors of the Iranian state is the security sector. There are multiple organizations that deal with security. You know in my visit to Iran, I noticed these guys working firsthand, and they’re obsessed with security. They’re obsessed with security because they fear Israeli penetration, U.S. penetration, Saudi penetration and so this is not an open, if you will, arena where ISIS could just jump in and say, you know, we’re gonna send in suicide bombers. It had to do a lot of work to be able to penetrate that and that speaks to ISIS’ capabilities and sophistication.

As for the implications, I mean look, ISIS has gamed all of these things out. We tend to look in the open sources, when you read stuff there is this assumption that somehow these are all sort of disconnected attacks that are not linked to some strategic objective. And at Geopolitical Futures, that’s what we talk about is, we can’t look at events as sort of randomly taking place or taking place as some entity hates another entity.

There is a strategic objective. The strategic objective of ISIS is to, a) survive, especially now that it’s under pressure, that you just mentioned. You know it’s in the process of losing Raqqa. It’ll take a long time, but that process has begun. At the same time, so there’s that threat but there’s also an opportunity. The opportunity is that the sectarian temperature in the region is at an all-time high and this would explain the timing of this attack.

ISIS would like nothing more than for Iran and Saudi Arabia to go at each other because, a) it gives them some form of respite. You know, they’re not the focus, and it undermines the struggle against ISIS. And b) it creates more opportunity for ISIS to exploit. The more there’s sectarianism, the more the Saudis go and fight with Iran and vice versa, the more space there is for ISIS to grow. So I think that this attack in Iran has very deep implications moving forward.

JLS: Those are all good points and I want to draw special attention to one of the points you made and then ask you to play what you’re saying forward a little bit. First thing, I just want to point out is that you were talking about the Iranian Kurds and how they had somehow been radicalized and there was a sense of disenchantment, or disenchantment is probably not even strong enough, but an antagonism with the current regime in Tehran.

And I just want to point out that it’s very difficult to speak of the Kurds as a monolith. I think often times people say the word the Kurds and they think of you know just all the Kurds in the Middle East and they’re all the same. But we really have to think of in terms of – there are Kurds in Iran, there are Kurds in Iraq, there are Kurds in Syria, there are Kurds in Turkey. They have different religious affiliations, different ideological affiliations, sometimes are speaking different languages that are almost unintelligible to each other. So I try very hard in my writing and when I am speaking about these types of things to be very specific about when I am talking about the Kurds and I thought one of the things you did there was you brought up was just how complicated that situation is and that, of course, has relevance throughout the region.

We saw that the Iraqi Kurds and the Kurdistan Regional Government are talking about an independence referendum and maybe we can get to that in a little bit. But you gave a really good explanation of why this is extremely important from Iran’s perspective. But what do you think Iran is going to do? What response does this mean Iran is going to have to make? What is the next step for Iran both in terms of, you know, Qatar, which it had some sort of relationship with and it can certainly see this diplomatic offensive led by Saudi Arabia as a diplomatic move against Iran, and then second of all this move by ISIS. What are the practical concrete things that Iran is going to have to do to respond here in the next couple weeks?

KB: With regards to Qatar, what we have is a situation where its own GCC allies, its fellow Arab states, have shunned Doha. And so Doha right now needs a lot of friends. The United States has not de-aligned from Qatar and joined the Saudi bandwagon, so that’s good. It’s forging some sort of a relationship today, the Qatari foreign minister is in Moscow, so there’s a Russian angle to that as well. We’ve already talked about Turkey.

At this stage, it wouldn’t hurt, necessarily, for Qatar to reach out or benefit from Iranian assistance, but it has to be very careful. It doesn’t want to do something with Iran or get too close, especially now, and give a bigger stick to the Saudis with which Riyadh can beat Doha. And so, I think from a Qatari point of view, it’s essential that they strike a balance when it comes to Iran.

Conversely the Iranians, this is a great opening. And they would like to exploit this to the extent that it is possible. But I think that the Iranians are no illusion as to their limitations. They know that – they’ll milk this for whatever it’s worth. But they’re not under the illusion that somehow Qatar will join them and be part of their camp. That’s actually taking it too far. I don’t think that they can rely on Qatar. But from the Iranian point of view, so long as Qatar is at odds and defying Saudi Arabia, that’s good enough. They don’t need more from Qatar and they will milk that to the extent that it is possible.

As far as ISIS is concerned, I think that there are two things here. One is that both of them will benefit ISIS, both moves that the Iranians make will benefit ISIS. First is that there is an imperative for the government, for the security establishment, to make sure that this doesn’t happen again or at least begin to neutralize, before it grows. There’s a sizeable Sunni population in Iran. It’s not just the Kurds, there’s a sizeable Turkmen population in the northeast near Turkmenistan and there are some of the Arabs, not a majority, but a minority of the Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, the Ahwazi Arabs as they are called. They are, a minority of them and a significant one, are Sunnis as well.

And then you have the big province in the southeast, that’s Sistan and Baluchistan, and that province is majority Sunni and ethnically Baluch and already has a jihadist problem and there’s cross-border terrorism that takes place where Baluch jihadist rebels go to Pakistan and then you know from there they have a sanctuary that they come in and they strike at the Iranian security forces. They’ve been pretty successful over the years in killing some very high-ranking IRGC commanders.

So from Iran’s point of view, this is a lot of vulnerability. So the Sunnis are suspect right now after what happened. I mean it’s not easy and I’ve been to the Khomeini shrine and I can tell you that it’s not something, it’s not just a cake walk that you can get in there and do all this kind of stuff, let alone parliament. And so from the Iranian point of view, they feel very terrified right now because they used to think they’re safe. And this is sort of really a wake-up call for them. So they’re gonna go after the Sunnis. The more they go after the Sunnis, the more they are gonna create resentment, not just within their borders, but sectarian tensions are going to rise. And ISIS is going to say, see we told you, and they will have more recruits to go fight the “evil” Iranians and the “evil” Shiites.

But at the same time, the Iranians do not think that this is ISIS alone. They deeply believe, at least their security establishment, and I saw a report yesterday where the Iranian intelligence minister was urging caution, saying, let’s not jump to conclusions and let’s not accuse the Saudis just yet. Let the investigation finish.

But the security establishment and the hawks are convinced that there is, even though ISIS is involved, that there is a Saudi footprint in this attack and they’ll give you evidence and they’ll point to Saudi intent to undermine their country. And so they’re gonna go after Saudi Arabia. They’re gonna retaliate. It’s horrible to predict another bombing, but if a bomb went off inside Saudi Arabia, I would not be surprised that it, you know, Iran somehow retaliated in that shape or form. I am not sure if it will. But I’m just saying that if it does that, then I wouldn’t be surprised, because the Iranians, they’re not going to just accept this. They have to retaliate and respond. The more they retaliate, they set into motion, they trigger a broader conflict. I am not saying the two sides are going to go to war, but it’s going to an ugly proxy battle at least in the immediate future.

JLS: In many ways, that proxy battle has already been going on. I think what you are talking about is going to be a real worsening of the situation and unfortunately, that’s the way things are going in the Middle East right now. The last thing I want to touch on before we break is the Islamic State, because we’ve sort of been talking about them in a roundabout way when we talk about all these other issues, but for a long time, the Islamic State, and when I say long time I mean maybe the past two or three years, the Islamic State really has been the center of gravity I think in the Middle East. And I think one of the reasons we’re seeing all of these things happening on the periphery is that the force of IS as the center of gravity is actually weakening because IS itself is actually weakening.

Now I know that that doesn’t mean that ISIS is going to disappear, but I think it does mean that the Islamic State as a strong territorial entity that can threaten some of the different states in the region from a conventional point of view, is actually weakening. So can you talk a little bit about what it means for the Islamic State to have come under such pressure at its capital in Raqqa and what Islamic State’s activities are going to look like going forward? We know they’re going to pull back a little bit and try and get strength in numbers and some strategic depth but ultimately they are outnumbered and they’re outgunned. So they’re probably going to have to go back to some tactics of blending back into the population and waiting really for a lot these sectarian dynamics that we’re talking about right now to overwhelm the region once more so that they can take advantage of the power vacuum.

KB: So I would compare what is happening to ISIS to what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. They lost the cities, and for a while, they were an incoherent entity, but they weren’t decimated or eliminated, they just were lying low. And they were slowly rebuilding themselves. And now they are at a point where – and I would say it’s not just now, it’s been the case all along, at least since 2003 – that they exist in ungoverned spaces outside the cities. See we have this perception that if you don’t hold a city then you’re not a serious player. That may be true at one level, but at another level, it just means that you are operating in an area where the good guys can’t project power, at least not effectively, and you exist.

So I think – I don’t see necessarily just ISIS devolving into an insurgent movement or a terrorist organization – I think that the so-called caliphate is going to shift into a rural area. And this is not something that is a setback from an ISIS point of view, because I don’t think that ISIS ever believed – I mean it’s a serious player and they’ve been here before, it was not as big as what they have, I mean I’m talking about their holdings, but in Iraq, they have been driven out of cities before. They’ve been in the desert, in the rural areas, only to come back because the underlying political, economic, social circumstances really don’t get addressed and its enemies start fighting with each other, providing the room for ISIS to once again revive itself.

I think that it remains to be seen how quickly ISIS can be pushed out of Raqqa, pushed out of Deir al-Zour, into the desert. And even when it does go there, it’s going to still have a space and the time to continue its activities, perhaps not as effectively as it has since Mosul. I think that ISIS knew this would come, ISIS did not believe that – you know, now they have Mosul, now they have Raqqa, now they have Deir al-Zour – that they’re not going to see reversals. I think theirs is a very long game and they will go back and forth. And so I think that we need to be cautious when we talk about progress against ISIS.

JLS: Is there anything that can be done to solve the underlying political and social circumstances that create ISIS and give ISIS fuel to continue running?

KB: That would require the Iranians and the Saudis sitting at a table sharing drinks and having food, and you know that’s not happening. So, if that’s not happening, and I don’t think that there’s any power on Earth that can fix those underlying sectarian tensions. I mean if you just look at the Sunnis in Iraq. I mean, there’s this big euphoria about how Mosul is no longer in ISIS hands. And I’m saying, well that is true and it is a victory and an important one. But I’m looking at a year, two years, three years down the line.

The Sunnis are completely a shattered community in Iraq. They fight with each other. ISIS existed because there’s no Sunni core, no Sunni mainstream in Iraq. Ωnd they’re losing territory, especially now if the Kurds are moving towards independence, they’ll lose territory to the Kurds. They have already lost ground to the Shiites.

This is probably the first time, the price of removing ISIS from Mosul is Shiite control over Iraq’s second largest city, which was majority Sunni and a majority of Sunnis and Kurds. Now you have a Shiite-dominated military force along with militias that are going to make sure that ISIS doesn’t come back, and they’re going to engage in some very brutal activities. And that’s going to pour you know gasoline on the fire of sectarianism that’s already burning. And that’s, from an ISIS point of view, another opportunity to exploit and they’re looking forward to it. And that’s sort of the irony in all of this.

JLS: Well it’s not a hopeful note to end the week on but unfortunately, it’s the reality. Thank you for joining us Kamran, and thank you, everyone, for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, I encourage you to visit us at geopoliticalfutures.com. I also encourage you to email us with comments, critiques, suggestions for topics and anything else you want. You can just email us at [email protected]. I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis, and we’ll see you out here next week.

Xander Snyder and Jacob Shapiro get down to specifics in what a potential war would look like, and ask each other why the US always seems to fight its wars in the same place. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, welcome again to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis. Xander Snyder, one of our analysts, is joining me again today to talk this week. Xander, how’s it going?

Xander Snyder: It’s going well Jacob, how are you?

JLS: I’m doing alright. We’ve been very busy at Geopolitical Futures. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world and the first thing we wanted to do was follow up – George joined us on the podcast last week to talk a little bit about certain indications that we’re seeing in terms of a potential U.S. strike on North Korea in the coming weeks.

The USS Nimitz, which was in port in Washington state, actually left yesterday and is headed for the Western Pacific. There were some reports that the USS Vincent, which is actually currently off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, might be leaving the area, but as of now it doesn’t seem like it has left. The USS Vincent and the USS Reagan actually had some joint drills yesterday where they actually lined up next to each other and were doing things. So tensions still remain pretty high on the Korean Peninsula.

So we thought we would talk about a study really that Xander led with us here at Geopolitical Futures which looked at what a potential military conflict looks like between North Korea and the United States. Xander, I know a lot people are thinking about missiles and nuclear weapons, but one of the points that your piece made that I found particularly informative was that there’s actually a lot of other variables here that if there is a conflict will become much more important.

And I think artillery was one of the ones that you focused on most closely. How about you lay out for listeners here why it’s so important to think about artillery when we’re talking about a potential military conflict between North Korea and the United States.

XS: Sure. Well, like you mentioned, a lot of the headlines in the news really focus on ballistic missile development, nuclear warheads, nuclear tests and missile tests, right? That’s what has been going on lately that’s been receiving the most attention.

However, North Korea has a really conventional military, and a lot of this is rounded out by something like 21,000 artillery guns that it has, a combination of tube shell artillery guns which is generally what you think of when you think of artillery guns like big World War II cannons, you know stuff that’s actually firing shell. And then they also have another type of artillery device called multiple rocket launchers or MRLs, which is exactly what it sounds like so instead of firing a shell, it fires rockets of different sorts.

And this is important because basically since the end of the Korean War, North Korea has been amassing this conventional arsenal and Seoul, one of South Korea’s major cities, sits within range of a lot of these weapons that are stationed on the Demilitarized Zone. So the reason this piece focused not entirely on artillery but largely is because North Korea is able to maintain a fairly substantial threat against a major U.S. ally, against South Korea, using normal weapons, not nuclear weapons, not ballistic missiles.

JLS: Yeah it’s an important point, and it also dictates what a potential U.S. strike is going to look like against North Korea, right? Because it can’t just be that the U.S. is going to go in and pinprick certain nuclear sites with whatever big bombs that it has in its arsenal. One of the points you made is that the U.S. is going to have to also devise a strategy for knocking out a lot of this artillery to try and protect Seoul from the inevitable backlash that would come from the North Koreans.

XS: Exactly. In the event of a U.S. strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities, essentially two battles begin. The first is the attempt by the United States to eliminate the North’s nuclear capabilities while at the same time minimizing the amount of damage that can be done to Seoul and other populous centers in the north of South Korea, mainly with the North’s conventional artillery force. So both of these battles will be waged at the same time.

Now the U.S. would engage in a first strike because of the nuclear program, because if North Korea were to develop a ruggedized nuclear warhead that could be affixed to a ballistic missile that would be a threat that would be intolerable because even right now some of the North’s ballistic missiles could reach U.S. allies, and in time, the threat is they could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, an ICBM, that could reach the U.S.

So, this would be the reason the U.S. would strike, however at the same time, the U.S. would have to find a way to either on its own or cooperating with South Korea essentially neutralize the threat of that artillery as quickly as possible. And the reason that the piece focused so much on artillery was because the North would not need to launch any sort of major ground infantry invasion at the outset of hostilities in order to pose a major threat. The artillery can actually reach quite a long way as it is.

JLS: Yeah and I think this actually brings up one of the things – some listeners who are familiar with war and who study war will be more familiar with this but other listeners who are not – the issue of artillery really brings up one of the most important parts of talking about military activities that is often overlooked, which is simple things like logistics. So you spend a lot of time in the piece discussing not just what kind of artillery they have and what the potential moves of the actors are going to be but also where the stockpiles of ammunition are and what that means about North Korea’s ability to communicate across its firing lines and to actually make its attacks effective and to protect itself against the types of strikes that the U.S. is going to use to try and take out those artilleries. So can you talk a little bit about also specifically the issue of ammunition and how some of the resources that you found indicated some of what’s going to happen if the strike does indeed happen?

XS: In the piece, what we tried to show is one potential way or several considerations that can be made that can constrain the conflict to look or to behave in a certain way if it were to actually break out. But as we mentioned in the piece and as anyone familiar with war knows, once it actually begins its very difficult to actually know what can come up so we do our best to understand the constraints in the situation based on the arsenal that North Korea has available to itself, that North Korea has available to it, while understanding that making an exact prediction of these things is actually very difficult when the violence begins.

That said, there are certain things that you can attempt to game out. And one of these is recognition that the other side is aware that you are aware of its own weaknesses, right? So one of the things, I know it’s kind of like a lot of back and forth and you know what I know that you know what I know, right? It’s one of those things. And one of the things that we looked into was the command structure of the North Korean military. And I came across some papers published by the U.S. Army War College talking about how it is essentially a very centralized, probably understandably so, a very centralized military structure – something that borrowed a lot from Soviet military structures during the Cold War. And one of the ways that the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un maintains control over the military is with a parallel reporting structure so there are military officers but there are also political officers, and he uses this dual reporting structure to assure that no military officer at any given time can acquire too much power to rebel against him or pose any sort of serious threat.

So the conclusion that some of these papers have drawn is that, well because it is such a centralized command and control structure that will actually provide for a lack of flexibility in the event of conflict. If the North Korean military actually has to wage a war, if the supreme leader must direct everything himself, well that’s a very inflexible structure.

So we recognize that conclusion. But we also try to expand on it a little bit because North Korea, they’re not dumb right? And I think this is another narrative that gets tossed around out there, it gets picked up on because it is difficult to rationalize a lot of their moves. But a country that’s capable of a nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles, they’re not stupid, right? They know that the United States has planned for the outbreak of war, and if they have, we’ve considered their command and control structure. So they’re thinking, “Ok well, the U.S. is going to think that we have a fairly flexible command and control structure, so we need to account for that to a degree because if our communications get cut off and we can’t actually direct artillery fire in the outbreak of hostilities, we face a serious problem. We can’t control the war, and that will decrease our ability to, you know, actually achieve some sort of strategic objective that we would want in this conflict.”

So it makes sense then to think that there’s actually some system even if it’s not publicly available that would allow for devolution or decentralization of command to a degree that would allow unit-level artillery commanders to continue fighting if they lose communication with the centralized command. So that’s one indicator that you can look for to get a sense of whether or not this is true. And it’s certainly not slam dunk evidence, it’s more like a mosaic you are putting together a lot of different pieces to try to corroborate this idea.

So one thing we looked at in the study was the prevalence and location of decentralized ammunition stores. And the reason this matters is because supply and logistics is everything in war. If artillery commanders can get ahold of things to shoot, well a gun is not very effective without a bullet, without a shell right?

Now it turns out that for decades the North Koreans have been developing hardened artillery sites or HARTs is the cute acronym for it, H-A-R-T. And these are stationed all along the Demilitarized Zone from coast to coast in North Korea, and it’s impossible to know the locations of all of these but some of them have been postulated and we put together sort of a representative of like a best guess that we came across for where some of these HART locations can be.

And that’s an indication that the North Koreans have prepared for a scenario in which if communications get cut with centralized command, there is no need to depend on like the centralized supply depot, so they can continue to fight, these artillery heads can continue to fire and pose a real threat to Seoul on a localized basis. They will still have access to ammo even if they are kind of shut off and by themselves.

JLS: One thing that you said in particular that struck me which is that the media picks up on this narrative that North Korea is stupid or that they’re crazy, and I think it’s a point to be emphasized because the worst mistake that either side can make in a military conflict is to underestimate one’s enemy. I think one of the reasons that the Korean War back in the ’50s dragged on as long as it did was because the United States actually miscalculated and underestimated a lot of the factors at the beginning of that war, and it probably prolonged a conflict that didn’t have to be as long as it was.

I think the other thing to point out, which is the flip side of some of what you are saying, is that North Korea suffered a great deal in the Korean War with the United States in the 1950s, and it is terrified of the United States. There is a very real fear on the part of North Korea about what the United States is capable of and what U.S. unpredictability is. That might be strange to hear for a U.S. audience or for an audience that is more Western-oriented, but I think that’s also true, and I think it animates a lot of North Korean’s actions.

But I want to take a step back for a moment and ask you, so Secretary of Defense Mattis gave his first public interview I guess last Sunday now on Face the Nation on CBS, and he got a question about North Korea, and he said two things about North Korea. He said, number one, that North Korea was already a national security threat to the United States, and the other thing he said and this got picked up quite a bit was that the fighting that would happen in North Korea if there was a military conflict there would probably be the worst that many Americans would have seen in most of their lifetimes.

So I wonder if you know having really dived deep into the details and thought about all this, how you rate Mattis’ statement? Do you think that this really would be some of the most destructive and catastrophic fighting the United States has done in the last 50, 60, 70 years, or do you think that’s a little bit of hyperbole?

XS: Yes, I think definitely it would represent a very violent conflict. There would be a lot of destruction, a lot of death, and that is in large part because of the capability of the North Korean military to wreak such damage based on the weapons they currently have. I mean, while it is true that a lot of their conventional weapons are outdated, a lot were acquired from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, some are natively built, and there are a few newer weapons systems that we talk about in the piece that have been developed more recently, but ultimately the vast majority of their guns are relatively old, but old guns still shoot. They might have, you know, a slightly higher rate of failure, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t do a lot of damage.

Now, there are some reports saying if the North Koreans start firing on Seoul, they will completely flatten or level the town. And I read some reports that challenge that to a certain degree, but even some of the more conservative papers that said, “Well, maybe they wouldn’t flatten Seoul,” had really very high casualty estimates in the first couple of hours in the outbreak of a conflict.

One of the estimates was that if North Korea targeted population centers in Seoul with its artillery instead of, say, other military targets at the outbreak of a conflict, something like 30,000-60,000 people could die in a first three hours of a conflict. So, you know, we’re talking really high amounts of casualties. I mean something like 58,000 soldiers died in the entire Vietnam War, so that’s very violent.

So I think the question you want to ask yourself after hearing those numbers is, well, would North Korea actually use its artillery if it would be wreaking such destruction and the potential for a retaliation that it would cause? And I think that the answer has to do with the credibility of deterrent, right? Everyone talks about nuclear deterrent, and it’s an important subject to talk about, but right now North Korea also has a conventional deterrent and has had one before it began developing its ballistic missile technology and nuclear technology, which is its conventional artillery deterrent. Now, if it is struck and does not implement an artillery barrage against the South, then it’s effectively saying to the world that this deterrent, this conventional deterrent, this threat is not really there. So I think it’s quite likely that if attacked, North Korea would feel compelled to retaliate against the South and that it could be quite destructive.

JLS: Yeah your point is well taken though, which is that a deterrent is at its most powerful when it’s actually deterring. Once a deterrent has had to be triggered, it automatically takes the power out of the hands of the country or the state entity that is doing the deterring and forces it make an offensive move that it doesn’t want to make. The whole point of deterrence is to try and prevent it from making that move.

I think another thing maybe to also point out is that some of the stuff that you’ve pointed out here is one of the reasons that at GPF we really don’t pay a lot of attention to the political drama and back and forth about THAAD, which is that U.S. anti-missile system that finally is going to get stationed in South Korea. But there’s a lot of domestic opposition to it being stationed in South Korea. China really hates that these U.S. anti-missile systems are going to be in South Korea. But the point is that doesn’t actually help the South Koreans solve the problem that arises if there is a significant military conflict because as you say the issue here really is artillery, and if you have 21,000 pieces of artillery or whatever you said it was, the THAAD missile defense system is not going to be able to block those things, right? There’s really nothing that South Korea can do if it gets that far.

XS: No, I mean at that point all they can really do is hope that the U.S. can – well it would be the U.S. and South Korea. I mean, I don’t want to make this sound like the U.S. would be doing all the fighting, right? If the North opens on the South, the south also has artillery pieces and as soon as a large gun fire it exposes its position, right? I mean right now, they’re hidden to a certain extent. Some of these HARTs that I talked about are deep underground caves or tunnels, fortified positions where pieces of artillery, sometimes even planes, are hidden to protect against the barrage. But as soon as their position is exposed, the South has artillery too and can respond in kind.

But it will take a lot more time to eliminate all of the artillery pieces with a counter barrage than it would with say a strategic bombing campaign. And there, the U.S. would probably be taking charge with a lot of its strategic bombers located at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

JLS: No but that’s a good point, and it’s good that you brought up Andersen Air Force Base in Guam because I think that this is another part that is not well recognized, because the United States wants its aircraft carriers there because that sort of became a U.S. military doctrine when it comes to fighting war but actually a lot of the heavy lifting that’s going to happen on the U.S. side is going to happen out of Guam. That’s one of the places that we’re watching most closely, right?

XS: Yeah absolutely, it would come from either B-52s or B-2s or B-1s, all of which are heavy strategic bombers, one of which is stealth, B-2 is stealth. Some folks believe that the B-2 bomber would be able to take out a lot of these artillery positions while at the same time avoiding North Korea’s anti-air defenses. And in theory that’s true, it’s difficult to really play out again just because war is unpredictable.

JLS: Yeah. And just taking a step back for a second from the very tactical perspective that you’ve offered here about North Korea, it’s also very telling to think if we just look at everything that we’ve actually written this week at GPF and to see how it all fits into a larger picture.

Obviously, we had, you know, your deep study of this issue in North Korea. We had one or two other pieces that dealt with North Korea. We had a couple other pieces that dealt with the problem of ISIS. And some of the comments that Secretary Mattis made about how the U.S. is accelerating its strategy against ISIS.

Then we also wrote about NATO this week in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump going to Brussels and meeting with NATO leaders. And these are all actually very connected to each other. You know, the major military conflicts that the U.S. seems to be involved in right now are this fight against the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq and dealing with the potential threat of a nuclear North Korea.

I don’t mean to minimize those conflicts. But they are not sort of on the level of challenging the United States from an existential perspective, right? Like it is a national security interest that North Korea not develop a nuclear weapon, but the future existence of the United States is not in play there. The same is true of ISIS. The United States doesn’t want a radical Sunni Arab entity to rise in the Middle East and throw off the balance of power there, but at the same time, what happens in the Middle East or what happens with these horrible terrorist attacks doesn’t actually challenge the U.S. from an existential point of view.

And then you have the U.S. also going to NATO, and a lot of people have, you know, been talking about Trump’s manners at NATO and I don’t really feel like getting into that. I’ll just point out that Secretary Mattis has been for NATO from the beginning, and Donald Trump picked him as secretary anyway. And Mattis himself has been a NATO officer so you can see the U.S. trying to find the right balance of what conflicts is it going to engage in, what is it not going to engage in, what alliances is it going to use, what alliances is it not going to use.

And I think that one of the things that is striking to me in particular about North Korea is that, you know, unlike with ISIS where at least it has built some kind of nominal, even superficial coalition to deal with ISIS, the U.S. really is the one pushing this issue with North Korea and is going to be providing a lot of the impetus for it. They’ve been pushing China to do something on this issue, but China so far hasn’t really been able to get North Korea to calm down and seems to be just repeating itself over and over again.

The South Koreans have elected a government that is a little more peace oriented when it comes to North Korea. Obviously, if there is a fight, they are going to have to be involved. And Japan, which we sort of see as really the main player in East Asia, hasn’t really had much to say. So in some sense I think from the United States’ perspective, it’s got to be a little bit…, on the one hand it shows how powerful the U.S. is, but on the other hand it shows how limited that power is because the U.S. can’t really depend on anyone when it’s dealing with the situation in North Korea.

XS: I think you make a great point, and it is challenging when investigating one part of the world or any one aspect of the world to get caught up in the details, which to some degree matter, right? Because details reveal truth about a matter, which are difficult to see from a high level. We talk about geopolitics and ultimately that is events in the world and how they impact one another. It’s impossible to look at one part of the world without recognizing how events in other parts of the world are related to it, especially when talking about the United States, which as the sole global superpower right now has interest everywhere. So, therefore, what goes on in one part of the world, in the Middle East, impacts the amount and types of resources that it can devote towards approaching other challenges in other parts of the world.

So the amount of military resources that it commits to the Middle East impacts the amount of military resources that it can commit to conflict in the Western Pacific. So, you know, I’ve had people approach me with everything that’s going on now with the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, and they’ve said, “So do you still think that the U.S. is going to be the major power in the rest of the century looking at what’s going on now?” And the only answer I can really give them is yeah. I mean, the U.S. is immensely powerful economically and militarily, and like you said, none of the challenges that it’s facing that we’ve talked about in this podcast, that we talk about at Geopolitical Futures really threaten it from an existential perspective.

I mean, even if you want to imagine this hypothetical scenario where tomorrow North Korea develops the capability to deliver all of its nuclear warheads, which I’ve heard estimates about 20 – well not nuclear warheads that it can attach to a missile but nuclear devices – if it could tomorrow find a way to deliver all of these somehow to the U.S., that still wouldn’t be an existential threat. I mean if they could wipe out portions of 20 different cities, it would be devastating, but the U.S. would still be around and still have the strongest military by far.

So there are threats, but it’s important to, when digging into the details of the challenges U.S. is attempting to deal with either with economic or military strength, keep them in the context of how much damage they can actually do to the U.S., right? And whether the scale of those challenges really confront – well if they really pose the existential risks in the way that a lot of people often talk about them doing.

JLS: Well Xander, I want to ask you one more question before we wrap up, and it’s a little bit of a curve ball, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about. And actually I haven’t asked you this before, and I haven’t actually come to it in my mind so we’ll see if it works or it similarly stumps you. There was something that George actually has said to me a couple times since the time that I’ve known him, and it’s – I forget the exact quote, but it’s something like the great wars are always fought twice. You know, like World War I, there was a World War II. Like the really important wars in the world are always fought twice.

And when we think about the current conflicts that the United States is involved with right now, I mean we’re basically on the third iteration of the Iraq War, right? Because we had Desert Storm and then we had the invasion in 2003, and then technically all U.S. troops were out of there under the Obama administration, and then Obama had to recommit them because of what was happening with ISIS and ISIS going into Mosul and dealing with Yazidis and stuff like that. And with Korea, obviously the United States fought the Korean War in the 1950s and that was part of the Cold War.

But it has really struck me that when we look at the places that the United States is committing most of its military resources right now, they are old conflicts. They’re vestigial conflicts. They were there before and maybe sort of weren’t carried out in a way that brought them to some kind of resolution. Maybe they can’t be carried out in a certain way that can bring them to some kind of resolution, and these will be constant little conflicts that the United States will have to be going through all the time. I guess I don’t necessarily have a question there, but I wonder if there’s anything in your analytical toolkit that can help explain why the U.S. seems to go back to fighting not just a lot but in the same places in the world over and over again.

XS: It’s an interesting question. I think if you look at conflicts isolated as individual events, it’s maybe harder to see that connection, but if you try to dig down to understand the causes of those conflicts, sometimes the underlying causes are more difficult to solve, right? What do I mean by that? If you look at World War I and World War II, they were both about the same fundamental issue, which was Germany’s role in Europe and that had always been a question. I mean, even the Thirty Years’ War to a degree was about German states’ role in Europe, and it only really became a pressing issue after the unification of Germany, and that’s what lead to the massive scale of these conflicts.

So while the circumstances might have changed with Korea – you know, the Cold War is no longer going on, they no longer have support from the Soviet Union – there are some aspects that remained unchanged. And those remain longer-term geopolitical causes, right? So, Korea has always been unified. Almost always throughout its history for thousands of years, and it became divided as a result of the Cold War, and we’re now dealing with the underlying causes – the relationship of Korea with itself and that’s not something that has changed on some level since the Korean War. So I think there are ways to dig down beneath isolated events and try to see what those causes are. That doesn’t mean that major wars will always be fought twice, but I think that sheds some light on why they sometimes are.

JLS: Yeah and it just strikes me that one of the ironic things is that, so if we take what you said and play it a step forward, the issue in Korea is that there is a division there that is somewhat unnatural when you think about history and the Korean Peninsula overall. In the Middle East, it’s sort of the opposite, right? The unnatural thing is trying to join together states that never actually existed. So on the one hand, in Korea, you have this really arbitrary separation that has now taken root over half a century and creates its own host of dynamics. In the Middle East, because of colonialism, because of the way that the Ottoman Empire fell apart, you had these groups that were smushed together in way that perhaps didn’t make geopolitical sense, and now all of that stuff is playing out. So that’s just an interesting little aside. But Xander thank you for taking the time to join us on the podcast today. Again, I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m our director of analysis. If you have any comments, feedback, critiques, we also love topic suggestions, you could actually write to us at [email protected]. And we will see you all out here next week.

George Friedman joins the podcast this week to talk about indicators that suggest the U.S. is gearing up to attack North Korea. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone from Orlando, Florida. I am here with George Friedman this week who’s joining us for the podcast. Hi George, how’s it going?

George Friedman: I get by, how are you?

JLS: I’m doing alright. We’re here for Mauldin Economics’ Strategic Investment Conference and we decided to take a step away and put out this podcast this week for y’all. So the main thing that we want to talk about today is North Korea. George actually started off the conference proceedings here with something of a bang when he laid out some intelligence that we’ve been picking up from North Korea that seems to suggest that the United States is more likely than less likely to strike North Korea so George how about you lay out for podcast listeners exactly what you’ve been seeing?

GF: Well to begin with, Business Insider published something that I said the war was imminent, which I didn’t say but Business Insider wanted it to be. What basically we saw last week was first another carrier, the Reagan which is based in Japan being deployed toward the Korean peninsula. We also some very heavy exercises, some of which were scheduled, some not, in South Korea. We also saw some very heavy brass including the Chief of Naval Operations had been back visiting Guam. Guam is a very important because Guam is the strategic base for the bombers: B1s, B2s, B52s – will be coming out of there if there is an attack.

And finally, we saw something, which is interesting, which is that the Guam Chamber of Commerce on May 31st will be getting a briefing from DHS people, Department of Homeland Security, on civil defense. Now, what really struck me is I haven’t seen the term civil defense since I was a kid and suddenly it shows up in Guam and oddly enough all the other different movements that were taking place while not insignificant were not as significant to me as this. Why would they be holding briefings in Guam on civil defense? And that really stuck with me and then I went back to what I saw happening in February.

In February, there was a kind of fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward Korea. What had happened was the Koreans appear to have launched a missile fueled by solid state fuel. Now that’s important, because if it’s liquid fuel then satellites will have some warning time that it’s being fueled and getting ready to go. You don’t get that warning time with solid fuel. It’s ready to go from the very beginning and you won’t even know that it’s fueled.

Now there’s a question obviously of what state the development of a warhead is because it’s not easy to build a nuclear warhead. It’s pretty easy to detonate a device on the ground, much harder to build a warhead that you can fit on top of missile that can survive the launch and the reentry.

So, when the solid fuel issue emerged, suddenly the United States had to reevaluate its position. And if everyone recalls back in March, we started having all sorts of meetings, pronouncements on both sides, hysterical threats coming out of North Korea, just all the operatic things that lead up to a conflict. Then, the Chinese President Xi visited and Trump tweeted that if the Chinese help us with our problem with Korea, we would be much more forthcoming on trade issues. Now this has always been the case in U.S. policy going back for years but interestingly enough no one has ever tweeted it before, which I thought was charming. I thought isn’t that nice? You know, it was very nice to let us all know what we already know.

Things went quiet and were quiet until very recently. But either the Chinese didn’t help or the Chinese were unwilling to take the step you needed and in the end, we wound up in the last week with some significant movements of weapons into position that remind me at least of the kind of buildup we had during Desert Storm and other things of that sort. This is sort of the way we go to war. Sometimes, we’re hoping that they will accept this and capitulate. Saddam Hussein didn’t. We’re in a position either to bluff or play as the other side wants.

JLS: I want to push back a little bit against you to drill down deeper into this and one question I asked you yesterday was that when we think about North Korea and in general when we think of all regimes, we think of regime survival as being the most important thing. So first of all, why would North Korea get to a state where it would do something that they know would threaten the United States, they know that the United States is going to see this and it’s going to react in a particular way.

And then the other side of that equation is, what is in it for the United States to actually intervene here? Why not just let them have it? Are the North Koreas really going to fire it and risk mutually assured destruction because if they did fire something at the United States obviously many people would die but the United States would respond with overwhelming force and if you think through your method, it’s always said that actors don’t do things that are going to lead to their outright destruction. How do you respond to those two questions?

GF: Well that’s a shockingly good question, and don’t let it happen again. (laughs). Ok so first of all, the North Koreans and every country in the world is aware that the United States has a nuclear fetish. If you have a nuclear program, we’re going to negotiate with you. If you have a nuclear weapon, we’re not going to mess with you. The North Koreans badly want to reach a stage where they have a nuclear weapon. They survived very improbably the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China into a quasi-non-Maoist country. That they survived has been an extraordinary achievement. That they will continue to survive is their fundamental goal and they understand that South Korea really doesn’t want North Korea to collapse. Because then they would have to do what West Germany did with East Germany and this would be very expensive.

The Chinese are happy to have a buffer between them and South Korea. And very frankly, they use the North Koreans as kind of a tool. Every time, the U.S. presses the Chinese, North Koreans do something insane, the Americans go the Chinese and say “Hey, help us out.” They do, they come back to the table, we say now let’s get back to those trade talks and they say what? We just bailed you out and you want to talk about trade talks? It’s a good game, it’s not an iron clad game, but it’s one that they’ve been willing to do.

What the North Koreans want to do of course is to move from having a program to having a weapon. The United States is actually fairly content in letting them have a program. But they don’t want them to have a weapon. You asked why? First because once they have a weapon, we really can’t take steps against that. Even if they are not going to hit us, they might hit the Japanese or parts of South Korea or something like that.

And second, once that they have that cover, they can build ICBMs that put us in reach. Now, the probability of them using it is extremely low. But if you’re the president of the United States and you are facing something that is unlikely but catastrophic, you have pledged to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That’s a very serious oath to take. And you know all military men do, I am not sure the president’s oath has that in it but it should. In any case, the president of the United States is going to look at very differently, what kind of risk can he take?

I think that North Koreans decided, looking at what appears looking from the outside chaos in Washington, that if there was a time to slip this through, this was the moment. The chaos from Washington is real but it doesn’t really define the posture of the American military. They remain fairly aware of what’s going on in the world. So, what happened is that with the evolution we saw with the missiles, the questions arose, how confident are we in our intelligence that the Koreans aren’t approaching a viable, nuclear weapon? And the answer comes back, if you are sitting at a coffee shop and BS’ing with the gang, not a chance. If you are secretary of defense, that kind of confidence can cost you.

So, they entered into the zone of uncertainty where we aren’t quite sure what they have or what they don’t have and that pushes us to make a decision. And the problem is that if they end up having the weapon, options are closed off. So for many, this is the last moment to exercise those options. And so, a carrier began to move, exercises were held. Two other carriers on the West Coast of the United States, they haven’t moved yet. If they move, that will be more of an indicator. But certainly, we’ve moved into a more aggressive posture.

Plus, the new President Moon of South Korea took a day off. This should not be such an exciting event except in South Korea apparently taking a day off is really a big deal for the president. You don’t do that. What he did is he went sort of incommunicado for 24 hours. Now personally, he might have wanted to get drunk, I don’t know. Or he went into some serious consultations of various sorts. It’s hard to tell. But the indicators are upticking to the United States at least establishing the possibility of an attack and possibly prepare for one.

JLS: Do you think this is going to be the nature of threats to the United States going forward in the next decades? I mean when we look at the things the United States has been involved in the world most seriously, it’s you know the Islamic State, North Korea, things that threaten the United States in some fundamental way. But it’s not the Soviet Union, it’s not even Russia or China, it’s not even going toe-to-toe with any kind of big power. I know you’ve written about the United States developing imperial power, developing imperial power, trying to develop any kind of self-awareness about its kind of imperial power. So do you think this is what U.S. conflict is going to look like in the coming decades or does this distract from some of the real state-on-state issues that the United States has with bigger countries?

GF: During the 20th century, the United States had two major systemic wars, the first and the second World War. And I would define a systemic war as when the entire international system destabilizes and you have large scale conflicts between nation-states, sometimes called peer-to-peer conflicts. We also had lots of minor interventions, we went into Mexico, we involved ourselves in the Philippines and had quite a civil war there, intervened in a civil war. We intervened in Nicaragua, in Haiti.

So, in fact the two types of war, one has a very limited political objective, sometimes attainable, sometimes not. The other is a systemic war whether there’s an unlimited possibility of disaster or triumph, where the world is changing its entire shape, I call that systemic wars because the entire system is reshaping itself. Every century has had some form of systemic war because nations rise and fall and they destabilize it.

When we look at the 19th century, it was Napoleonic wars where literally everything was on the table. In the 18th century, it was the Seven Years’ War which once again everything was on the table. So, the question is not is this way wars are going to be? The answer is there’s always two kinds of wars and my assumption is that the 21st century is not going to be the first century in which there is not a systemic war.

So, we will have large-scale war fare. We’ll also have more limited political wars, these are the ones we can afford to lose and we don’t do very well in these. Vietnam was an example of a limited war that we lost and the republic survived very nicely and moved on and the Soviet Union collapsed. Iraq has not yet been lost but it’s doing a very good imitation. So too Afghanistan. These are the regional wars that a great power may engage in. And let me say something about imperial wars before everybody gets upset.

An empire in my mind is not a formal entity like the British Empire was, like the Roman Empire was. It can be an informal reality. It is a situation of overwhelming economic presence throughout the world and great military power. The United States is one quarter of the world’s economy. That means that everything the United States does anywhere in the world is going to affect somebody.

The United States is also the only global military power. It became that in World War II when it invaded Europe and the Japanese Empire simultaneously in 1944, which was an enormous achievement. The United States doesn’t really want to be an empire. It’d rather watch the Super Bowl. But empire is a condition, it is not a decision, it is not a formal structure. It is simply that everything you do is going to tick somebody off. And sometimes they are going to try to do something against you.

The United States is in that condition. It really hasn’t accepted what it is, it has no ongoing operating system for managing it. It is now in the process of understanding the limits of this power but also understanding the reality of that power.

So, I think we will have wars like in the Middle East. We will probably have less than that as we get more prudent in what we select. But always the war that matters is the systemic war, that’s the one you can’t afford to lose. So, if you lose in Vietnam and you lose in Iraq and you lose everywhere and probably if you lose in Korea, life goes on. World War II as the Japanese and the Germans learned, this was not good to lose this war. It really meant a great deal. The Russians understood that and the British and the Americans as well, although the probability of being defeated was slight.

Still, we must understand that the idea that because you’re having these wars there will never again be a systemic war is unrealistic. And the idea that because we have systemic wars, we should ignore the political challenges is also unrealistic. We have both kinds of wars. And the military unfortunately will frequently prepare for all the political wars and then have to suddenly reorganize for the systemic war.

JLS: So, taking us back to North Korea a little bit, you actually said at one point that you thought that there was maybe a 70 percent chance around that of war breaking out between the United States and North Korea. If we’re wrong, what does that look like? What do these movements then mean and then what happens afterwards?

GF: Well the nice things about these movements is you can turn around and go home. Which is to say, if this is a bluff to unnerve the North Koreans, at the same time that they are launching missiles, if that’s what this is, you can decide what to do later. If you wait with a deployment, then a window opens that you can’t close because they are not there. So, it’s a prudent move that gives you options.

Now, one of the things to remember is that we’re unsure of what the North Koreans have. We do know that the North Koreans have a very powerful counterpunch. They have masses of artillery just north of the DMZ within range of Seoul which is a city of 25 million people, which we are partnered with through alliance and which we have responsibility not to destroy their capital and 25 million people.

The North Koreans may estimate that we will be restrained because of the deterrent threat that they have toward the city. They may also assume the United States remains convinced that they don’t have nuclear weapons and will wait. And that may be true. But they’re betting at this point that they can bluff a nuke well enough to say: you don’t know if we have one or not, you don’t know if we got it in a missile or in a boat heading to San Francisco harbor, you don’t know. And so that achieves for them, the primary goal: don’t mess with us.

Their primary goal is regime survival. And do not think of them as stupid, and the kid may be fat but he’s not crazy. He’s enjoying life and he’s also not oddly enough the sole ruler of North Korea. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a complex mechanism. It has a leadership that lives extremely well, does business around the world under very different circumstances. They have shown no suicidal indications. This is not Japanese kamikazes, and this is not ISIS. These are people who survived and want to continue to survive. They look at the United States as extremely irrational and totally unpredictable.

So what’s interesting in this is, they look at the United States as a dangerous country. They still haven’t figured out why we bombed Kosovo. I am having trouble, I’ve always had trouble understanding this, but they don’t look at us as a rational actor. They look at us as a country torn internally, externally incomprehensible, extremely dangerous and powerful, that they have to manage and manipulate. And that’s what they’re trying to do.

The Americans look at them as if they were ISIS, that they want to die. That they are so committed to the fat boy that they just wanna die. And that’s also a kind of crazy view but it leads us to have very extreme reactions to their behavior. They have extreme reactions to ours. Neither side understands each other, which is at this moment why the United States within its own parameters may choose to become aggressive earlier rather than later.

JLS: I want to ask you one more question, it’s going to be a little bit of a curve ball. Would you say that North Korea is the last totalitarian state in the world from the age of totalitarian states or do you think it’s just something completely different from the totalitarian states that ruled in the 1930s and 40s?

GF: Let’s define that, the totalitarian states, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany particularly had overarching ideologies and part of the regime was that everything was turning around that ideology and what made them totalitarian is that there was a totalistic view of the world that the public absorbed, much of them believed. And those that didn’t were killed. That made it this way. This is more like what Karl Marx called an Oriental despotism and by that it is ruled by a family, not by a political party. It is ruled by a family that fights among itself apparently. But also has an infrastructure under it and it is infinitely more corrupt than Stalin or Hitler.

So one of things you have to remember about totalitarian societies is the incorruptibility of the leader. Stalin really didn’t steal very much. He didn’t need to, but you know he didn’t. Neither did Hitler, he was a very frugal person. Personal luxuries didn’t apply to them because they were, like Robespierre, ascetic, they didn’t do it.

No one will ever call the North Korean leadership ascetic. No one will ever claim they actually believe in anything beyond survival, although they may claim. They do have a reign of terror. Now, the reign of terror must be distinguished from totalitarianism. It can be very good, it can be very efficient. There are other countries where it is terrifying to disagree. Saudi Arabia is not one that I would, you know, run feminism up the flag pole.

So is it the only one? It’s a wonderful example of Oriental despotism. It’s not the only one but they do a mighty good job.

JLS: Fair enough. Thanks for joining us George and thank you all for listening. As always you can write into us at [email protected] if you have any suggestions for topics or any critiques or other things that you’d like us to take up in this podcast and we will see you all next week.

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss the future of Syria, the prospect of US-Russian cooperation in the Middle East, and whether ideology defines geopolitics or vice versa. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Xander Snyder: Hi, and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures Podcast. I’m Xander Snyder. I’m an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures, and I’ll be chatting with Jacob Shapiro, the director of analysis here at Geopolitical Futures. How’s it going Jacob?

Jacob L. Shapiro: Nice to be back, we’ve been on hiatus it feels like for a couple weeks.

XS: Yeah, and today we’re going to dig into a subject that’s probably more on the forefront of people’s minds than many others in the world of international affairs. We’re going to be talking about the conflict in the Middle East and U.S. and Russian interests, and how they’re affected by what’s going on there now. So just for the sake of context, let’s lay out the current lay of the land for what’s going on in the Syrian civil war right now.

You can either just look at this as a single conflict, but really it’s more complicated than this and the nature of the fight is that there are multiple fronts or fights all built into one. How would you describe the nature of those different individual conflicts Jacob?

JLS: Yeah, it’s really difficult to talk about Syria and the conflict that’s going on there in the first place because Syria really doesn’t exist anymore, and we don’t really have the vocabulary for talking about what actually exists in its place because nothing has emerged. I don’t think that anything is really going to emerge.

I was looking into this for a research project lately, and I sort of knew this intuitively, but I think of Lebanon and Syria as together. I’ve always thought of them as part of the same sphere of influence and usually it was Syria always interfering in Lebanon, but you could also think of Lebanon as a model for what’s going to happen in Syria. And Lebanon is, it’s a much smaller country than Syria, and yet it fought a civil war for 15 years. So the idea that Syria is going to calm down and that Syria is going to remerge as a single country at some point in the near future seems to me to be mostly folly in the same way that thinking that Iraq is going to be able to pull itself back together is simply folly.

But in thinking about all the different sides that are in this fight – I mean, it started as an internal Syrian conflict and in some ways, it still is. It’s the Assad regime, which is the Syrian Alawites, and also a lot of Sunnis bought into the Assad regime and the Syrian Kurds and the more secular opposition and then all the opposition groups that are various flavors in terms of Islam, some of which are more moderate in the way they want Islam to govern daily life and some of whom are like Islamic State, who are sort of on the religious totalitarianism end of the spectrum.

So there’s the local fight, there is the sectarian fight in general between Sunnis and Shiites for which Syria and especially Iraq have become huge battlegrounds. There’s the problem with Syria now being really a way for different powers in the region to position themselves. The Turks have their interests in Syria, the Iranians have their interests in Syria, Saudis have their interests in Syria, the Israelis have their interests in Syria, and then you zoom an even bigger step out and it seems like almost every Western power in the world is somehow participating in bombing Syria or attacking ISIS in some way. I mean, when you read down the list of countries that have actually participated in military actions in Syria, it’s a pretty impressive list.

So it started as an internal Syrian conflict, but as most conflicts in the Middle East go, it quickly morphed into all these different levels, and I think that’s one of the things that’s going to keep it going for a long time.

XS: Yeah, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to imagine any sort of coherent Syria, in the way that we’ve come to know it, emerging out of this is in part due to what Syria was defined as most of the 20th century anyways, right? You had a number of countries in this region that were drawn basically specifically to allow outside … powers to maintain some degree of influence over these countries. So just like it’s hard to imagine Syria with its borders before 2011 emerging again, it’s hard to imagine Iraq coming out of this with similar borders.

And what is it that has changed in the last 25 but also hundred years that has weakened the powers that existed in the 20th century that maintained these borders and has driven it to what it looks like today? I mean certainly, the rise of Islamism in the last 30, 40 years and the decline in the Soviet Union play some role in that. But what’s really sparked the deterioration of these borders?

JLS: I would say two things. First of all, it would’ve been better if the outside powers that carved up the Middle East had thought about it in terms of how are going to best control or influence these particular countries. I think it wasn’t even that thoughtful. I think it really was they were just carving up the region, and they thought of the region from a sort of, “what are the resources that I can access here or what does owning this particularly territory versus this particular territory give me for my power.” So they didn’t really think about where different local communities were, and how to divide things in such a way that these states would be more manageable.

It’s a general trend of homogenization, right? Even if you look at a place like Eastern Europe today, Eastern Europe is now a collection of states with a lot more homogenized populations than they were even a century ago. You had large pockets of minorities in these different states, and that’s less so. That’s also true of the Middle East, the Turks are now in Turkey. Well, you can’t really speak about Iran because Iran is such a cluster of different things, but people are self-segregating themselves into their little groups and the previous multinational way of dealing with things has sort of broken down. The Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire, there was no real nationalist impulse there.

And this gets to the second question that you posed, which is: What has changed? And I think that the thing to think about there is to remember a lot of the ideas that led to the political ideologies that created nationalism – and not just nationalism in Europe but helped organize Europe into the nation-states that exist today – I mean, those started bubbling up around the Enlightenment, right? So we’re talking really even by the 1600 and 1700s, a lot of those things are beginning to develop.

They didn’t come to the Middle East really until the Ottoman Empire collapsed. So the Middle East really encountered the Enlightenment and modernity and nationalism and all of these ideas when the Ottoman Empire fell apart after World War I. And they had to integrate these new ideas with their traditional notion of how things should be governed, and Islam was obviously a big part of that. There was a big rush at first in the embrace of nationalism, and you had all different kinds of nationalism flourishing in the Middle East in the 20th century. You had Turkish nationalism, Iran rose as a national power, certainly Israel is an example of that, Zionism is just a fancy word for Jewish nationalism. And then you had Arab nationalism. And Arab nationalism I guess we would say didn’t quite work.

You know, there was a sense that the Arabs are a group as a whole, but then they also created these subidentities. Egypt was one that made more sense because Egypt has always been sort of separate and unto itself. But especially Lebanon, Syria, Iraq – these were countries that were really trying to create a national identity essentially out of nothing, and it worked for a while. It was seductive for a while, Nasserism and Baathism and all these things certainly gave a lot of these countries meaning.

But in the long term, they were viewed as bankrupt by the populations. They didn’t bring economic prosperity to the region. They didn’t bring greater choice in representation to the region. They sidelined Islam to a great extent because they were afraid that Islam was a threat to their power. And they couldn’t defeat Israel. Israel was one of the major political issues for these Arab nationalist powers, and I mean, to be frank, they got their butts kicked every time they tried to engage with Israel. So I think all of those things led people to look somewhere else and the only real organizing principle that has ever worked in bringing the peoples of the Middle East, the Arab people of the Middle East, together has been Islam. Besides Islam, there’s never been a unifying sense of what’s going on.

So in that sense, it’s a reversion to the previous organizing principle of the region. Now, the problem is that you have people using Islam for their own political purposes, and everybody’s arguing that they have the one true path, and they all have to fight each other.

XS: As an American and someone who’s obviously observed how U.S. media and U.S. society has attempted to interpret the events in the Middle East over the last six years – you know, you mentioned a moment ago how the ideas of Enlightenment didn’t really even get there until the early 20th century, and it seems like so much of American identity is defined by our relationship to Enlightenment principles.

And it seems to me that part of the reason that a lot of folks here didn’t really truly understand what was going on during what’s come to be called the Arab Spring, is just this sense of optimism that, you know, the rest of the world is finally going to come around to this idea of democracy, and this kind of led a lot of commentators and analysts to really miss what was going on there, right?

It wasn’t that you had huge percentages of these protestors ascribing to liberal ideas or philosophies. The more powerful subgroups within them turned out to be or many of them turned out to be jihadi. Is there more to it than just optimism? Why did so many people miss the nature of the uprisings that began in 2011?

JLS: Well, I understand why people wanted to interpret the events of 2011 in that way. There was some reason for it. First of all, the vanguard of the protestors, there were liberals among them. There were people who wanted greater political representation, and they were certainly at the forefront, especially in Egypt. I mean, it wasn’t by any means even a majority of the protestors probably, but there was a significant contingent that wanted real reform.

But when you think about how things set off in Tunisia, that wasn’t a result of any kind of democratic rising. That was a vegetable salesman who couldn’t make ends meet, and he got accosted by a female police officer, and he felt humiliated and embarrassed, and it set off a bunch of protests. We’ve got more protests in Tunisia now, the military has actually now intervened, which is a little out of character for Tunisia because the military has never played that big a role. But I am getting a little off track in answering your question.

I’ve written before about what people got wrong when they were dissecting the Arab Spring. I don’t blame people for getting it wrong. There’s a reason to hope that these things would happen. What I think happened though was a complete lack of self-awareness because even in Europe, even in a place like the United States that has this allegiance to the principles that you talked about, it took many hundreds of years and a great deal of bloodshed before the present-day reality emerged, and these things certainly aren’t perfect. There are Enlightenment principles, and there are nationalist principles, and in Europe those two things combined together to create World War I and World War II and some of the greatest horrors the world had ever seen.

So I understand that there was this sense of optimism and that, you know, the Middle East was ready, and I think also there might have been some residual guilt on behalf of the parties that had been colonial powers in the region and had really not set them up for success. They wanted them to succeed, and there’s nothing really wrong with wanting them to succeed. But when you got down to it, there was really no deep tradition, not even tradition but there was no real political organization for the ideas that we’re talking about right now in the Middle East.

The groups that were the best organized were the Islamic groups, whether that was offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood or different ones because they were able to speak directly to the people to engage them. And over time, they were able to come to dominate a lot of these protest movements which we’ve seen, Syria is a great example.

The initial protests in Syria were a result of, you know, there had been a big drought, and the government had not been providing the level of goods and services necessary. And the people looked out and saw that things were changing ostensibly in Egypt and changing in Tunisia, and they asked for more. Assad did not do what his father did in similar situations and just completely crack down, but he tried to sort of give them what they wanted piece meal, and it wasn’t enough. And you had a bunch of different groups with a bunch of different interests, and eventually the ones that were able to carry the day were the Islamist ones because they were the best organized, and they were most willing to die for the things that they were pushing for.

So I guess I don’t know if that actually answers your question Xander, but that’s sort of how I see how we got the wrong impression of what was going on there.

XS: Do you think that if there was any optimism involved in the misinterpretation of these events, has that optimism been beaten out of us? Is the U.S. beginning to look at the world less from the perspective of spreading democracy and more in terms of what’s good for us?

I mean, when I was growing up, you know I was younger during the 2003 Iraq invasion, for example, and I remember this idea of “spreading democracy” not really being debated too much, at least in the mainstream. I mean, it was somewhat taken for granted that this was a foreign policy goal worth achieving, worth exerting forces on achieving. Now it seems more taken for granted, at least by many that this just isn’t a tenable model for forming U.S. foreign policy strategy.

Have we lost this optimism? The last six years of events in the Middle East, is this pushing us to change how we look at the world or was this change in ideology inevitable?

JLS: Well it’s funny, and it’s a good question because and I’ve written about this before. I don’t remember the last time I wrote about it for GPF, but you know, after the Cold War ended and the U.S. emerged as the really only dominant global power in the world, there was the Clinton presidency, but after that came the Bush presidency, and they were the ones that had to respond to 9/11 and also carried out the 2003 Iraq invasion. They were neoconservatives, and this was a political ideology, which basically equated the national interests of the United States with ideological goals. So the spread of things like democracy and human rights came to be identified directly with the national interest. And then the other important part of neoconservativism was that the U.S. would intervene when it needed to, to promote those values because that was in the national interest.

The funny thing that people often forget is that, in that sense, neoconservatism really is a cousin of liberal internationalism because liberal internationalism says the same thing. It also equates the national interest of the United States with the spread of particular liberal principles. The main difference between the two is that neoconservatism is willing to have the United States unilaterally intervene in different countries to push those principles, whereas liberal internationalists would rather do it through the U.N. or other multilateral institutions.

So this has always been part of the United States, the spread of American values has always been embedded within U.S. ideology and U.S. foreign policy frameworks. And certainly coming out of World War II, there was a real sense that liberal internationalism the way Roosevelt defined it was the way to help make the world better and also make the world safer from the prospective of the United States.

As the Cold War really ratcheted up, that all fell aside and realism and pragmatism, which I have always argued are the great American philosophies, asserted themselves, and you had people dealing not so much with the ideologies – although they certainly dress them up in the guise of those things – but there was a larger enemy to defeat. And those ideological concerns had to be subordinated to the goal of defeating the Soviet Union.

So what I am saying there is I think the United States goes back and forth depending on how powerful it is, and when the U.S. is feeling particularly powerful, and its challengers are particularly weak, the United States has the luxury of saying, “well yeah, we should push our values because that’s what’s best for the world and that’s what’s best for the United States.” When you enter a situation as the U.S. did after really the failure of the Iraq intervention, you get into a place not only where there’s political fatigue in the United States with those ideas but where the United States is spread too thin.

There’s no one power that is challenging U.S. dominance in the world right now, but there are so many smaller conflicts, all of which seem to require U.S. attention that the United States is spread too thin and it can’t think in terms of making the world a better place and convincing itself that that is what’s going to be best for United States policy. It has to define a clear set of objectives and then pursue them and have a larger goal but deal with the people you have to deal with no matter what your ideological differences are with them.

So I definitely think the U.S. has moved more towards a realist view of the world, and I would note that this shift happened under the Obama administration, the administration that from a rhetorical point of view was probably more hopeful and more internationalist than many previous administrations. Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize because the Europeans were so happy that somebody who spoke their language got into office. But he got into office and the challenges were laid in front of him, and then he had to make compromises. And that’s where we are today.

XS: I think that raises sort of an interesting question that’s really at the core of any sort of social studies, which is trying to understand the direction of causality – what leads to another thing, right? I think it’s almost common sense that ideology influences a society in a state’s actions and that just makes sense because what someone thinks influences what they do. But to a degree, it seems like ideology is also influenced by the constraints that a state finds itself in at any given time.

For example, with the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was essentially supremely powerful I think. It was the global superpower, so to an extent it could afford to think that neoconservatism in that constant global intervention was in its national interest because it could make the mistakes essentially that the U.S. has made over the last 25 years without having its core fundamental interests threatened in a way that a state with a lower margin of error would encounter. How do you think about causality in this context?

JLS: Yeah in this sense – and you and I have argued about this before – I am on the side of saying that reality determines ideology and that ideology very rarely goes the other way. I use the term ideology very broadly. So we were just talking about neoconservative ideology – neoconservative ideology is a product of the Cold War, the way the Cold War ended, U.S. military economic power in the 1990s. You can’t have neoconservative ideology, be a convincing ideology, if you don’t have all of those other things first.

Islam is a really interesting example of this question. Is Islam an ideology? What are the factors that have led to this birth of Islamism throughout the Middle East, and is it the factors there that led to Islamism or is Islamism driving regional actors to their current situation? You know, if I’m going to stick to my guns then I really have to say that, no, I think that there are actually hard objective political and social realities that then lead people towards embracing Islam and its various manifestations.

One of the things that I get asked often is, is it even possible for a Muslim country to be a liberal democracy? Can Islam coexist with liberal democracy? Does it make any sense to want these types of political regimes in the Middle East? And I would say that just in terms of principles, there’s no reason that Islam can’t coexist with liberal democracy, there’s no reason that Christianity or Judaism can’t coexist with liberal democracy.

The problem comes in understanding the objective political realities, and there, to have the types of regimes that the United States wants, there has to be a certain level of wealth, a certain tradition of rights. And if it’s not there, you can’t just create it. So the U.S. found that out in Iraq when it tried to engage in state building there. And in some ways, I am not sure that U.S. policymakers have learned the lesson because when they talk about what they want after the fighting in Syria ends, whenever that’s going to happen, they think about reconstituting some sort of federalist system in Syria and a federalist system in Iraq, and as I said at the beginning, Syria doesn’t exist anymore, Iraq doesn’t exist anymore.

These countries are not going to get put back together, and trying to put them back together and believing that federalist principles or the right separation of powers in the government is going to achieve that to me is really wishful thinking. If you want to engage with the reality on the ground, you have to engage with the fact that you live in a world where people want to take care of their own and identify with their own and trust their own and they are going to fight and die for their own. You can’t put people who hate each other and who have a history of hating each other in the same country and expect that overnight they are going to sign a piece of paper and going to trust each other.

Again, there’s nothing really that outside powers can do in a situation like Syria and Iraq, there’s the illusion that the United States or the illusion that Russia, in its talks in Astana and wherever else it’s having its talks, that they’re going to be able to accomplish something at the diplomatic level that will fix things in a place like Syria. It just won’t. It doesn’t matter what ideology you have, it doesn’t matter what people say far away from the conflict, this is a civil war. And it’s a civil war that nobody can win except the actors that are in it, and they’re going to have to fight it out. Most countries in the world have gone through these upheavals. I think it’s hard to see yourself in other parts of the world, but it’s something that should be better understood.

XS: So how then have the U.S. and Russia been engaging in these difficult or thorny, prickly realities that they’re encountering in the Middle East? Is there room for overlap of interests between the global superpower and the European regional power, Russia, or are our interests fundamentally divergent in the Middle East or can we find and have we found ways to cooperate with Russia?

JLS: I was listening to George give a speech a couple weeks ago, and one of the things he said was that he wrote his book “The Next 100 Years” – and if you go back and read “The Next 100 Years”, it’s pretty incredible how accurate George was in a lot of the predictions that he made. But he said in the speech the one thing that he really got wrong, was he really got the Middle East wrong. He didn’t realize that Islamism was going to be a force and that jihadism was going to be a force and that the U.S. was going to have to commit so much energy and so many resources to the region. He really thought that there was going to be a pullback on the part of the United States and that it would be focusing on other parts of the world.

So I say all that to say that when I heard George making that point that one of the things that stood out to me was he was still thinking about the Middle East through a Cold War prism. And the Middle East was one of the real main battlegrounds between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Middle East had a great share of global oil production, it’s less so today and the proxy conflicts that were happening in places like the Middle East had a lot more, there was a lot more at stake in them then there currently is today.

We talked a little bit about ideology. I actually think that inertia is a more difficult thing for both the United States and Russia to overcome in their relations when it comes to the Middle East than any ideological things. There’s no capitalism versus communism anymore, it’s really Russian nationalism versus United States national interests. So the place where Russia and the United States can get bogged down in a place like the Middle East is to get used to dealing with each other as if they’re adversaries.

When you look at what the actual hard interests are in the Middle East, the United States and Russia first of all share some general interests, and second of all, this region is of little importance to both of them honestly. Russia has much bigger fish to fry in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Central Asia. It has real differences with the United States in a lot of these regions, particularly in Eastern Europe. That was part of the reason that Russia intervened in Syria in the first place, to try and create some leverage with the United States with the Ukraine crisis.

And for the part of the United States, it has been trying unsuccessfully to get out of Iraq really since 2007. The surge that Bush administration put through was one strategy to try and finish off the conflict and get out, that didn’t work. Obama just tried to pull everything out and hope that everything was going to be fine, that didn’t work. Trump seems to be going back to more of a surge kind of mentality of, you know, let’s commit a couple more forces now and knock out these ISIS guys, and then we’ll finally leave.

At the end of the day, what do the United States and Russia share in common in the Middle East? Neither one of them has any interest in ISIS being a powerful force. It’s a lot closer to home for Russia, there are a lot of Chechens fighting in the Syrian civil war, and the Caucasus is a fertile ground for the types of radical Islamist ideologies that have developed in the Middle East. So Russia has that in mind.

And I think the other thing that Russia has to think about is containing Turkey. I know that everybody sees that Putin and Erdogan seem to have buried the hatchet, but Russia and Turkey are historical enemies. And Russia is a declining power, and Turkey is a rising power, and Turkey is historically a U.S. ally, but it is also beginning to have problems with the United States that we’ve seen in recent weeks really become clear.

So for Russia, it’s really about containing radical Islam and then making sure that a country like Turkey or a coalition of powers with Turkey at the head can threaten Russian interests in places that are more important to them like in the Caucasus or the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe.

The United States shares a similar concern with ISIS. It can’t tolerate ISIS mostly because I think when the United States looks at ISIS, it worries about – is this or could this be some kind of unifying Sunni Arab state that would be completely hostile to the United States? That’s the fear.

And then the second part is that the United States is trying to build a balance of power. The United States wrecked the balance of power when it invaded Iraq in 2003. The Iraq-Iran standoff was a major part of that balance of power. The United States has been trying to restore some order to it ever since, so in that sense, the United States also doesn’t want Turkey to become too powerful. Certainly, the United States would like Turkey to take a greater role in managing ISIS.

But at the same time, as Turkey becomes more powerful, you are going to see more and more clashes between the United States and Turkey, and in that sense, this weird U.S.-Russia-Turkey triangle is going to be a constant maneuvering of different sides against each other.

So I think that overall the Middle East is not that important to Russia and the United States, but they both find themselves there, and they both share some tactical goals there. We’ve said in our 2017 forecast that we expected that the U.S. and Russia would find some quiet ways to cooperate and coordinate their activities in the Middle East. I still expect that to be the case. I don’t necessarily expect it to be friendly or even cordial, but I do think that when you look just at the hard interests and you put away the baggage and when you put away the history and when you put away the ideology and you just look at what both countries want in the Middle East, there is some room for cooperation.

XS: Right and at Geopolitical Futures, this is really how we try to interpret and analyze what’s going on in the world, right? It’s not so much what one country says, its rhetoric or even what it wants but rather what’s in the realm of possibility. And at least as it relates to U.S. and Russian overlaps of interests in the Middle East, I mean there are places for cooperation despite the tension between the two countries that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

We’ve written a good deal about both U.S.-Russian relations as well as their role in the Middle East and the developments in the Middle East on our website http://geopoliticalfutures.com. Check it out, you can navigate directly to analyses by region if you are interested in learning a little bit more about our net assessment on any particular region. We’ve written large-scale long-term forecasts, and we update these regularly with our Reality Checks and Deep Dives, so if anything on this episode interests you, go to http://geopoliticalfutures.comand you can learn more there. Thanks for chatting today Jacob.

JLS: My pleasure, and if folks out there have comments, please also we love comments so let us know how we’re doing. If you even have suggestions for topics, we’re here, we’re listening.

XS: And you can reach us at [email protected] Thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Allison Fedirka and Xander Snyder discuss Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, its broader impacts and why it can't go on forever. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Xander Snyder: Hi and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures podcast, my name is Xander Snyder and I am an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures and joining me today is Allison Fedirka, a senior analyst also at Geopolitical Futures. And we are going to be talking to you today about what is going on in Venezuela. How are you doing today Allison?

Allison Fedirka: I am doing pretty good Xander, how are you?

XS: I’m great. So people have probably heard about Venezuela in terms of there’s some sort of crisis going on. The Maduro government has been cracking down on protestors and things probably seem pretty chaotic. Where does this situation stand right now Allison?

AF: So people have probably been hearing about Venezuela being in crisis, I would wager since 2012-2013. So in order to understand where we’re at now, it’s important to appreciate from where the country has come over the past five years or so. There are multiple problems making today’s situation more complex and straining and volatile than it was five years ago. The government was always based on a populist policy and as long as the government had money that they could spend on the population, it had support, it would do just fine. They also had a charismatic leader back then which was Chávez.

In 2013, we started seeing financial strain in the country in terms of spending more than it was receiving, declining oil production and capabilities, infrastructure problems and basically seeing the populist government catching up with the Venezuelan government. We also saw Hugo Chávez and die and have his predecessor take his place, which is Nicolás Maduro. He was never popular as Chávez.

So fast forward to 2014, we have the drop in oil prices. Venezuela depends heavily on oil. Ninety-six percent of its U.S. dollars comes from oil sales. So it basically has a decreased source of foreign currency, which was vital for importing food. Everybody needs to eat, and Venezuela does not produce nearly enough food on its own to feed its population. And you continue with the situation of low oil prices, cutting imports, dwindling food supplies and you get to where we are today. So the crisis were seeing did not happen overnight. And what we’re seeing is a long time coming. It’s not necessarily thinking of it as a spark but just something that has been fostered for years and years and years and this was inevitable.

XS: Now Geopolitical Futures’ forecast on Venezuela, if you go on our website you can check out our full year forecast for this year, we say that the Maduro government in its present form won’t survive 2017. So we’ve talked a little bit about how the situation has developed post-Chávez under Maduro over the last several years. What’s going to change this year that’s gonna force Venezuela over the tipping point? Are there alternatives or is there just going to be anarchy for a while?

AF: So the forecast was carefully worded because it is difficult to be precise with exactly how we foresee the government changing. At the beginning of the year and December when we wrote this forecast, there was several possible routes that this could take. One was a very last minute decision to hold a referendum that would trigger new elections. One was dialogue between the parties, one was military coup, one was outside intervention, one was popular uprising.

Since the beginning of the year, several things have occurred in terms of breakdown of institutions and political processes such that a referendum with elections are no longer a viable option. Dialogue seems pretty much impossible, we haven’t seen any moves for foreign intervention. We’ve seen some divide among the military.

Right now, what we’re seeing on the ground is anarchy and that seems to be the dominant force for change in the government right now. Whether or not the opposition can sustain that and also to an extent increases that, because right now it’s becoming the status quo, they need to push it a little bit further in order to get the change that they’re looking for because they’ve been doing that for a month now and so far the government has been able to resist. So that’s where we’re at. The people’s force seems to be the leading cause right now and it will most likely be a combination of those factors of either outside pressure joining the opposition leaders or perhaps factions of the military or dialogue under extreme duress that will take the Maduro government out.

But the point is, we always talk about constraints and imperatives. And we don’t see an out for Venezuela. Like we said, this has been a long time coming and there’s constraints of feeding your people, paying your people, being able to provide basic services, such as water and electricity and medicine. Those are all running out. And that’s when people get desperate and in our view that is when there will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and that’s why we don’t see the Maduro government surviving 2017 from its current form at the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

XS: I think something that really plays a big part in just the current situation in Venezuela as you mentioned briefly was oil prices and just the finances of the state. I know we talk a lot internally about the debt service that Venezuela has to, well the debt that it has to service throughout the year. And as oil prices have come down, not in addition to just losing profitability from the state-run oil company, I believe Venezuela also subsidized oil prices for domestic consumption for political reasons. How much has oil prices contributed to the crisis versus just being one element of a bigger storm?

AF: So oil prices would be one of the most fundamental contributors to this crisis, in that the entire political system is based off of having money and spending it on people. And oil is the primary source of revenue for the Venezuelan government. So when you take away the primary source of your revenue and your entire government depends on revenue to govern, it’s a very huge contributing factor to the crisis that we’re seeing right now.

XS: So in a certain sense, the problems that Venezuela is facing being a petrostate parallels a lot of what we’re seeing in other parts of the world too, right? Low oil prices are having geopolitical impacts all around.

AF: I would say that the difference is that a lot of the states that we’re looking at, from the low oil prices that started in 2014, Venezuela’s problems were beginning to emerge well before then. So it is very closely tied to oil but the crisis predates the 2014 drop in oil prices by two or three years. So while it’s the same commodity that is the root cause of the problem in Venezuela, the crisis is different from what we’re seeing in countries from the 2014 crisis in that it’s a much more prolonged crisis. They have been dealing with this for two to three years more than any other country that we’re looking at now as a major victim of a drop in oil prices. Which also means they’re are a lot more desperate and a lot more advanced. So if you want to think about what countries suffering oil prices might look like two or three years from now if there is no rebound, look to Venezuela and you will have an idea of how bad things could get.

XS: If Venezuela descends further into anarchy, the direction that it’s been going, how does that impact its regional relations in South America and how does that influence any broader trends? What influence does the United States have in Venezuela for example? Who will this impact outside of Venezuela proper?

AF: So regionally, the neighbors of Venezuela have been impacted, specifically Colombia and to a lesser extent Brazil, in that individuals near the borders will consistently crossover into Colombia or Brazil to find basic goods, find a job, find sources of revenue, and either go back into Venezuela or in some cases just settle in new places.

So you see an economic crisis of sorts on the border areas, a fluidity of borders, Colombia has closed their borders with Venezuela on multiple occasions, and when it hasn’t been closed, strictly monitored it with Venezuela because of all the security concerns that come with massive amounts of people crossing back and forth over the border. It’s also hurt some of those local economies because of goods getting gutted from their system of people just hoarding things and trying to replace their domestic markets in Venezuela with goods from Brazil and Colombia. That’s the most local level.

At a regional level, we have lots of, South America and Central America and the Caribbean, they love to have their regional blocks. And so there’s many regional blocks in the Americas that have spoken out against this. The two larger outspoken groups would be Mercosur and then the OAS and to a lesser extent Unasur has also spoken out.

The effect that this has had on those countries is minimal depending on where you’re from. In some countries like Argentina or Brazil, you’ll see trade issues where there’s back payments on imported goods and that affects primarily the businesses, the exporters and the importers of those countries, rather than an actual state. Mercosur did suspend Venezuela from the bloc. But the thing is, just because you’re suspended from Mercosur doesn’t necessarily mean there’s trade ramifications.

When they suspended Paraguay, they did not cut off trade. They’ve suspended Venezuela, they did not cut off trade. And so that lack of concrete consequences means that those groups have very little impact on Venezuela and also creates a complicated scene because there’s not much they can do about it without greatly risking any type of backlash.

There’s a fear in the region of setting precedent for certain types of things. Dictatorships and things like that are still in the memory of the older generations in the region and so people are very cautious of what types of precedents they set for interfering with another nation. With telling them how to run their government, with telling them how to respect or revise their constitution because once you do it for one country, the concern is that it can be done to you. So they’re very outspoken with what they see as wrong, but they’re very hesitant and unwilling to do any concrete measures to intervene or take extreme consequences against Venezuela.

The United States has an interest in Venezuela in terms of oil production. It has an interest in terms of any type of oil operations and sales and companies that Venezuela has in the United States, like Citgo. And to a lesser extent just the regional stability. But Venezuela on its own cannot threaten fundamentally any of the U.S. interests. However, the U.S. still sees itself as the overseer, if you will, of the Americas in general. The U.S. has also been slow to act and I don’t think will do any type of intervention at this point in Venezuela either.

XS: Yeah, I think I’ve heard murmurings of some potential sanctions but talk is cheap. It remains to be seen if the U.S. will do anything.

AF: Exactly. So, there’s a group of senators that have asked for sanctions and they’ve also tried to talk about cracking down on drug trafficking and drug charges on these individuals or companies involved with drug trafficking in Venezuela and also some type of humanitarian aid. The problem with that is like you said, it looks great on paper, it sounds good.

In practice, the U.S. has already put sanctions on individuals and select people and places in Venezuela. They have already used the D.E.A. to pursue drug-related arrests and anti-drug operations in the country to help crack down on the government. I mean even the nephews of the first lady were victims of these type of D.E.A. operations. So what they’re proposing is essentially doing more of the same, and to what extent they would increase their efforts and if it was on a scale necessary to be effective, it remains to be seen. So while they may be talking about doing this, it’s unclear if it’s going to be any different from what’s already going on right now.

XS: Right. Now, in our longer term forecast, Geopolitical Futures’ longer term forecast, we like to describe or look at South America as a region where there will be a relative amount of stability. We say that in comparison to where other parts of the are going. We certainly don’t mean to say that there won’t be any degree of internal conflict in some of these South American countries that are still, like you said, struggling with certain narcotrafficking issues or vestiges of some of the guerilla warfare that existed over the last several decades.

How does what’s going in Venezuela fit in to that picture? And if this conflict escalates, if it becomes some degree of civil war, does that remain contained? Does it spill over across borders? Why do we think that this area is going to remain relatively stable despite what’s happening in Venezuela?

AF: So in terms of the broader regional picture of stability, Venezuela is by far and large the exception to this label of stability. And that is because in many of these other countries, you’ve seen drastic moves to cut down guerilla groups that used to exist and those guerilla groups have primarily become drug trafficking groups at this point or other types of black market and crime groups.

You’ll see labor protests, and those are the marks of instability if you will that we see on a daily basis in the region. Indigenous issues in certain countries, especially Andean countries, and those are the domestic issues that are primarily domestic in nature in terms of the impact on the countries that we think – they’re going on but it’s still relatively stable because we aren’t seeing interstate warfare. We’re not seeing genocide or anything of that nature.

Venezuela is very different in that we are seeing anarchy on the streets, violence daily, lack of basic living goods. That is not stable. So where it goes from here, people can close their borders. There are ways to keep this confined in Venezuela as possible. None of the issues in Venezuela, in terms of how the government is run, directly threaten other countries in the region save perhaps Bolivia, which is the last remaining left wing strong government in South America. Some people may argue Ecuador is too but even then they’ve started to take a step back from where they were say 10 years ago, at the height of the Chávista leftist government movement in the region.

Anarchy and chaos will not last forever. At some point, Venezuela will break. We have forecasted that will happen this year, and assuming that does happen, there will still be chaos afterwards because it’s unclear who will be in charge, how they will be in charge, how they plan to fix the problems. But in the long term, there’s no reason to believe that it won’t return to a form similar to that of its other regional neighbors in South America in terms of relative stability, where there are labor disputers, maybe some indigenous issues but nothing that fundamentally threatens the existence of the state or the government.

So Xander, since we have you here too, I know I’ve been talking a lot about some of the political aspects but we have your financial background and expertise. Earlier you mentioned this discussion of Venezuela’s debt and fears of default and whatnot. And so far, they have been able to evade any type of major default. Where did they stand now and what moves are they continuing to do to try avoid a default type of scenario?

XS: Right, the move has been to keep restructuring their debt, at least to this point. Venezuela has a lot of debt and the problem that governments face most immediately with debt is actually not the quantity of debt but rather their payments on it – so interest and any principal that they need to repay. Because as soon as a government, or any borrowing entity really, can’t service its debt, it faces a default and all the consequences that come along with that including new demands by lenders. Reaching any covenants can require stricter enforcement or new rules imposed upon the borrower.

What’s interesting in Venezuela obviously the rest of the world and capital markets are aware of what’s going on there, so they’ve had some difficulty restructuring their debt to date. But Russia has actually been involved. I’d have to go back and re-read the specifics but the Russian oil company Rosneft was involved in helping Venezuela restructure some of its debt and has been providing some degree of lending to keep the government and the Venezuelan state oil company solvent.

So there are some Russian interests in Venezuela and to the extent the Maduro government can keep servicing its debt, you know, it will do anything it can basically to keep servicing its debt. Whatever restructuring the capital markets allow for, they will keep doing until they run into a wall, and then they will face bigger problems.

AF: When you say run into a wall, what do you mean by that and are there any signs of that coming in the near future?

XS: Sure, well if the government can’t service its debt, if it runs into this one big payment, I know it has a couple scheduled later this year that it can’t pay, then essentially it starts running into this problem where it doesn’t have enough money to fund all the social activities that need to get taken care of internally. Because the state oil company essentially acts as the coffer for the government in order to fund whatever social obligations it still can. And if it starts running short on money, then lenders are going to be a lot less forgiving, in terms of presenting new terms that are amenable to Venezuela or extending any sort of new debt or rolling over existing debt.

So really, they just face the problem you mentioned earlier of running out of hard cash currency. I mean what happens if you can’t fund the ongoing activities of the state and the obligations that it’s incurred. That’s what I mean by running into a wall and it remains to be seen if they’re going to be able to keep restructuring successfully or if at some point, something will give.

AF: Gotcha. And we have yet to see from the opposition any concrete plans to solve the economic issues. We’ve seen some unity among them saying yes we all agree: the political system is broken, it needs to be fixed, the economic system is broken, it needs to be fixed, and we all agree that it needs to be fixed in some way shape or form. There have been no concrete plans put forth. From your view, what are the top one or two items that would need immediate attention to go about trying to normalize the Venezuelan economy? It’s a loaded question, I am sure there is more than one answer depending on who you talk to. But from your standpoint and a geopolitical point of view, where are some of these starting fundamental points that would need to be addressed from the very beginning?

XS: Sure. As I understand it, a big problem that the Venezuelan government has run into has been providing domestic oil subsidies, which is basically selling oil domestically to prices that are far below international market rates. And this has basically continued to just bleed the coffers dry because they are suppling this product for either at or below cost. So that’s not something that can continue. There are subsidies that are like that, that will need to be discontinued if Venezuela hopes to actually rightsize its budget in the long term.

On a more fundamental level, social conflict seems to arise more often when people can’t eat. That’s a really basic law of revolutions, right? I spent some time recently in Colombia where they’re, rightfully probably, more focused on some of the domestic issues there going on with the FARC demobilization and local corruption. But I’ve certainly met some Venezuelans and met some Colombians who have family in Venezuela and the thing that just keeps coming up time and time again is there’s nothing on the shelves here. There’s no food. There is no medicine, we have to go to Cúcuta across the border in Colombia just to get you know basic things to survive day to day.

And while that remains a challenge, while that situation continues to exist in Venezuela, it’s hard to imagine the social unrest really declining to any substantial degree. So, economically what that means in terms of fixing it is, whatever the government has to do to stabilize the situation enough to make investments look reasonable in Venezuela again to reassure markets internationally or just find whatever way they need to get food back on the shelves.

AF: That will be a very interesting move for them to do. I’ve seen some recent surveys and in the last year like you’ve said, it’s amazing how the immediate needs shift and change the pace and interests of individuals. In the last year, security you know 12 months ago, 18 months ago, was the primary concern of many Venezuelans. They felt unsafe, they felt like crime was everywhere. And now we are in a situation where people are getting killed almost on a daily basis. There’s tear gas bombs, there’s firehoses and protests and burning tires on any given street.

And the most recent surveys by private firms show that the vast majority are actually more concerned about where are they going to get their next meal as opposed to the security concerns that they had a year ago. So you make an excellent point and that is also one of the strong fundamental pillars of why we believe that something has to give. There’s a level of desperation that you will reach where when life no longer becomes livable, you need to do something about it. It’s a human instinct. Politically it manifests itself with the social demonstrations and so I look forward to being able to come back and discuss with you hopefully the results of our forecasts of nothing else to update later on too, how this all plays out.

XS: Me as well. So obviously, these protests are still ongoing. Something like 35 people have been killed over the last month and we will continue to follow these developments. If you would like to learn more about Geopolitical Futures’ perspective on Venezuela, be sure to check out our long-term forecast which is available to subscribers and we’ve also written a lot of Reality Checks – 1,000 to 1,500-word pieces – the most recent being “Venezuela’s Breaking Point” is what it’s called and it describes not only recent developments, but again why we think that these developments play into our forecast for 2017 and why the Maduro government will experience some sort of significant change by the end of the year. So thanks for taking the time to chat Allison.

AF: Thanks, and great talking to you.

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss what is and isn't important about the French elections and what is at stake for Europe. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. This week I am joined by one of our new analysts, Xander Snyder. We’re happy to have you Xander.

Xander Snyder: Thanks, this will be fun.

JLS: We’re hoping to just have a conversation today about what’s been going on in France, and I want to be conscious of not ascribing too much influence to Marine Le Pen and to the hysterics around the election itself because, as we often write at GPF, elections don’t matter that much and individuals matter even less. But I think that this election in particular does say some very important things about what’s going on in Europe right now.

So just to kind of rehash for those who need rehashing of it, the French election happens in two rounds. So the first round is sort of a wide group of different parties and people, and if somebody gets 50 percent in the first round, they win, but that almost never happens. So the first round is to whittle it down to two people, and then in the second round you get two people who face off against each other in a runoff, and you go from there.

So the first round this year was remarkable in the sense that none of the establishment candidates from establishment parties did particularly well. The two leading vote-getters were Emmanuel Macron who started his own new party, which is nominally progressive or centrist, it sort of depends on what day of the week it is how you want to describe it.

And then Marine Le Pen who is the head of the National Front, which is a party that has been around since the ’70s, which is considered a right-wing nationalist party. It’s not the greatest way of describing it if you actually look at their platform, some of the economic policies might be described as more left wing. What’s really “right wing” about them is their nationalism and what some people would call their racism, although I think that Marine Le Pen has tried very hard to purge the party of some of those more negative influences.

The two other leading vote-getters were Fillon, who was sort of the conservative candidate that everybody thought was going to win and was beset by scandal after scandal such that he just couldn’t get his momentum going, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, who was sort of the far-left Bernie Sanders of France who did much better than people thought. He got 19.6 percent of the vote but not enough to get to the second round.

So that’s where we are right now. The second round takes place on May 7 and really this is going to be a vote between in some ways a pro EU candidate and an anti-EU candidate. Le Pen has said she wants to renegotiate the relationship with the EU as soon as she gets in, and if there’s not a successful renegotiation, she wants to put it to a referendum and hopefully leave. Macron is really promising policies more of the same.

So one of the reasons this is so important to talk about, it’s less because of France, more because of what this says about the state of Europe. So that’s sort of where we are, right this second. Xander, I thought it might be a useful thing to start off by talking the tension between individuals and between geopolitics. I know that as somebody who has started recently with us and has been doing a lot of training on this, that it’s sometimes hard to see the boundary there. How do you see the relationship between Le Pen and the French elections.

XS: I think you wrote two pieces recently on what’s going on in France. One was a Reality Check and the other was a Deep Dive that placed this election in greater geopolitical context and they’re worth reading. I think an interesting distinction that you drew was whether or not Le Pen controls her constituency or her constituency controls her. And it’s an important distinction because you say this could be the difference between the National Front becoming a reanimation of some of the really bad things that happened in 20th century Europe versus it just becoming a 21th century political party that’s just trying to balance and find a way to essentially stay in power, which is why Le Pen has been exorcising some of the more radical elements of her party to try to get to where she is right now.

So, I’d actually be curious just to start off to know a little bit more about what you meant by that distinction. Who’s controlling who and why does that matter in a geopolitical sense? In a sense, that’s greater than just the election.

JLS: The reason that matters for me is because I am thinking about trying to define what was really bad about 20th century Europe and what really might have geopolitical significance. For me, in 20th century Europe, that was really the rise of fascism and the rise of totalitarianism. If you read a lot of the literature about totalitarianism in general, Hannah Arendt is the one I’ve studied most closely but these ideas are not specific to her.

Totalitarianism and fascism and communism, even as Stalin used it, it was not about the man. The ideology sort of ended up privileging the role, but these were mass movements and you couldn’t have the move towards totalitarianism and towards fascism if you hadn’t had the creation of a mass movement.

So in some ways, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, these people were spawns of these mass movements that broke down all previous ties and which created this new mystical sense of what the nation was. And it had some relationship to reality, but it also tried to break things apart so there wasn’t Prussia and Bavaria and all the stuff anymore. There was the romantic Teutonic Knight marching around in the forest type stuff, and there were these ideas about in some cases purity. And all of these things that developed were a result of the mass movement itself.

So when I say it matters whether Le Pen is leading her constituents or her constituents are leading her, it actually has nothing to do with Le Pen, nothing to do with what power she would or wouldn’t have if she came into office. I think she would actually be more limited in carrying out some of her more radical policies that people don’t like or people are vocal about not liking.

But the real issue here is, is French society or are there parts of European society that are breaking down to the point where you can see the type of mass movement that happened in the 1930s and the early 1940s and had people gravitating towards these forms of government that ended up perpetrating all of these wars and all of these horrors that really Europe and most of the Western world has been afraid of since? Does that answer the question?

XS: I think it does. It jumped out to me because I think it hints at a deeper issue in social sciences generally, which is teasing out causality when you can’t do a double-blind study. It is very difficult, what’s causing what. And so you get to this point where, for example, Le Pen and the National Front, it’s difficult to tell if her actions are just a symptom of these trends you are talking about or if she has some degree of control over them. Which do you think it is?

JLS: Well I think that Le Pen is a creation of her time and of her constraints. I mean, you can’t think about Le Pen and not think about her father who is a Holocaust denier who really was the person who was in charge of putting the National Front on the map. You can’t think about him and not think about his experiences in the French Algerian war. You can’t think about the French Algerian war without thinking about France’s history as an empire and its history of colonialism and its battles with Great Britain. You can’t think about that stuff without thinking about Napoleon and the French Revolution and we’re sort of right back at the beginning of all this stuff, right?

So I think that Le Pen really is just an individual manifestation of a larger thing. There would be no Le Pen if there wasn’t high unemployment in France and if there wasn’t stagnant GDP growth in France and if it wasn’t that in the northeast of France, a lot of the industrial production centers are suffering. They look across the border to Germany, and they see that Germany has historically low unemployment rates and that, thus far, the Germans have been spared from the major ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis.

So I really do think that she is a creation of her time and a creation of her father and a creation of French geopolitics. And she is both enlivened by those things and completely restricted by them, and I think some of what Le Pen is doing is you can watch the individual try and strain against those things as much as possible. I mean, she kicked her own father out of the party. She’s doing everything she can to purge the party of the parts that people might think are too radical because she is trying to be pragmatic.

But A: She’s going to have a hard time doing that, the second round polls if they are right say it’s like a 62 to 38 margin. B: If she even got to power, we’d have to wait until legislative elections in June to see if she could even get some of the legislative support let alone the popular support for some of her approaches. And C: It’s hard to forget who she is and who her father was and all of the things that they have said, and for a lot of people, that’s not what it means to be French.

So again, she’s an interesting laboratory for thinking about what an individual can do and what the limits on an individual are. She’s interesting because she’s compelling and charismatic and in some ways able to articulate some of these issues better than anyone else. I think that’s what makes her a powerful politician but I don’t want to ascribe to her the force of a world historical person or somebody who by themselves is going to completely shape the way geopolitics is working.

XS: Sure, it’s not a juncture point per se, it is part of a larger trend.

JLS: Yeah it’s a much larger trend, and she’s really just a small part in a much larger chapter. It’s funny, I was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper a couple days ago and one of the things they asked me about Le Pen was they asked me if I thought the EU was going to fail. I sort of looked at the person strangely, and I said, look what does it mean for the EU to fail?

From my perspective, it sort of already has. You’ve got the Hungarians and the Poles ignoring EU directives on refugees and migrants. You’ve got Britain saying sorry we’re out, we don’t want any part of this. The French themselves have been ignoring deficit rules from the EU for years. The Italians and Brussels are going back and forth on banking regulations and literally are fiddling while Rome is burning.

So you have all these people ignoring EU directives. You have Germany sort of sitting there in it all in a very economically vulnerable situation. Le Pen is just one small chapter in this, and she represents the particular French chapter in this, which is an important one. France now is the second-largest economy in the EU, and in a lot of ways the EU was a French idea. It was them who wanted to build the EU to keep Germany where it was. To solve the problem that created all these wars in the European continent since 1870.

So yeah she’s a part of all of those things. She’s a fairly small part of it and an interesting part of it. If she did come to power and if the National Front swept legislative elections, there might actually be something to say about this being in the immediate term important in the way that the EU demise carries out. But the demise is happening. It will happen with Le Pen or without Le Pen.

If Macron sails into the presidency, I completely expect him to be equally blocked because France is very divided, and he’ll have five years of status quo policies, and we’ll be back here in 2022. We’ll be talking about the same stuff and maybe Le Pen will even have a greater percentage of the vote.

XS: So I think something that you mentioned a minute ago will give us kind of opportunity to dive in just a little bit more into how Geopolitical Futures thinks about the world. You kind of describe this person who is straining against all these domestic political pressures and just trying to figure just what options she actually has. Now at Geopolitical Futures, one of the things that we really focus on is this idea of constraints.

We believe that people end up in power, parties end up in power because they are effective at understanding what steps they need to take to get there, right? And there’s only so many options once they’re there that they can take. So what we try to do a lot of the time is understand what those options are, what those constraints are and go from there, and that’s what lets us have a little bit more insight into just describing the situation. What sort of constraints do you see Le Pen or Macron facing following the election that either would face regardless of who wins?

JLS: Look either one of them is going to be stuck with a very difficult economic situation that has been building up over time, and I am not convinced that either one of them has the policies in their toolkit to solve it, and that’s not an indictment of either of them. I just think that it’s a particularly difficult structural situation that they’re in, and it’s not something that’s going to be solved overnight.

The problem is that it’s a problem that has been developing for so long that people’s patience is probably not in line with the things that have to be done to fix 10 percent unemployment and 25 percent youth unemployment and stagnant GDP growth and all these other things for a couple years.

On the actual legislative level, again Macron’s party is brand new. The National Front has made some headway but, in the last legislative elections, ended up not taking that many seats because the other parties banded together against them to keep them out. Le Pen has said she wants to take France out of the E.U. It’s not exactly clear how that works. She could call a referendum, although either the court or the Parliament has to approve that step so it’s not like she can just do it herself.

Its less clear – does she need the approval of the population in some way to do it? Does she not? That’s an open question. So those are all technical constraints in what they are doing. And then the broader constraints are that there was an internal logic to the EU. We’ve written a lot and George Friedman, who is our chairman and founder, has written a lot about the inherent, illogical nature of the EU in the sense that it wasn’t quite completely taking everyone’s sovereignty, but it still wanted to take a little bit of it away. But there was a logic behind the EU: It was this idea of, what is Germany’s role in Europe going to be?

There was this sense that if you could get Germany into an economic block that was beneficial for it, you would basically be controlling Germany’s imperatives, and Germany’s imperatives have always been to spread out over the Continent. That’s what has really been the approximate geopolitical issue in Europe, basically since German unification in the late 19th century.

Is a French president or if France leaves the EU, are they just going to ignore that or are they just going to run away from that? What is their relationship with Germany going to be from now on? Who is France going to trade with? What are the implications of the economy going to be if you start breaking those things down? Can the French really come back with a currency that quickly?

These are all the sort of difficult constraints that make things happen now, and one other thing I would just throw on there is that the inertia is also a very powerful force. Brussels has been there for a long time. I think one of the reasons that George often says that he doesn’t expect the EU to collapse, he sort of just expects it to go away into obsolescence, where they might still have meetings and they might still issue directives but everybody will kind of ignore them. We’ll wake up one day and people will realize, ok there’s an EU, but there’s not really an EU.

So I think those are all parts of constraints that both Macron and Le Pen face. In that sense, they’re probably more similar to each other than they are to anyone else in France.

XS: A metaphor that we’ve used before that I think is apt is that the EU has essentially allowed France post World War II to, like you said, control Germany’s directives to a degree, keep them in a cage because there is this institution in which Germany has become essentially the most at least economically powerful country, but France is powerful military lets them play an outsized role in that institution as well.

So looking beyond the elections, looking beyond what’s going to happen in the next month or two, what are and what have France’s historical imperatives on the Continent been, and how do they develop as the EU becomes a weaker institution?

JLS: That’s an interesting question. I would say that one of the things you have to think about in terms of France and Germany’s relationship is that the EU was also built around a divided Germany, and one of the things we often talk about and write about is that a lot of these institutions that exist, exist because of inertia, what I was talking before about inertia. NATO is an anti-Soviet alliance. The EU’s aim was partly to contain Germany, was partly also anti-Soviet, was about rebuilding Europe.

But the EU also contained western Germany, right? Like for most of the EU and its predecessors, what we’re talking about here is Germany that is divided into west and east. In some ways, the German model gets completely upended at German unification. Nobody was expecting the Soviet Union to fall, nobody was expecting German unification on that quick a scale. And once Germany unified, it set in motion an inevitable set of circumstances that lead us to this point where France and Germany are coming at each other with cross purposes. It was easier for France to deal with a Germany that was cut in half than it was for France to deal with a Germany that was whole even when Germany had to go through, you know, the economic struggles of reintegrating the east into it.

So I mean, going forward on the Continent Germany and France have always been the two dominant players. The thing that I would say is Germany has large economic problems, demographic issues, internal issues in terms of people thinking about, well, Germany wasn’t always Germany. It only unified in the 1870s. Is there any chance that some of the separatism that we’ve seen in other parts of Europe might come to Germany?

France also I sort of look on as not necessarily a declining power but one which is really internally focused which has major domestic issues. They are not exactly about to go adventuring all over the place. You’re right that they do have a powerful military, but it’s pretty much maxed out right now with their deployments fighting ISIS in the Middle East and the stuff that they’re doing in Mali and North Africa. I think this really gets to a shift in European history in the sense that what happens in the west will be less important than what happens in the east.

When I look at Europe right now, the really dynamic economies and the really dynamic things that are happening in Eastern Europe. When you look at what’s happening in Hungary, when you look at what’s happening in Poland, you know I think that’s the place where the future of Europe is really going to be decided. And that might sound a little bit strained, especially since we are so used to thinking about Germany and France being the main contenders on the Continent. But I really do see a much weaker Germany than we’ve had before, a weaker France that is much more inwardly facing.

And when you have a weak Germany, when you have a weak Russia, there have been periods where Poland sort of rises and where these Eastern European powers have their day. So I think we’re thinking about what the EU and what Europe is going to look like 10, 20, 30 years from now. In some ways, it’s not so important whatever argument the French have with themselves about what it means to be French. In some ways, what’s more important is what’s happening in Eastern Europe, what is the relationship going to be between east and west, what is the relationship between a declining Germany and a declining Russia going to look like, how is France going to deal with that, how is the U.K. going to get involved. Those are some of the questions that I would see.

But I would turn that question around on you Xander. How do you think about the future of the EU 20, 30 years out, considering some of the things we’ve talked about?

XS: Yeah, I think something that we’ve written about that gives some insight into what’s going to happen is this idea of nationalism, which isn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing. I’m not ascribing a value judgement to it. But as we see the EU grow weaker, as we see Brussels increasingly issuing these orders that no one pays attention to, the idea of identity has crept back into politics in the EU in a powerful way.

People are trying to understand their role in the EU, or well on the European continent, and as that trend progresses, I think we’re going to see more attachment to national identity, and that could go a couple different ways. But this idea of multilateralism that has really prevailed in this period following World War II up until today. I think we’ll sort of fade out as a period in history.

Now how that impacts geopolitical interests on the Continent, I mean I guess you can argue that the existence of multilateral institutions don’t ultimately change things. But as European countries begin to focus more inwardly on their own country, I think we will see a greater focus on national interest rather than continental interests, which is really what the focus had been, especially during the Cold War when Europe fell under the umbrella of U.S. protection. So I think we will see a refocusing on what it means to be French, for example, and therefore what is good for the French.

JLS: Yeah I guess one of the things I would push back a little and just say that I don’t think it’s that multilateral institutions are not important, they can be very important. The deeper issue there is that the multilateral institutions have to have some kind of mission and some kind of purpose. And I think that, and this is one of the things also that France in particular helps articulate, which is that you know multilateralism and international institutions and all of these things were a big part of what happened in 2008.

And I think people have a difficult time separating 2008 from the way that financial crisis spread across the world globally because everybody was so exposed to each other. Particularly in Europe, where a lot of these countries didn’t have control over things like currency that most nation-states do because they are all tied into the E.U. They didn’t have some of the tools that were necessary or the tools that most nation-states have at their disposal to respond to some of the economic problems.

So the question then becomes, is there a purpose or is there some kind of ideological construct in which multilateral institutions can once again be seen as useful? I think one of the main reasons Le Pen has risen as far as she has in France is that nobody else really has any good policies or any good vision of what’s going on. We talked a lot about constraints, and I am not saying that somebody needs a policy that’s going to work, but I am saying that the opposing side needs to present some sense of confidence that it knows what it’s doing and that it has a potential solution that it can produce.

When I look at somebody like Macron, I described him in one of my pieces as an empty suit. I think you actually commented that I was judging him unfairly or that I wasn’t being objective and I responded back to you, no, I am actually being objective. I have no idea what Macron stands for and most French citizens that I have talked to that are my friends also don’t know what he stands for.

He’s called himself a progressive. Other people call him a centrist. I don’t think that it makes much sense, you know being a moderate is actually, that means something. When you call someone a moderate, you are not saying they don’t have any positions or that they’re some kind of equal distance between one position and another position. Moderation is a particular kind of outlook on the world and can articulate in meaningful ways and approaches to problems that can give confidence.

So I think the challenge for those who would favor multilateral institutions and for those who would  favor a less narrow definition of the national interest especially in terms of economics and in terms of refugees and things like this, they have to somehow articulate solutions to the problems in a way that, A: projects confidence, and B: actually takes into account people in their own nation-state.

A lot of times now I feel like nationalists have their solution, and it might be an imperfect one but at least they have a point. They have talking points and you know who Le Pen is and you know what you’re going to get from Le Pen each time, whereas the others you don’t really know what they stand for, what they would do if they got into office or whether they have any confidence that what they would do if they got into office would work in the first place.

So I don’t actually expect nationalism to always be as dominant as it is without any other ideological challenger. I certainly think it’s winning the day right now, and I expect it to be very different going forward. But at a certain point, there’s going to have to be some kind of political opposition to it. I am not sure what that looks like eventually, but I don’t think it’s just going to be all nationalism, all the time. I think the thing that nationalism has done though is that it has redefined the conversation towards the working class, the middle class.

At a certain point, this becomes class based and not necessarily nation based because the people who are voting for these parties and are voting for the nationalist message are people who have gotten screwed over by the current economy and who the elites have just paid no attention to. The gulf between them is getting wider and wider, and so they turn to things like nationalism and patriotism because those are ideas that can give them pride and give them a way of articulating what the problem is. That was a little long winded but you started with multilateral institutions and sort of how I would respond to it.

XS: Yeah I think that makes sense, I mean if you look at the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis. A lot of people all over the world saw that what had been effectively policy for a couple of decades really utterly failed them. So the question has been asked, well what’s good for me? And the question that can follow that is, well who am I? Am I a European, am I middle class, American, who do I identify with and what does that imply in terms of policies that are going to be effective for my group, right? So I think that is certainly one of the trends that we’re seeing brought out more clearly in this French election but also certainly in the U.S. and over the last couple of years.

JLS: Well yeah, and this is actually one of the ways in which the distinction between right wing and left wing breaks down because really when we’re talking about somebody like Le Pen or the National Front or any of these nationalist parties. What they’re doing is they’re defining the nation in a narrower sense. They want certain people to be excluded from the nation, they want there to be a very high barrier, a high bar in terms of what it takes to become a part of the nation. Once you are a part of the nation though, in a lot of ways they want the economic and security and political benefits that are afforded to you to be much more than most traditional right wing or liberal things would think of.

That’s why, when I say that if you read Le Pen’s platform, if you read some of the policies of the National Front, you might expect them more in the far-left’s positions. I mean, one of the things that Jean-Luc Melenchon shared with Le Pen was that he also wanted to take France out of the EU. So if you had elected this “far-right” candidate in Le Pen, not elected but if Le Pen had gotten through and Melenchon had gotten through, you would’ve had two anti-EU candidates, right? They would’ve been on completely different spectrums and the difference between them wouldn’t have even been in terms of getting into the EU. It would’ve been… I am not actually sure, the difference would’ve I guess been on how to define the French nation and how France would deal with defining Frenchness. But again, I am just trying to tease out how this is a lot more complicated than people are making it out to be and the dividing lines that we had before are really stripping away.

XS: Why does that matter? Why does it matter what Frenchness is? Because I think that on some level that’s really the crux of the problem. We’ve certainly come back to this idea in our written pieces, but why is that aspect of identity playing such an outsized role now?

JLS: Yeah I think about that sometimes, and I think that this is an important place to talk about the difference between a nation and nationalism. And so nationalism is an ideology. The nation is really a group of people who share a certain thing common. There are a lot of different definitions for it, but let’s say a common language or ethnicity even principles can define a nation sometimes. It can be a very broad definition. I think one of the reasons nationalism as an ideology, as an organizing principle for how to govern, I think one of the reasons it’s so effective is because it leverages something that is very real, which is the nation. There really wasn’t nationalism, we can’t speak about nationalism before the 17th and 18th centuries, but we can certainly speak about nations before the 17th and 18th centuries.

So I think the point about, you know you asked what does it mean to or why is it important that you have to define what the nation is. I think that in some ways the reason that it’s important is because nationalism has really won the day as a governing ideology. Nation-state is almost a synonym for state these days, and most countries in the world, not all of them but most, are nation-states. And people think in terms of the nation-state and nationalism as an organizing principle sort of, I mean they’ve accepted it without really thinking about it, without even really knowing it. Partly because you know it’s responding to something real, and at that point if that’s how you’re going to organize things then defining who is in the nation is going to become incredibly important. And this has been important in different points throughout European history and throughout the history of nations and nationalism in general.

I mean, the French Revolution – and you know more about the French revolution than I do I think Xander – but I mean the beginning of the French Revolution began with defining the nation, right? And the Third Estate had to define a vision of the nation and the way they defined it was everybody who was in the Third Estate was in the nation. So the aristocracy, maybe some of the clergy, were not going to be considered part of it because it became more important to talk about equality. One of the reasons equality becomes one of the defining things that the French Revolution pushes for is because of the way that the French society is structured beforehand and because of the particular economic things that they are responding to.

So I think it’s important, and I think that people are thinking about it because they are trying to figure out how to respond to problems. And if you are a government, you have to know who you’re responsible for taking care of, who you are responsible for defending. So if you are the president of France, whether you are Le Pen or Macron, you have to have a sense in your mind of who it’s your job to protect. For Le Pen, she’s saying very clearly, I am sorry, it’s very sad about these refugees and these migrants who don’t have a home, that doesn’t mean that I have to protect them. My job would be to be the president of France and to protect France, and I will protect France. And maybe protecting France means that I just can’t let everybody in as much as I would want to and as much as, you know, it’s a sad situation that they’re in.

So you know that’s how she wants to define the nation, and because of that definition she pursues certain policies and people gravitate towards her because they feel, I don’t know, that their society is under threat or their job opportunities are under threat. You know, now we’re talking about the things that make it convincing. But I think that’s why people are thinking so much about this because before you connect policies, you have to know who the policies are meant for.

XS: Yeah and I think the example of the French Revolution is actually another nice example of constraints in action, right? Because if we think about how the French Revolution is romanticized – the phrase liberte, egalite, fraternite, that comes to mind – is this idea of these higher moral principles that were driving this big, this really critically important event in history.

But, you know, you mentioned the Third Estate and identity. The reason that that group of individuals appealed to that idea of equality is because they were trying to gain political power to push back against essentially what was an increase in taxes that the nobility wasn’t going to have to incur to the same degree, that was exacerbated by a food shortage, a crisis, due to a bad harvest. And so it’s not like I mean some of these people probably had higher moral principles, but that framing would never have existed if those people were not stuck in that situation trying to solve that problem, so it’s just another example of constraints.

JLS: Yeah and I think one of the things to think about here is – and this one of the things that makes the United States different than those European countries and I know that Trump is in the same vein as Brexit and Le Pen but I also sort of think of him as separate because I can’t really speak about the United States as a nationalist entity.

And one of the reasons I have a hard time thinking about nationalism in the United States is because, first of all, you can’t say the United States nation, that sounds kind of awkward, you sort of have to say the American nation. But the American nation really sprouts up out of nothing, and I shouldn’t say nothing, right? Because what happens is you get a bunch of immigrants who come to the United States and fight wars or wipe out the native population. Point being that they haven’t been here for time and memorial, you know? Like the United States was founded in 1776, and there weren’t really people of the group that founded the United States there for much longer before it.

Whereas when you are dealing with France, you are dealing with – and you know there wasn’t always a France, certainly if you go back thousands of years, there’s different iterations. If you are even talking about France around the Enlightenment, there’s still different languages, there is no harmonized French system. But you are still dealing with people where there’s a very deep and serious tie between the blood and between the land. This is one of the things that used to be in a lot of National Front discourse, which was that there is an innate relationship between your blood and between your land, and it’s tied in this very particular way.

So one of the interesting things to me about Trump is that he is, you know, putting America first and he’s making America great again, but I think there is a real difference between what he’s talking about and between what’s happening in France because Trump can’t make the same appeals to American nationalists that I think someone like a Le Pen in France or even, you know, the Brexit people in Britain can make to a British nation or to a French nation.

When Trump was out there, what won Trump his election was connecting with working-class and middle-class voters and making them feel like they had a champion, like he was going to be their champion. A number of them were white I think, and that obviously plays into, that’s maybe a counter to some of the things that I am saying. But again, I think that Trump had to be much more class based about it whereas in a country like France, in a country like Great Britain or even in a country like Germany, yes a lot of it is economic based and a lot of it is class based, but there’s also this other element that just isn’t there in the United States.

XS: And that’s because these countries have had so much more history shaped by geopolitical constraints to form these concepts of identity, is that what you’re saying?

JLS: It is, although I think one of the ironic things about that is, and I sort of, we talked about this a little bit at the beginning when we were talking about totalitarianism and fascism and how the mass movement creates this sort of mystical idealized version of the nation. Yes, all these countries do have longer histories and can go back further in time. At the same time though, like I said earlier, nationalism is really, we’re talking about the 17th and 18th century so yes they go back in time and there is this conception of this relationship between the land and the people going back thousands of years and on a certain level its true. But even that is sort of constructive, right? It’s maybe got a few extra hundred years in the hopper so maybe that’s why it’s more deeply felt.

But, we’re over and over talking about the same thing. I do think there is some difference though in the sense that the French can’t remember a time when they weren’t in France, whereas it’s part of the American narrative or myth about itself that it got here and it was people fleeing from something and they wanted to create something based around principles rather than a shared type of nation. So yeah, that’s sort of what I mean about that.

XS: So I think that kind of lets us all tie it together and the last thought that I want to bring up is actually what you pointed out in your recent Reality Check, which I suggest people go take a look at, it’s called “Declaration of the Rights of France.” It’s at the end and rather you call out a conflict in the French constitution, I think it’s in Articles 1 and 3, one of which is the idea of universalism and the right and equality of all men everywhere. And then later on that same page, there’s this idea that the state, the nation needs to have sovereignty in order to enforce the rights of individuals in that state.

So, one is rights of people in that state, the other is rights of people everywhere, right? And I think that kind of speaks to the distinction between nationalism and the nation that you’re talking about.

JLS: I would just jump in and say, it’s actually not the constitution which tells you something about France. It’s the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is one of the great documents that comes out of the French Revolution, but it’s not the French constitution. In the same way that the Declaration of Independence is not the American constitution, right? It’s separate. And Article 1 does say men are born and will remain equal in rights, and then Article 3 says that the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.

So the first thing the French Revolution does is say, there are free and equal rights that everyone has by virtue of being a human being, right? And one of the things the French Revolution does is it declares this freedom and this equality for everyone as such just for being a human being, just for existing and breathing and being there. And within two articles, it gives that freedom away by saying all of this sovereignty is in the nation. And I think the reasons it does that is because it is impractical, it doesn’t work to have everybody just being completely free all the time with no accountability with nothing. This goes back to Hobbes– it’s life is nasty, brutish and short and the state of nature is not a fun thing – and Aristotle – man is a political animal, we come together because if we don’t come together, there’s going to be chaos and it’s going to be nuts.

So at the opening salvo of the French Revolution is that everyone is equal and it realizes very quickly that that’s not going to work. I think that’s true of most of the world’s democracies, and it is really the tension within world democracy because the principles of the Enlightenment were this idea of, you know, you have rights and freedoms as a human being by virtue of being a human being and that got married to nationalism as it arose.

They were almost two separate ideas. You had liberalism, sort of classically defined, and you had nationalism. And they came together, and they made the nation-state. That was what the marriage of those two things looked like. And they want to be able to have their cake, which is everybody is free by virtue of being a person, and yet they want to eat it too because they want everybody to have their own nation and their own right to their own nation.

That sounds perfectly wonderful in principle, but in practice it gets a little bit difficult, right? Because if you’re going to accept that hook, line and sinker, then Catalonia should have a nation if they want a nation. And Scotland should have a nation if they want a nation. And what do you do if you have two nations, let’s say Israel and Palestine, who claim the same land and can create, you know, claims that maybe one side won’t respect the other side’s claims, but let’s say both can present some kind of historical basis for their claim to a certain part of land, and it’s the same land.

What are you going to do? Are you going to divide the land up? What does your men are born and remain free and equal rights tell you to do when two different men claim the same land and that’s sort of what Article 3 does, right? It says that, ok, sure we’re all equal but the nation-state exists to protect that freedom and the nation-state means you give up some of your sovereignty to the nation-state because the nation-state is going to protect those freedoms for you within a defined limit.

It’s Churchill who said, I forget exactly what the quote is, but he’s talking about democracy and it’s the worst form of government except all the others. You know, liberal democracy is sort of like that – it’s not perfect. It has all of these inner tensions, but I think the danger comes in anybody who thinks that it’s only about the nation. And then I think there’s also an equal danger in anybody that thinks it is only about the principle because if you are a radical in either direction and if you can’t split the difference, you’re not living within the liberal democracy because the liberal democracy is a compromise between two ideas that together on the surface don’t exactly fit.

XS: So I think what ties it all together for me is the idea that ideology does not really by itself drive major world events. It certainly, as an idea, spurs men and women to action, but the idea that there are power imbalances and circumstances, political realities that shape those ideologies. At the same time that there’s an interplay between them both, I think is fundamental to how we look at the world. We try to understand the reality of the situation in addition to what people are saying.

JLS: Yeah I think that’s exactly right and I hope that as we get into the second round of French elections – it’s sort of the year of elections, right? We’re going to have British elections this year, we’re going to have German elections this year, who knows what other stuff is going to pop up. I hope that – and I am sure we will be talking about these in some depth as we go both in terms of our writing and also on the podcast, but I think one thing as people think about these elections, if you want to think about things through the way we’re thinking about them, just listen to what Xander just said.

I mean it’s not really about the election. The election tells you that something important is happening, and it gives you some data points to explore for what’s important that’s happening, but it’s not the election and the selection of the person itself. It’s not about Merkel, it’s not about Le Pen, it’s not about Theresa May any more than it was really about Hitler or Stalin or Roosevelt. Those were all people who met the challenges of their time and were defined by the challenges that they faced not by their personal opinions on what they needed to happen.

The same will happen in the 21st century, so the only way I think it’s fair to make a comparison between those two time periods right now at least as I see it is to talk about how the leaders then and the leaders now are not free actors. They are constrained and defined by the things that exist around them, and they are expressions of things underneath them. They’re not shaping history themselves, they are as much a part of being shaped by it as all of us have been shaped by it.

So I think we’ll wrap up there. So Xander this was fun. We should do this again. This was a long one and I hope people enjoy it, but if people think it’s too long or if you have questions that we didn’t answer, if you have suggestions for any other topics, you can just write in to us at [email protected]. You can also just visit us at geopoliticalfutures.com to read our stuff, and we’ll see you out there next week.

Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss Turkey's future after the referendum on April 16. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis and I am joined by Kamran Bokhari, one of our senior analysts. Thanks for joining us today Kamran.

Kamran Bokhari: Thank you for having me again.

JLS: I think, Kamran, you’re in Missouri right now, right? You’re giving a lecture or are about to give a lecture if my memory serves me.

KB: Yes, I am going to be giving a lecture this evening in a couple hours.

JLS: What’s the topic of the lecture?

KB: The topic of the lecture is political Islam, sectarianism and the collapse of the Arab world. That’s sort of the broad topic. There’s a long formal topic, but that’s sort of in a nutshell the issues that I’ll be addressing. You know ISIS and what’s behind ISIS, the underlying geopolitical current and drivers that are shaping the current reality in the Middle East.

JLS: So that all dovetails nicely with what we want to talk about today on the podcast, which is last week’s referendum in Turkey. It has turned out that the polls that said that the “yes” votes were going to win the referendum were correct and now President Erdoğan seems to have more powers than he did before. I think there are a lot of questions that people are wondering about here and we’re going to tackle some of them in succession.

But the first one I think we should just start with is the simplest one, which is what does this mean? So maybe Kamran from your perspective, somebody who has been following the AKP in Turkey for a long time, what does this mean in the broad scheme of things?

KB: So I think at one level, this is the sort of formalization of a de facto reality, and that de facto reality is that Erdoğan is the most charismatic leader in the country. His party is stronger than anybody else. His prime ministers have been weak. Since he left the office of prime minister and assumed the presidency, he’s basically been ruling the country in the way that he envisions and what this referendum does is just basically formalizes it. It allows him to establish a legal system that basically justifies what he’s been doing anyway.

I don’t see the referendum as a monumental shift in and off itself. I think it’s the finalization or formalization of a dynamic that’s been in play ever since Erdoğan assumed the presidency.

JLS: I think one of the important things to point out there is also that it isn’t just about Erdoğan. Erdoğan happens to be one particular individual who happens to be a very skilled politician. But the broader thing that is happening here is that you can see this in the way the referendum vote broke down. There’s a big divide between the cities like Istanbul and like Izmir and the central Anatolian regions, which are the regions that really give AKP a lot of its electoral heft.

I think people at their own risk diminish the importance of those people in the interior because they’re prejudiced to think that the things in the cities matter the most. But we’ve seen this time and time again that there really is a divide between the cities and the interior and Erdoğan has been able to capture that, right?

KB: Yes and in many ways, this is just a continuation of the trend that we’re seeing worldwide. I mean Brexit was one, the election of President Donald Trump is the other major case in point. There is this divide between those who live in urban areas. In many ways, the people living in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir have more in common with their counterparts in other cities like that – other mega cities on the European continent, North America, Asia – than they do with their own fellow citizens who live in the rural areas, in many cases not too far out from the city limits of these major metropolises.

So I think that, that phenomenon is continuing. And the idea that somehow autocracy is gaining ground in Turkey – I think that is problematic because clearly there is a sizable amount of people in Turkey who do not see it that way, who think that it is their democratic vote that has allowed Erdoğan to become what he is and he represents them and they support him. So I think we have an issue – there is a variance in how people see democracy being played out in practice.

JLS: Yeah I think that’s a good point. One thing that I would pick up on what you were saying though is that you were talking about comparing what happened in Turkey this past weekend to Brexit and to Donald Trump but I wonder, do you really think that’s a good comparison? Because I think on the one hand you have some of that going on in Turkey. But the other deeper problem for Turkey is a problem that really has to do much more with the Muslim world than it has to do with the European world, which is: What is the relationship between politics and the Muslim world and between religion?

The AKP gets called an Islamist party and I know, Kamran, you can shed some more light on this, but one thing that I always come back to and I always say when I talk about this is that the most recent Pew survey on attitudes in Turkey showed that, while people are very proud of being Muslims, they don’t think that Shariah or Muslim law should be what governs Turkey. They certainly have a sense and especially AKP supporters would like to be able to wear the hijab in public. They don’t think of secularism in terms of the radical way in which the French think about it. But they do want to be free to at least practice their Islam in the public sphere and don’t want that to be prejudiced or criticized in any particular way.

So how do you think about the AKP and about Turkey in general in terms of this conflict, not just between urban and rural but between religious and secular?

KB: I mean yes, this is a topic – if I recall correctly you wrote a Reality Check not too long ago in terms of the blurry line between secularism and religion in the context of Turkey. Yes, the religious/secular divide is something George wrote about a couple of days ago as well.

The secularism of Turkey is actually undergoing change. The Kemalist version of secularism was based on French laicism. You know, a very hardline, very radical form of secularism where overt public displays of religious symbolism or religious practices were frowned upon. And that was the order of things for many decades until the rise of the AKP or actually some of its predecessors in the ’80s and the ’90s, and that movement has strengthened. But does that movement call for an Islamic state, a state where Shariah is the basis, is the core of the legal system? No, I think that’s not the case.

I would argue that the AKP as well as its rival the Gülen movement are struggling to basically take the lead in a post-Kemalist secularism – a secularism that’s more American for lack of a better comparison where religion is allowed and tolerated in public affairs, in civil society. As you said, you know, the wearing of the hijab by not just people on the street but in public service, so I mean recently the ban of wearing the head scarf in the military was lifted.

So those are the kinds of things I think that do not add up to Sharia and do not add up to sort of that Islamist vision that we see, for example, in Egypt in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood or far more austere representations under the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Saudi government and perhaps the most radical in the form of ISIS. So I think that we have to separate between the two.

I think that what the AKP party is trying to do is to strike a balance, as George pointed out in his recent Reality Check, that [Erdoğan] has a population that is secular and he has a population that is more religious. Somehow, he has to ride the tiger and make sure that these two streams do not clash and they go together and there is stability in the state.

So I think that that, at the end of the day, is what’s shaping the religious/secular debate in the country … Now, the popular perception is that democracy is dead in Turkey and, you know, we’re just waiting for Caliph Erdoğan to take his position. That is a view that many people have and I think that is not correct. I think there is more nuance that is being missed.

JLS: I agree with that, and we’ll get into that in a second Kamran. But I just want to stop and go back to something that you said. This is a question that we get from readers sometimes, and I think you being the expert that you are in the Muslim world, you are uniquely well suited to answer this question.

So how would you differentiate between the political ideology of say the Muslim Brotherhood and the AKP party? I mean, obviously, I know there’s a difference but how would you think of the difference between those parties? How would you think of the difference in Islam in the way it is practiced in a place like Turkey verses a place like Egypt or Saudi Arabia? What differences can you tell us from the religious perspective that might shed some light on this conversation?

KB: So the AKP is the successor to a number of Islamist groups and they came in succession going all the way back to the ’80s. That did have ideas very similar to the Muslim Brotherhood – that Islam should be imposed by the state. An Islamic state has to be top down, and the role of the state is to implement Islam. If you ask them, those who believe in this, they will say, “well we need to implement the Shariah, the Islamic laws.” And what are those? Well, that’s up for debate. How will that be done? That is a very long story, and many of these people do not know themselves how will they do it.

The AKP in sharp contrast with that is simply saying there should be more space for people who are religious to take part in public life. In other words, people should not have to be secular to get a career in the military or the bureaucracy, and we should not completely in a very radical way privatize religion in way that it should not leave the home. In other words, it should be allowed to flourish kind of like the churches in the American heartland. I am here at Springfield, Missouri. This is the home of the Assemblies of God denomination, and there are somewhat in the neighborhood of three hundred churches in this city. And so that is civil society. Does the state impose that? No. Does the state block that? No.

And I think that’s what the AKP wants. Because the AKP came into a context where overt public display of religiosity, the expansion of mosques and all other religious symbolisms and religious institutions and practices, that was frowned upon. That was seen as backward and people had to do that at home or in their locales where they were not fearful that the state could prevent them from doing that. So I think that that is the clear distinction between those who want an Islamic state and those who want a society in which Islam can flourish, for lack of a better term, or at least religious people can be able to practice their religion the way they want to.

JLS: I think that’s a really important point and I think in general – and you were mentioning this before –  this is what is so important when thinking about not just Turkey but a lot of different countries, which is being critical of generalizations and trying to compare things to each other that don’t necessarily need to be compared. And you were talking earlier about the people who have made the “yes” vote in this referendum out to be the death of Turkish democracy. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen that headline actually in the last few weeks. And it’s not like we’re trying to say here that Turkey is not going to become, that the power is not going to become more centralized in the presidency. And we’re also not saying here that Erdoğan doesn’t have some authoritarian tendencies.

The problem with thinking though that this is the end of Turkish democracy is that you are simply ignoring a couple facts. First of all, the Turks voted for this by a large majority. I know that the OSCE came out with a report afterwards talking about various discrepancies in voting. But if you actually read the OSCE report, the report basically says that from a technical level, there was no interference. It was just that people didn’t have access to the proper information, which to me sounds like a way of saying, “oh well their message didn’t get out.” And certainly Erdoğan has been cracking down on journalists, he’s been cracking down on academics. The political environment in Turkey I can’t imagine has been pleasant for a large part of the population since the coup. But it seems to me there is a very large distance between the dictatorship that people are making this out to be and Turkey as it currently stands.

But Kamran, I’d be curious how you think in terms of this question because on the one hand we do see Erdoğan has cracked down quite heavily on some parts of society that in most liberal democracies would be respected as the pillars of liberal democracy. And yet on the other hand, he continues to bow to the wishes of the people. He continues to put these moves to popular referendum, and I think that if he lost, I don’t think we would’ve seen him overruling them. I don’t think we would’ve seen him do extra legal things. So how do you tease all of that out?

KB: Well I mean when it comes to democracy, there are a number of things that tend to be missed in the popular parlance or the way people popularly conceive and discuss it. And the key thing, the number one thing missing in this debate over Turkey is that the democracy that existed before in Turkey was also problematic. It’s not as if the secularists before the AKP came to power were not autocratic, did not have authoritarian tendencies.

This is a country where secularists have imposed three direct coups and one indirect – I mean the military coming in and stepping in and really imposing a form of government on the country – and so AKP is not alone in this. And Turkish democracy, I mean we assume that Turkey – if we don’t see things the way we are familiar with, we say, “oh democracy is dying, democracy is receding,” and we think that is the end of the line. It’s kind of like the end of history argument from Francis Fukuyama back in ’89. I mean this is not the end of history, this is not the end of the line for Turkey. Turkey will continue to evolve and it’s not going to look like what it is in the West.

There are multiple fault lines. There is an ethnic problem that prevents Turkey from being a Western-style democracy. Kurdish separatism is key in that. We’ve already discussed the religious-minded people verses the more Western-oriented people. There is civil military relations…

JLS: Well Kamran, Kamran hold on Kamran. Let me stop you there because I think that is one of the biggest questions – the Kurdish question really is. What do you think the Kurdish question looks like in 10 or 20 years. Now that Erdoğan has solidified power and now that he has gotten what he wanted, can you imagine a situation in which Turkey is able to move forward on that issue and try and integrate Kurds more fully into Turkish society or to come to some kind of resolution to this conflict? I can’t imagine that it’s in Erdoğan’s interest for this conflict to just fester on into eternity, no?

KB: No, it’s not in his interest. If you have millions of people inside your borders who are of Kurdish ethnic background and you have a very large organization in the form of the PKK engaged in an arms struggle for independence – obviously, that’s something that’s on your mind. You can’t just fight your way through it, and if you look, the Erdoğan regime early on tried to deal with this through negotiations.

They tried to work with the Kurdish nominated HDP party several years back. And they tried to bring the Kurds into the political mainstream. Those negotiations did not work out and so it’s not as if this is something that the Turks feel that they can militarily impose a solution on, especially now that the issue is not just the PKK. It’s also the Syrian Kurds who the Turks view as cousins of the PKK. And so this is a complex problem that I think will have to be solved constitutionally through negotiations and I don’t think Erdoğan or anyone at the helm in Ankara thinks otherwise. I think that they know they have to do this but any negotiations cannot be done from a position of any weakness.

I don’t think that Erdoğan and the AKP think that they can solve this problem outside of the parameters of the constitutional process or through undemocratic means, so this issue will not be resolved any time soon because the government has other priorities at this point. And this problem has been magnified by what’s happening in Syria. Had the situation in Syria not taken the path that it did, perhaps AKP could have been far more successful in pushing along that peace process along the domestic front. But the domestic Kurdish problem is being complicated by the cross-border Kurdish problem, and so right now it’s an issue of which one do you deal with.

And while this is happening, you have a coup in the country. And you have to deal with the coup … which means that the Kurdish issue becomes more of on the backburner if you will – we’ll get to it when we get to it because there’s a more immediate crisis that has to be dealt with.

So there’s so many balls that are in the air that have to constantly be juggled by the current government. And I think that what doesn’t happen in conventional conversations is empathetic analysis. There is an expectation, there is something that people want to see happen – which is democracy – at all costs and under all circumstances in a certain way. And when they don’t see that, then it’s Turkey is going into a dark tunnel. Then you’ve got those kind of cries and slogans being dished out.

JLS: Kamran, that was all very brilliant, but you didn’t actually answer my question, did you? I mean I was asking whether you think that there is any kind of solution to the Kurdish issue. Do you think that what’s happening with Erdoğan is a way of him being able to move forward? Do you think that it’s even possible for Turkey to integrate the Kurds in their southeast? Or do you think this will just continue to be a major problem?

If we look at other powers in the world, I mean there are different ways of dealing with these kinds of internal problems. The Chinese obviously just subjugate the people in Xinjiang in Tibet. In the West, you either come to some kind of understanding or integrate them politically with full rights. How do you see the integration of the Kurdish issue and the solving of it? I mean, because when a lot of people look at Turkey one of the things that sticks out to them is that there’s this continued insurgency that the government can’t seem to move past it.

KB: I mean a solution anytime soon is unlikely. I think that given the vulnerabilities of the Turks and given the fact that the Kurds think that the odds are in their favor because of what’s happening in Syria, the Syrian Kurds get their Kurdistan and that somehow helps Turkish Kurds. As long as this sort of view  exists, I don’t see any resolution to that.

There’s also the element of how long before exhaustion of war sets in, and both sides say ok we can negotiation. Is there a formula in which the Kurds are willing to accept some form of status, special status? I don’t know if we can even call it that. I want to avoid using the word autonomy because that could mean anything. But is there a formula that both sides could agree on? And I think that that question cannot be resolved until it becomes clear as to what is the fate of Syrian Kurds because if the Syrian Kurds – as long as they are seen as making progress with their Kurdistan project – then the PKK is in no mood to negotiate seriously.

And as long as this Turkish regime feels vulnerable not just from the Kurds but from a host of other issues, I don’t think that it is in the mood to negotiate seriously. So eventually, at some point in the future, I can see that happening. But for the foreseeable future, I just don’t think that is something that is going to materialize.

JLS: I disagree with you a little in the sense of how optimistic you are about the prospect of the Syrian Kurds. It seems to me that they have very, very disadvantageous geography, that they have enemies against them who are much stronger than them and while they are ascendant right now, they’re really on an indefensible plain and there’s really not a lot they can do. They’re surrounded by Sunni Arabs on the one side, as you say they have their PKK cousins across the border on the other.

Iraq is another interesting thing, and what’s going on in the KRG is perhaps something else to think about for another time. But I think the second thing to think about, and this is really my major concern with Turkey – I am wondering now that the political drama is over, that the Erdoğan government can turn to this, which is that Turkey’s economy has just not been doing that well. And I don’t think that that’s super specific to Turkey, we’re seeing a lot of economies not doing well and some of the reasons for Turkey’s struggles are not Turkey’s fault.

After 2007 and 2008, you saw a decline in foreign investment in Turkey. At the same time, I think Turkey was also focusing on boosting exports as a growth strategy. Obviously, a lot of different countries that have been pursuing exports as a strategy have been hurt because there’s reduced markets for those exports. And Turkey isn’t exactly in a place where it can compete with exports from a country like Germany or even somebody like China, who is probably pushing them out of the market. So there’s been a lot of criticism about Erdoğan moving the economy to a more stable plan or system, even about, you know, crony capitalism – although I always feel like crony capitalism is a funny phrase because I don’t know any form of capitalism that isn’t a bit full of cronyism.

But obviously, Erdoğan has been centering not just political control but economic control into people that are close to him, and I think a lot of outsiders, especially Westerners who were maybe bullish on Turkey five to 10 years ago, are much more suspicious now because of the political situation, because of the Kurdish question, because of what is the relationship between Turkey and ISIS and is Turkey going to have to intervene in Syria. And then what is it like for a businessman to be working in Turkey when so much is going consolidated in the center.

So I think that one thing to note is that the idea that the Turkish economy is not doing well is certainly true but it’s not like there are many economies in the Middle East that are going to challenge Turkey. The Saudi Arabians are a basket case, the Egyptians are a basket case. Iran is maybe the most promising of them, but Iran has its own issues and is also pretty dependent on hydrocarbons for their economy.

So on one hand, I see the serious struggles in the Turkish economy, and they concern me in the short to medium term in terms of Turkey’s ability to project power. But overall, it still seems to me that they are the main heavyweight in a lot of different ways in the region. What do you think of that Kamran?

KB: I agree with you, and I just want to clarify that I don’t think the Syrian Kurds are looking at a favorable outcome. At least, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I did. But I think that as far as the economy is concerned, one of the plans or the strategy that this government was trying to push forward was to create an energy transit state in Turkey. Taking gas and oil from Russia and from Azerbaijan and even Iraq and there was also talk of Iran channeling its hydrocarbons to Europe, to the European market.

Now that was all great when the price of oil was well over $100 a barrel, but those times are long gone and the price of oil is stagnating somewhere in the mid-50s at this point and there’s no reason to believe that we’re going to see a spike anytime soon. So those plans have really undermined the strategy or one of the strategies of the Erdoğan government to improve the economy.

So I think that that’s another problem that is holding Turkey back. It’s also very dependent on energy from Russia. And then there’s been an attempt to try and use Iraq as a way to somehow reduce the dependency on Russia – that hasn’t been successful given the politics that’s going on inside Iraq and the Kurdish autonomous government struggles with the Shiite-dominated government over control and production and export of hydrocarbons.

So I think that should also be kept in mind. As I said, there isn’t going to be a turnaround on the energy front anytime soon. So yes, I mean, I share your outlook on the economic front for Turkey. But nonetheless, if we are to compare Turkey with everybody else, it’s still far more powerful and it may not be a booming economy, it may not be rising as a heavyweight in the Caucasus or in the Middle East or vis-à-via Europe. But Turkey still is a player, and Turkey is still a large country with an economy that may not been doing well but the fundamentals are still there. And I think that once the global conditions change, then I think Turkey’s fortunes will change with it.

Other than that, I don’t see any structural changes that Turkey itself can do to turn the economy around and all of the sudden, it starts to boom.

JLS: Well I will get you out of here on this Kamran. So now that we’ve finally gotten through with the referendum, and now that Turkey can think forward not just with the referendum, what do you think is the next big thing that’s facing Turkey? So much of the media attention on Turkey has been around this referendum. I feel like it’s been that way almost since the coup, so in terms of what we’re looking for here at GPF for Turkey over the course of the next year – what do you see as the most important development to keep an eye on?

KB: I still think that the referendum issue while most of it is behind the Erdoğan regime, there’s still some loose ends to tie, so they’ll still be focusing until the new constitution is in place. We’ll have to see how the new presidential system works, but I think that the next major issue that Ankara will have to deal with is Syria because that is a threat. There are Kurds, there is ISIS. Great powers are intervening in Syria, and Turkey can’t just sit back and say, “oh well, we’ll let them handle it.” I mean, we have Russia in there, we have the United States – not that either Russia or the United States is making any major moves to really alter the balance of power in Syria.

But nonetheless, the intervention itself creates threats, creates opportunities as well and that situation is something that Turkey cannot ignore. So I think that that will be the first order of business in terms of trying to work out a relationship with the United States as to how the Kurds will be managed in Syria and how Turkish reservations about Syrian Kurds can be addressed, while the two sides – while Washington and Ankara – can work towards degrading ISIS. And then there’s the question of the future of the Assad regime, which then pulls them towards the Russians. I mean, the Turks have to deal with the Russians and the Iranians. I think this is something that we’re going to be seeing Turkey heavily involved in as we move, you know, further into 2017 and beyond.

JLS: Well I agree with you, and I know that here at GPF, we’ll be watching closely as Turkey is one of the most important countries not just in the Middle East but in the world from our perspective. So Kamran thanks for joining us. Once again this is Jacob Shapiro, and I am director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures. We love comments and feedback so please send that to [email protected], and if you want to read our stuff please visit us on the web at www.geopoliticalfutures.com.

Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, how they affect U.S.-China relations, and evaluate the chances of a U.S. strike on North Korea's nuclear program. What will the world will look like in a quarter century? Find out, free: hubs.ly/H0757Mt0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us for another edition of Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am joined again by one of our senior analysts, Kamran Bokhari. Kamran, thanks for being with us again.

Kamran Bokhari: Hey, thanks for having me.

JLS: So there’s a lot of stuff going on geopolitically in the world today but our focus is pretty sharply on the Korean Peninsula right now, and Kamran, the first thing I wanted to ask you was do you think that large bomb the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan yesterday, the largest conventional weapon in some ways that the U.S. has, do you think that was a message for the regime in Pyongyang about what might happen if they go ahead with their tests this weekend as they’ve been threatening?

KB: Well, I mean it’s a $15 million weapon, that’s the cost of using one of them. I doubt that it was just used for posturing. There has to have been some intelligence and military basis for it to be dropped in Afghanistan. So maybe there’s an added benefit to it, maybe it shapes perceptions in Pyongyang, but I don’t know.

So I wanted to ask you, where are we going with this standoff? This nuclear standoff, as you know Jacob, is not new. It’s been going on, it pops up every now and then. The pattern that we’ve noticed is that the North Koreans want something, they wave this card and get the U.S.’ attention and then either they get what they want or they just go back home until the next time. But this time it feels a bit different. Why don’t you pick that apart?

JLS: It doesn’t just feel different, in some ways it is different. You know this Kamran, we’ve been working together for a long time now. One of the most dangerous things you can do in intelligence, in analysis and in general is to assume that just because you’ve seen something happen once before that it’s going to happen the same way again. So certainly, the United States has danced with China in a diplomatic game over North Korea before and North Korea has wanted food or it’s wanted respect or it’s wanted whatever it’s wanted.

The thing that’s different this time, there’s two things. First of all, the North Koreans have always done a good job of proving themselves a little bit mentally unstable. We’ve always seen that as a bit of a ruse as a way of getting what they want. Kim Jong Un is giving an Oscar-worthy performance in this regard. Even hardcore geopolitical thinkers like us, we look at this guy and we think that he might be a little bit crazy. You know he’s executing his family members with anti-aircraft guns. I don’t know even know what that looks like, how you would even do that. You know, throwing his family members to the dogs.

But the most crazy part of all of it is there have been pictures that have surfaced of him with what looks like a nuclear weapon or some kind of deliverable thing that you could use to deliver a nuclear weapon. And so we’re moving from a place where the worst case scenario is not just the North Koreans, you know, flaunting around a program, but that they might be delivering an actual deliverable weapon. It might be in the hands of somebody that mentally isn’t quite there.

I say all that to say that all our analysis at GPF is still that China has control over what’s going on in North Korea. We know that the Trump administration wanted to put a lot of pressure on China when it came to trade. We know that China didn’t want to give in on those trade terms. We know that this North Korea stuff really started happening as those negotiations with China came closer about trade.

So we can’t say anything for sure, but when you look at what’s going on, our expectation is that China will intervene here in some way and will get North Korea perhaps not to act rationally but at least to back down enough such that the United States won’t go ahead and feel like it needs to take unilateral action.

KB: What kind of unilateral action would that be? We don’t know, at least publicly. Perhaps the U.S. intelligence community has a better picture of the reality, but we don’t really know in terms of the world of analysis, what does a DPRK nuclear program look like. Is it a device? Can they mount it on a missile? I mean there’s been mystery shrouded over this. What do you think?

JLS: I mean again with North Korea, there’s so much we don’t know. I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in the intelligence agencies considering the mistakes that they’ve had before in Iraq and other failures when it comes to evaluating this type of stuff. But I think the question that you are asking is what would intervention look like? And I think there it’s not exactly clear.

So the United States has moved a carrier battlegroup near the Korean Peninsula. We know there are a couple extra destroyers in the Western Pacific that were deployed a couple weeks ago. There was a report that U.S. intelligence officials told NBC anonymously that U.S. strategic bombers in Guam were ready if they were called on to undertake a strike. Of course, they were already ready and they were already positioned there so there’s nothing really new in that statement. We know that the Japanese have sent some destroyers into the area in order to boost or exercise with the carrier group from the U.S. that is coming.

The thing to point out here is that it would be strange if the U.S. actually went ahead and carried out some kind of strike right now, because you would expect more than just one carrier battlegroup in the region if the United States was actually going to go at North Korea. This looks more like posturing to me and it looks like some of those destroyers are there to protect against the potential threat. The North Koreans do have submarines, so you do have to make sure that your carrier battlegroup is there to protect it.

But it seems to me that if the United States were going to go ahead, and if it was going to put a carrier battlegroup in the Korean Peninsula, we’d have to see at least another one that would at least make its way to the region before anything can happen.

The second major question there is can the United States knock out whatever North Korea is doing conventionally. Would it require a nuclear strike and is it even possible to knock it out? The message that the anonymous U.S. intelligence officials were saying to NBC was basically yes, the U.S. can not only knock this out and yes, it can do it conventionally, but I don’t put a whole lot of stock in an unconfirmed report from anonymous officials from NBC about what’s going on.

So I am sure the U.S. has some intelligence. Part of what makes this such a difficult decision for the American president and for all the actors involved is probably just how little intelligence they are going to have to go on. That they’re going to have to go on basically worst-case scenarios and making sure that they don’t regret not doing something.

KB: So, I mean if we have that situation where the United States has to act militarily to take out a nuclear facility, I don’t recall the United States doing that historically. You know there was a lot of talk about air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, but I think if my memory serves me right, the only precedent for this is the Israeli nuclear strike on the Iraqi reactor in Osirak back in ’81, and so this would be a new kind of development. And the reason I bring that up is because this is not something that becomes standard operating procedure.

Conventional targets, the United States military has plenty of experience in doing that. And then you know, the fallout of such a strike, will the government of North Korea then wage war against South Korea in retaliation? This becomes bigger. Would the regime become weakened to a point where it begins to crumble? I mean there are all sorts of unintended consequences. How are you looking at that as you game this out?

JLS: Well the first thing I would remind you is that the Israelis didn’t just hit the Iraqi nuclear reactor, they also hit what is believed to be Syria, and I think that people are probably thankful the Israelis did that now when we see the civil war in Syria and Assad’s propensity for using chemical weapons. So I’d just put that on the table.

You’re right that I don’t think the United States has carried out this kind of first strike approach on a potential nuclear power before, but I think that the biggest impact here besides on the Korean Peninsula itself would be on U.S.-China relations. I mean if the U.S. preemptively strikes or does a retaliatory strike against North Korea, and the reason people are talking about this is because the North Koreans have been threatening about some kind of event or some kind of test this weekend because it’s the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, he is the founder of North Korea.

The United States has made it clear that it’s considering doing something if North Korea crosses some kind of red line in terms of their test. What that red line is, I am not entirely clear. Is it just a test by itself? Is it a missile launch? Would it have to be confirmed nuclear for the United States to feel like its red line was crossed, and would the United States carry out the threat? Those are things that are all unclear.

But the point I am making is that if it is just a pinprick retaliatory attack, that’s not going to destroy the regime in North Korea. If anything, the North Koreans could use that to their benefit to rally people to their cause. It’s the same type of thing when we see the United States striking that air base in Syria in response to the Assad regime allegedly using chemical weapons. It’s a retaliatory attack. It definitely communicates that the United States is not happy, but it doesn’t actually strategically change anything.
What happens if you do that kind of pinprick retaliatory attack on North Korea though, and if North Korea goes ahead with some kind of test that runs afoul of what the U.S. wants? That means two things.

First of all, it means that China has less control over North Korea than we thought, and we published a piece earlier this week looking at the weakness of some of the levers that the Chinese have over North Korea. I think that the stuff about coal is way overstated. I also think that the stuff about the economic relationship is overstated but China is North Korea’s only patron.

If China can’t tell North Korea to back off on this, and if it gets to the point where it provokes a U.S. response, number one, China doesn’t have as much control over North Korea as we thought, and number two, it opens up a very interesting place in U.S.-China relations because right now Xi and Trump seem to have somewhat of an understanding, and things seem to be much rosier than people thought when Trump came to office.

But the basis of that is that they’ve agreed to some kind of understanding on North Korea where Trump has said, ok, I will back off a little bit on trade, there are a lot of domestic constraints why Trump has to back off on trade too, we can talk about those later if you want. But the real heart of the deal is, ok, the United States will back off on trade if China you will assert yourself with North Korea and make sure that North Korea doesn’t do anything that the United States can’t accept.

And if China cannot control or is not willing to control North Korea to that extent, it will create a break I think in the relationship between the United States and China, because it will be not just they have divergent interests, but they will have an area of disagreement over something that before it’s been an elaborate dance but there’s been cooperation.

And then the question for the United States will become what is it willing to tolerate? Because if it can knock out the nuclear device in one strike, great, but it’s probably not that simple. And then is the United States going to have to think about well, are the North Koreans going to retaliate against the South Koreans, and does the United States respond to its South Korean ally, does the United States have to do more in order to knock out the stuff? It creates a whole host of scenarios that I am sure the Trump administration doesn’t want to go down.

KB: One of the things that I’ve been thinking about when it comes to a response from North Korea is that what are its constraints and what does it really need to do to maintain stability at home? One of the things that it has been able to project at least on the domestic front is that can act belligerently. It is not scared of the United States and the sense that at least North Korea is a regional power and therefore that becomes sort of the legitimacy or the basis for the legitimacy of the regime.

Now, if the United States goes ahead and does strikes, even if they are symbolic, that puts the regime in a very awkward position, and it’s the shine coming off of their wheels, and it’ll be forced to do something that it may not have wanted or intended. Therefore, do you see the regime being forced to take some form of action then that requires a counter response and then this thing becomes spiraling out of control perhaps not so fast but gradually even.

JLS: Look the question here, it’s a good question, but it all comes down to how much control does the regime have over North Korea. And I would almost turn it back on you and I would you ask you this question, because, I mean, you are an expert on the Middle East and there are so many different types of authoritarian dictatorships there, but the difference there is that North Korea is still relatively cut off from the rest of the world. I mean they worship Kim Jong Un and they worship the leaders before them.
It’s funny, it reminds of, I think this was Kissinger that said this about not Bashar al-Assad, but about his father, Hafez al-Assad, and he was talking about what Hafez al-Assad was like at the negotiating table.

And I think this was Kissinger who said that Hafez al-Assad was the only person he knew that wouldn’t just go to the brink of negotiations and sort of threaten, but that Hafez al-Assad would sort of throw himself off the cliff in negotiations. You know, completely blow everything up, and then he’d look down at the cliff and be holding himself up by a little branch that he’d managed to grab on and you’d make the deal because he’d completely scared you.

So the question there really is, is North Korea the type of regime that does that, are they jumping off the cliff but they know that they have the parachute that they can pull and they know exactly what the red line is and they won’t cross it, or is North Korea a little bit unstable?

My answer to that question is that I think it’s the former. I think that this is all mostly a game, but I have enough doubt in my mind that I can’t say that for 100% certainty, and when you are the president of the United States or when you’re a South Korean leader or when you’re a leader in Japan, it doesn’t work to just say, well I think this is the case. You have to prepare for any particular scenario and in North Korea it’s just not clear how much control Kim Jung Un has.

KB: So speaking about control, I don’t mean a public uprising. You’re right about the regime, the regime is more threatened from within, which is why we’ve seen this kind of behavior towards potential threats, elite threats not threats from the public. So if you are part of this regime and you have varying degrees of doubt in your mind as to their ability of this third generation of North Korea to lead, or at least you are worried, we have not been in this position before, and God knows where this guy is taking us.

So then what kind of perception-shaping is taking place if the United States goes ahead and does strikes? I mean that undermines the confidence of the elite, especially the military, and that’s where I see if this regime is going to change. It has to be an elite thing. I mean I don’t see any mass uprising because you are right, the public of North Korea is even cut off from the people in the south, much less the rest of the world.

JLS: I don’t see that we’re in a place where there’s going to be some kind of public unrest or public upheaval to remove Kim Jong Un. I would just point out that if the U.S. is moved to strike, and my impression so far is that it’s not going to get to that point, but if the U.S. does get to that point, it creates a whole host of scenarios that is very dangerous for the U.S. and for its allies in the region.

But it also creates a very dangerous host of scenarios for the regime in North Korea. And if we assume that the goal of the regime in North Korea is to survive, you would think that they’re not going to do something that would set the United States off. Now they may still carry out a test. I am not saying they are not going to carry out a test, but I would think that the Chinese are communicating through whatever channels they have what the U.S. red line is and insisting that the North Koreans not go through it.

Now if Kim Jong Un is not listening, and if the regime really just isn’t there and for whatever reason wants to go ahead, the thing that I would be more focused on, and I have not seen any evidence of this, but does China have enough influence within the upper echelons of the North Korean regime to try and make a change, to try and put someone in that chair who’s going to listen to what the Chinese interests are?

Like I said, I don’t think it’s going to come to that point, but all of this revolves around the idea that my interpretation of what’s going on in North Korea is that the North Korean regime wants to survive and it won’t do something that compromises its survival. If they carry out a nuclear test that is sufficiently threatening this weekend enough so that the United States is going to have to intervene, once the United States intervenes, it gets very hard to predict immediately what’s going to happen afterward, and it gets very hard to say with any certainty that the North Korean regime is going to stay in power because of all the Pandora’s box that it opens.

KB: I am trying to understand what is it that it’s going to do. You know doing something which is unidentifiable. It could be a nuclear test, it could be a missile launch, it could be a combination of both, but either way what would be different? I mean we know the North Koreans have some form of nuclear weapons technology at some level. It’s not really clear what level they are, but they do have a device of sorts because they’ve tested in the past. So why is a test right now, why does it force the United States to have to do something at this point in time? Couldn’t the United States just say ok you know you did a test and we’re going to put sanctions on, and that’s the end of it because we’ve been here before?

JLS: It depends on the test. And this gets back to what the U.S. assessment of Kim Jong Un’s regime is and what the U.S. assessment of whatever tests happens is. But I think the thing to point out is that the United States has already leaked via intelligence officials to various news organizations that it is considering a pre-emptive strike if some kind of test goes on this weekend.

So the United States is seeing something that it doesn’t like. And I am sure whenever the United States was seeing that it doesn’t like was communicated directly to Xi when he and Trump were eating their chocolate cake at dinner last week. And I am sure that the Chinese have relayed that message.

My expectation is that there probably will be some kind of event this weekend, but it won’t be one that provokes a U.S. response. Because the U.S. will have already communicated no there’s a certain line which you can’t go across, and if you do cross that certain line, we’re going to have a problem. We know that the United States has tolerated a weapons program in North Korea and all these missile launches for a long time. But there’s something that they are seeing that makes them uncomfortable.

KB: So in the end, if this communication is going on and we don’t expect something major to happen, then that would sort of lead us to conclude that despite all the apparent craziness and the deliberate attempt to appear unpredictable and crazy, that at the end of the day as a regime, DPRK is a rational actor. That’s the underlying assumption here, right?

JLS: Yes, that is still my assumption and I will admit that I am less sure of that today than I perhaps was even a year ago. But I still have not seen enough to make me change my analysis yet. In many ways what happens this weekend will be a very interesting test case to see just how much influence China has over North Korea, just what North Korea is doing in terms of all the actors are that surround and just how serious the United States is. It’s a very good test for the model.

KB: Well, I think that we will be working hard, burning the midnight oil to see whether or not something emerges out of North Korea or whether the United States does a pre-emptive strike. All eyes are going to be on the Korean Peninsula this weekend, and at least for us here at Geopolitical Futures.

JLS: Yeah, and I think that one thing for people to really watch, and this one of the things we’re watching internally, you know if another carrier battle group starts making its way into the Pacific, or if we start seeing things about, you know, bombers at Guam, I am going to start getting a lot more concerned about what’s going to happen. But for now, I think all eyes are on North Korea and what they are going to do to celebrate Kim Il Sung’s 105th birthday. And we’ll go from there.

KB: We will indeed.

JLS: All right. Thanks Kamran, and thanks everybody for listening. This was another podcast with Geopoliticalfutures.com. You can send us feedback always. You can either leave feedback at the bottom here in the comments section or you can send us feedback at [email protected]. Thank you, and we will talk to you all next week.

GPF discusses what the novels-turned-hit-TV show tell us about geopolitics and apply GPF's methodology to the Game of Thrones universe. Read "The Geopolitics of Ice and Fire" here: hubs.ly/H06X1KN0

TRANSCRIPT:

JS: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Geopolitical Futures Podcast. I am joined today by our marketing director, Sam Dube. Welcome, Sam.

SD: Welcome, thank you for having me.

JS: So we are doing something a little bit different for today. This will be publishing on April Fools’ and it’s going to accompany a special edition piece that we’re doing for April Fools’ on “Game of Thrones,” which has turned into a hit HBO series. Before it was an HBO series, it was a series of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin. I know that some of our listeners will be completely uninterested in this, and for that, I apologize and you can just tune in next week for our regular turn at geopolitics.

But I actually think that “Game of Thrones” itself is an interesting laboratory for thinking about geopolitics, and I think that the level of interest that it has spawned, particularly in the United States, but not just in the United States, is also interesting to talk about from a geopolitical perspective. And since it was April Fools’, we wanted to have a little fun, so that’s what we’re going to do today. And Sam is joining me because she is a real fan and she is a true fan. She’s been reading all the books for a long time. I am just somebody who has come a little late to the party and has been watching the television show. So Sam, thank you for lending us your expertise.

I want to jump right into it, and people can read the piece that we wrote and stuff like that. But what I want to start off with rather than the actual content of “Game of Thrones” itself is a discussion of why you like it and why you think people are so drawn to it. I have my own answer, but maybe you can start us off by explaining to the audience why this is something that you gravitated to.

SD: Well sure. I’ve always been a fan of fantasy and in general those sorts of novels. I am also a big reader, so having something with a lot to sink my teeth into was really attractive. But what really kept me into the novels is the number of characters that there are, how dynamic they are and how they change over time. Normally with a novel or with a TV show, there’s one main character and you kind of follow them all the way through and you get one perspective.

But this is such a multi-person perspective that your emotional reaction to the show changes as they want you to change by following different character’s stories, having them meet different situations. It just really draws you in because there’s so much going on, and you can adjust your reaction to different people and see the same situation from many different angles.

JS: It’s funny, so would you say then that for you it’s more about the books, or is it more about the show itself?

SD: Well, now that there’s no more books coming before the shows, I would say now it’s about the show. When he was releasing the books ahead of time, it was more about the books for me. Although I won’t lie, I really do enjoy watching the shows quite a bit.

JS: Well, and also I mean I guess I would ask you as someone who has been reading the books and following George R.R. Martin for a long time, a lot has been made about the current and domestic political overtones of some of his work. So when Daenerys gets stuck in Meereen, for example, people have described that as very similar to the second Iraq War, or the political statement about the United States being stuck in the Iraq War in particular, or in the Middle East in general. Is that something you line up with or do you think it’s more abstract than that?

SD: I don’t know. I think so many of these themes were in play. I am really not sure about that. I haven’t seen that myself and I haven’t given that much thought. Usually when I am escaping into that, I am escaping into the fantasy of it and to tune everything else out. But I mean I could see it thinking back on many of the things that have happened. I can certainly see, you know, themes or thematically things that have happened in history kind of reappearing in the Westeros landscape.

JS: Speaking as somebody who really wasn’t into the books that much but is more into the TV show, but I am also somebody who is generally a fan of these types of things myself, and I have been asking myself why I am interested in these things and why I read these books. This is true of fantasy, it goes on down with “Lord of the Rings,” it goes on down to “The Chronicles of Narnia.” I would even extend it to science fiction. “Dune” is one of my favorite novels.

Our founder, George Friedman, in our weekly reading lists will throw a science fiction novel in there every once in a while, and he explains why it’s a really interesting way of thinking about the world. But one thing that’s really struck me thinking about “Game of Thrones” in general, but also just the general trend towards blockbuster superhero movies and huge franchises and fantasy novels and splitting seasons into multiple things. I mean “Harry Potter,” they had seven books, but we’re going to make nine different movies and a play and all this other stuff.

I think part of the reason for that, and I am playing a little bit of armchair psychologist here, but I hope people will forgive me, because I think what I am going to say is actually a bit true, which is that, I think that we live in this time of fake news, and we live in this time of spin, and we live in this time of people really aren’t sure what’s going on. There’s not a lot of clarity about what’s going on in the world. During the Cold War, for both sides, whether you were in the Soviet Union or you were in the United States, there was a defined enemy, there was a defined conflict. You sort of knew what was happening in the world as a way to orient yourself.

When people look back at the history of World War II, even World War I, it’s very easy to sort of identify, OK, well this was the good side and this was the bad side, and this was my country’s or my family’s or my particular tribe’s tie to that particular conflict. I don’t think we live in a world that’s like that anymore. It’s become less clear what’s going on in the world when we see these multinational institutions degrading and we see that there isn’t just one conflict.

The U.S. wars in the Middle East and with radical Islam is a really good example. Our founder, George Friedman, writes about this all the time. Most Muslims aren’t blowing things up or aren’t committing terrorist attacks in London. But some Muslims are, and it’s impossible to separate those two things from each other. So you can’t deny that you are in a war with radical Islam or with Islam itself, but then you also don’t want that to make it such that every single Muslim you see you want to ascribe some kind of hateful feeling to.

So for me, that’s a really long way of saying, I think people, and when I say people, I am really talking about myself here, I gravitate towards “Game of Thrones” because it is a story that tells me something about good and evil. It is something I can sink my teeth into. And I think the thing that is particularly unique about “Game of Thrones” from that point of view, and what I argue in this piece would make it geopolitical, is that it’s not clear, right? All of the different sides have some good things and some bad things, and there’s very, very few sides that are actually just completely evil, who are horrible, who you can’t relate to or understand at all.

I think this gets back to your point, because when you are talking about your attachment to it, you are talking about the characters and the different narratives and stories, and for me as an analyst who spends a lot of time doing empathetic analysis of other countries, and especially other political leaders, I relate to that, because that’s a lot of my job. A lot of my job is to put myself into the mindset of another person or another leader and try and see the constraints that are around them and see the things that they must do and then use that to analyze geopolitics. And I think that’s something as a watcher of “Game of Thrones” that people have to do.

As somebody who is a huge fan of this, does that sound sacrilegious to you, Sam, or do you feel like that gets along with the ethos of the general fandom of it?

SD: I think that goes along with it well. When you were talking about the Middle East and the conflict going on there, and how we approach that and how it’s not really clear who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, you can’t lump them all together. I actually thought of Tyrion Lannister and Jamie Lannister and all of the Lannisters, and how evil they seem from the outside, and how evil Tywin was, and how evil Cersei is. I don’t think that’s changed much.

But then you look at Tyrion Lannister, who’s good pretty much for the start. He’s a really snarky smart-ass, but he’s really very smart. And you look at Jamie Lannister, who’s gone from a king slayer to kind of almost an anti-hero. All those distinctions, good vs. evil, kind of get muddied in that. And then you look at the people who really are so good, like Ned Stark, who’s almost a martyr, and he doesn’t get anywhere with it. He’s a perfect example of nice guys really do finish last – or headless.

So, I think “Game of Thrones” does allow us to have that, you know that view of a world that’s as muddy and as hard to understand as our own, but with characters who are as easy to understand as our own political leaders. I mean we have a pulse on what these characters are that are running these various things, and whether or not we argue that the leader of any particular country is very important at any given moment is kind of a separate debate.

But in “Game of Thrones” you get that. It’s real life. You get these strong political leaders, you can understand their personalities, you can understand their priorities, their backstory, but in this case, I am kind of using the families as political entities, which kind of works for “Game of Thrones,” kind of doesn’t, because they shift so frequently. But it’s hard to tell if one house is all good or all bad based on the people who make it up.

JS: I think that’s a really good point. It actually helps segue into a discussion of “Game of Thrones” itself, because you are right “Game of Thrones” doesn’t really line up into our world in the sense that there aren’t nations. I make this point in the April Fools’ piece that we wrote. There really is no nationalism in “Game of Thrones.” There is no sense of national identity. Everything is really feudalistic.

One of the things that I realized, and you know just a full confession, I wrote that piece around Christmas time when I was in my grandmother’s house, and I had some time away from work, and I was just trying to relax. For fun, I was reading the first volume of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.” When Churchill is writing that first volume of “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,” he goes through the way that the monarchy eventually emerges in England, and I was really, really struck by the way he described the transition from feudalism to monarchy and the differences between Britain and between the country in that regard. It really struck me that one of the things that Martin was really playing with was Europe.

It’s funny that United States has become so obsessed with “Game of Thrones.” And “Game of Thrones,” it’s really a worldwide phenomenon. I travel a lot for work. I am in Budapest right now, actually. I find that a lot of people in the world have watched “Game of Thrones,” and know these strange words in English just because they were used in “Game of Thrones” and will talk to me about “Game of Thrones.” It becomes a point of common conversation.

One of the things to me that is strange about that, in the United States I think people don’t realize that the world that Martin is describing really is very similar to the Medieval or the Middle Ages in Europe. He’s talking about a time where there’s feudalism, there’s monarchy. Religion still plays a great role and has a great deal of power throughout the “Game of Thrones” universe. And he’s talking about the intersection of all these things. And for me one of the greater themes in “Game of Thrones” is the collapse of all these things.

So the houses themselves are not nations, but you can see in them, in the fact that you know the houses become tied to particular geographies, you can sort of see the beginnings of what a nation might look like, even with the accents and the different faiths and different ethnicities that are attached with each region. So I think one of the reasons that America doesn’t even realize that the show is so popular in other places around the world is that it really does, on a certain level, speak to a European audience.

Sam, I was talking to you before, and one of the things that you wanted to touch on was the role of magic in “Game of Thrones.” And I think that for people who normally read our stuff, and people who normally are interested in international politics, magic is probably one of the things that turns them off the most about fantasy. You are either a person who likes magic and fantasy or you are a person who’s like, you know what, give me the real world stuff, this is a load of garbage, I want to go learn about current things. But you had some interesting things to say about what magic actually represents in the universe. How about you tell me a little about that.

SD: Sure. One of the things in the piece that you wrote for this is, you liken dragons to a technology that Valyrians had that allowed them to kind of take over and really dominate the whole world, and later the Targaryens once the Valyrians were wiped out. And I would say although it is fantasy, and I mean yeah, dragons are cool to talk about and of course they are completely unrealistic, there is something in the real world that we can liken magic to and that would be, hold on for this one, it’s a microchip. So microchip is a new technology that really changed the world and it really revolutionized a lot of new technologies. I mean it’s the grandfather of what I am talking on right now.

Likewise, magic was that for the Valeyrians when they went and found the dragons, they just found them slumbering in a bunch of volcanoes. They just went and found them and they were like, oh we can train these dragons. Let’s figure out some magic to do it. And it was that magic, it was them developing the magic or having the magic to be able to train those beasts, that allowed them to kind of turn dragons into the technology that made them great. I mean in addition to that, they also created some amazing roadways and Valyrian steel swords, which no one else has been able to match. So their true competitive advantage in the world was that technology, that magic which allowed them to tame things such as dragons which isn’t that unlike computers, microchips, laser-guided missiles, all that stuff couldn’t exist without the microchip. And all the things that the Valyrians, and later the Targaryens who came from the Valyrians, did to take over and to really force their way out into the world came from that one central thing, the magic that they were able to conjure that other groups of people in Westeros couldn’t conquer.

JS: It’s interesting. I didn’t think of this until you just said it just now, but for me, I always thought of the dragons as sort of the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. You know, like a weapon of mass destruction that makes one side completely invincible and makes other people bend to your will. But what you brought up about this, and this betrays that I watch the show and don’t read the books, but you said that they found the dragons in a cave somewhere, and for me that immediately goes to the Comanche Indians on the American Continent before the United States has sort of moved out and added Texas and all these other colonial holdings.

Because at the time in the West, there were a bunch of different Native American groups, and the Comanche were not the most dominant. What happened was the Comanche discovered the horse, and the Comanche interacted with the horse in a way that none of the other Native American tribes did, and they became the greatest cavalry archers that North America had ever seen and terrorized the Spanish to the point that the Spanish invited American settlers into Texas because they wanted some kind of buffer zone between the Spanish colonies and these Comanche Indians. And the Comanches ended up ruling a wide swath of the West, until eventually the Americans invented the six shooter, the Colt .45, and were able to develop the types of weapons that could neutralize them. But it’s funny, it just occurs to me that that’s another level in which the technology thing counts.

SD: Yeah, imagine if Cersei can come up with a Colt .45 to get rid of those dragons? I don’t know what that would look like.

JS: Yeah. I’ll throw another hard question at you, because I think the dragons are easy to explain in terms of technology. You can think in a religious world if somebody was making a myth that, OK, a weapon of mass destruction or some awesome weapon could totally be represented as a dragon mythically. What about the army of the dead?

So you know we’ve got Daenerys Targaryen is coming back to Westeros with her dragons to conquer, which she sees as rightfully hers, but the other thing that is happening, and it’s really going to pick up this season I think, is that this army of the dead, of these zombies, is marching from the north and is about to try and cross over this magic wall that’s separating from the rest of Westeros. And they seem completely invincible.

We know that they can be killed probably by dragon fire. I haven’t confirmed that, but I feel like that seems like an obvious one. Or Valyrian steel, which you mentioned earlier. But when you are thinking about technology and you are thinking about realism, and I think Martin really is a realistic writer, how do you explain the army of the dead? What do you think is the closest analogy to that?

SD: Well they’re just technology gone wrong. If the dragons are technology gone right, which I think a lot of people would argue they weren’t technology gone right, depends on what side you are on, so is the army of the dead. The army of the dead were created by the children of the forest when the First Men first invaded Westeros. Before any men went into Westeros, there was children of the forest, there were giants, there were other magical creatures. They were all over there having a grand old time, and then these First Men with their big swords of bronze and their armor came in, and this peaceful community wasn’t ready for it. So they couldn’t fight them, they just kept being dominated, dominated, dominated. So they created this army of the dead.

They created that with magic. Now the problem with any technology is if you create something that big and that serious, you better be able to control it. I mean, liken it to a virus. Some kid in a classroom somewhere is playing around and sets off a virus that infects 20 million computers. He might have meant to do that. He might have just been screwing around with his computer with a virus program. But once it’s out, it’s out. And this is kind of like that technology. They use magic to turn a dead person into the first person in this army of the dead, and then it spreads because like a virus, they kind of self-create like create more of themselves. So that’s how I would liken it to in terms of technology.

JS: I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s interesting. Another thing I would ask you, Sam, and it’s been fun for me because we’re a small team at Geopolitical Futures and we all work on basically all our pieces together. It’s really a communal effort every piece that comes out. But, you know, you are a marketing director, and I am over here in analysis, and sometimes we don’t get to talk as much about analysis, but this was a case where I think going into this you actually knew more than I did and we got to collaborate a little bit.

One of the things you said to me was that you had never thought of the series from the point of view of geography in the way we sort of laid it out. So can you talk a little bit about as a fan of “Game of Thrones,” what it was sort of like to read through it, approach this way with this particular methodology, and whether you were skeptical it was going to work at first and whether you think it did?

SD: I wasn’t really skeptical of it. I was wondering how it was going to be different, because there’s so much fan fiction out there. And I think the geographic approach that you took was really clever because you watch “Game of Thrones” and you don’t really have a view of where these things are in your head. Like, where is King’s Landing, where is The Reach, you know like where are all these things in relation to each other and it’s just a concept you can’t really grasp.

So the fact that you created this analysis that actually has a map that shows it against Europe so you get a real idea of how far these things are from each other. Everything just makes a little bit more sense. I can see the path that the Valryians took when they were beginning to take over the world after they found their dragons. I can see the little island that the Targaryens went to when one of the children of a Targaryen leader had a vision that Valyria was going to be destroyed. I can even see the destruction on the new map of Valryia because they refer to it as a peninsula. It’s not a peninsula. It’s a series of islands. I can even see the path that the Valryians took up that push the Andals over into Westeros when they first invaded thousands of years before the television show happened.

So it puts a completely different perspective on it all that makes it, I mean it’s not real, it’s obviously not real, but it makes it feel a little more real, feel a little more subjective and like something that you could actually step into because this is a real world. This is a real physical place and not just some abstract concept in my head. I really liked the fact that it pulls together a real understanding of the world that these people live in. I mean, you can say this army moved from point A to point B, but without seeing it on a map you really have no concept of that. And I think this analysis does a great job of putting that perspective into place. And I never had that before. It was really nice to see that.

JS: I appreciate you saying that, and for me, also it drives home one of the things that I think makes “Game of Thrones” really interesting, and for me valuable as a resource. It’s not just something I do to burn off time. For me, it’s intellectually engaging on a certain level, and this is true of a lot of different fiction. I am a self-confessed nerd and I’ve already said some of the things that I’ve read.

But I don’t know that Martin worked it this way, but it seems to me that Martin must’ve started with a map and started writing his story after the map. I think the same thing about “Dune,” which is a story about a desert planet where geography plays a huge role. Something like “The Chronicles of Narnia” is very clearly to me about faith. It’s very clearly to me about C.S. Lewis’ interaction with faith and him dealing with that. “Lord of the Rings” is another one that always gets lopped into this stuff and that has something to do with faith, but Tolkien was a linguist at the end of the day, and he is famous for saying that the first thing that began the whole “Lord of the Rings” saga was he invented a language. And then came all the maps and the geography and all of this other stuff.

So for me, approaching “Game of Thrones” for somebody who does geopolitics for a living, I think one of the reasons I gravitate towards “Game of Thrones” as much as I do is because it really is about a map. And I really do think that you can explain things through geography. And one of the things I am really curious about, and one of the reasons I indulged myself in this little exercise while I was on vacation to write this was that I really think this is an interesting laboratory for thinking about geopolitics.

I think of “Game of Thrones” and George R.R. Martin in general as a very a realistic take on what politics looks like at a certain level and the way that people betray each other and make alliances and all these other things, and I am curious just how far it goes. I have a great deal of faith in the model that we use at Geopolitical Futures. It’s been very good at predicting a lot of events. And for me it’s kind of a litmus test, like just how realistic is George R.R. Martin going to be. Is it going to turn out to be just a fantasy series and something incredibly crazy that nobody could have predicted is going to happen, or can I use the same tools that I used to predict global geopolitics and think about this universe that Martin has created, which I think is much more realistic and much more based on geography than most of these types of universes are, and can I say something intelligent about what the future of this universe is going to be.

So that’s one of the reasons that I’ve sort of let myself go into that. But when you think about “Game of Thrones,” you think about other things that you’ve read. Harry Potter is another one in there. I don’t know exactly what the genesis was for that in J.K. Rowling’s mind, but do you think that Martin really was centered in geography, or do you think there’s something else going on there that I am missing?

SD: I feel like he couldn’t have written it the way he did if he wasn’t aware of the geography. I mean when you come at it from the story’s angle and then you look at the geography of it, it has to be geographic based. It is too well written to the map to not have had that in his head. It would be too coincidental that the way all of these people moved over time with their geography, there’s too many coincidences for him not to have done that on purpose.

However, I do think that he is a huge fan of throwing curveballs, things that you don’t expect and figures that people who have a lot of ability to change the scene of the world. There’s no way to know for sure whether or not Cersei will come up with that Colt .45 that can kill these dragons or, it probably won’t be Cersei, but there’s no way to know that Aegon Targaryen isn’t going to come back theoretically from the dead and claim his throne, and all of the sudden you have three dragons and three Targaryens. Like, who knows what is going to happen with that stuff.

So I think he will create twists within the constraints of geopolitics, but I do think it’s hard to predict just because he just really likes those twists. But I do think he will keep it constrained by the geography of the world he’s created.

JS: Well, thanks Sam. For our listeners, I hope you’ve enjoyed this. This was a little bit different than we normally do and we always appreciate your feedback. But if you liked this, we’d love to hear back from you with comments at www.geopoliticalfutures.com. If you didn’t like it, we’d also love to hear from you, too. Don’t worry, I promise we are not going to become a “Game of Thrones” website that is cataloging it all the time, and this was a special occasion for April Fools’, and we thought we’d just try it. But so as always, appreciate your feedback. I am Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis, this was Sam Dube, who is our marketing director, and we will see you next week for some more podcasting about geopolitics. Thanks.

Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss the geopolitical importance of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and whether the realities it created will define the future. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

JS: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. My name is Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures and I am joined again this week by Kamran Bokhari, who is our senior analyst, welcome Kamran.

KB: Thanks for having me, Jacob.

JS: I just want to apologize to our listeners, I know that we didn’t manage to get a podcast out last week, so we’re going to try and get two out this week. In general, we are going to try to stick to one a week, so we appreciate you guys bearing with us as we go along.

Last time we talked, Kamran, we talked about the Islamic State and we talked about the Islamic State’s origins and its futures. And one of the things I think is interesting right now is that the Middle East is really in a state of flux. The balance of power in the Middle East is changing. We can see it changing all the time. One of the things we are chronicling in our writing is how the balance of power in the Middle East is changing all the time. You brought up to us when we were thinking about what to talk about today, that we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and also Lebanon and Iraq had some token forces in there, but really it was between Israel and Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The 50th anniversary is coming up in June. How about you lay out for our readers why you think this is such an important anniversary to note?

KB: I think 50 years is a good point in time to go back and review and measure just how things have unfolded in the region. And 1967 is particularly important because it really shaped the way the region has unfolded. It was a pivotal moment. Israel, as a result of that war, its massive victory over three Arab states, really established it as a military power in the region. And it was only 19 years old, Israel was only 19 years old when that war happened. And at the time, no one could’ve foreseen that Israel would be able to defend itself against three major Arab powers, at least they were perceived as major Arab powers. And the whole perception of Arab strength was essentially laid bare. The image of the Arabs was tarnished. I mean the fact that in the collective Arab memory, June 5, 1967, is seen as Yawm al-Naksa, which is loosely defined or translated as the day of setback, although ‘naksa’ in Arabic is far more, if you will, stronger than just the word ‘setback’ as we know it in English, but nonetheless, it left a deep imprint on the Arab world and established that the Arab world was very much hollow and it could not impose a military solution on Israel.

JS: Kamran, I think this was one of the things you brought up last week that was interesting, which was when we were talking about the Islamic State and we were talking about the rise of radical jihadist Islam as a major ideology in the region, you pointed towards this moment as the moment at which the political ideology of the time, which was secular nationalism, Arab nationalism – in 1967 Egypt was still known as the United Arab Republic technically, right, which is an ode to the short-lived entity that existed when Egypt and Syria were part of the same republic from 1958 to 1961. So you sort of pointed out last week just how important this moment was in history and how it really defined how the Arab world was going to move forward. It amounted to the failure of Nasserism and in some ways, it was the moment that Egypt abdicated leadership in the Arab world, wouldn’t you say?

KB: Absolutely, and I think that it was forced to do that. I think that nobody could argue and nobody could sustain the image of this leadership role that Egypt had projected, that it was the leader of Arab nationalism, the Arab soul, the Arab world. When the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed in a matter of hours on the fifth of June, you couldn’t make that argument anymore. And it was essentially the beginning of the end of the Nasser regime, at least Nasserite Egypt – though some would argue that we are still living in the legacy of Nasserite Egypt – but Nasser himself didn’t live too long after that. He died in 1970, and that really closed that chapter of Arab nationalism, but it also demonstrated that the Arab states, and here we are talking about Egypt, I mean Egypt is the heart of the Arab world given it is the largest Arab state by population, any type of cultural renaissance, new ideologies that take shape in Egypt, in Cairo particularly, and then disseminate to the rest of the Arab world. So that was the status of Egypt. That war really, really demonstrated the impotence of the Egyptian military in the face of Israel, which was seen as a weak state at that point, and it really established many of the boundaries that we are currently dealing with and the relationships that Israel has with many of its Arab neighbors. So we know that in 1978, Israel and Egypt made peace and in many ways the outcome of 1967, really laid the foundation for that eventual rapprochement and the diplomatic relationship, the uneasy diplomatic relationship that has existed since then.

Likewise, the relationship with Jordan, even though the formal peace treaty between Jordan and Israel did not emerge until 1994, but it is well known that Israelis and Jordanians have had a very close security relationship, especially as it pertains to the Palestinians and those living in the West Bank. The Israeli-Syrian relationship was also established. The hostilities that exist till this day, the state of war as many would refer to it, was established in 1967 when Israel conquered the Golan Heights and was able to seize that territory from the Syrians and the Syrians have not been able to take that back.

So the entire geopolitical landscape that we now know as sort of the defining borders and the boundaries that established the Arab-Israeli dynamic were set in the aftermath of the 1967 war with a little bit of modification within the case of the Sinai, which Egypt was able to take back in the form of the peace treaty.

JS: Well you are right to an extent, I will say that you are overlooking a little bit just how important 1973 was. So Israel and Egypt again fight another war in ’73, and as much as 1967 was a success for the Israeli Defense Forces and for the strategy of preemptive attack, I mean Israel was in a weak position in some sense and it was forced to attack Egypt preemptively if it was going to be able to achieve its objectives. This led to a certain amount of arrogance on the part of the Israelis and in ’73, there was a massive intelligence failure where they dismissed Egyptian mobilization in the Sinai. Israel ended up winning that war with U.S. support and then that sort of is what led to the peace treaty in the end. But I think you are right in the sense that a lot of the geopolitical realities that have defined this part of the world, which is the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, the sort of frozen state of conflict between Syria and Israel as I would call it, Israel obviously went into Lebanon a couple more times after that.

But another thing that I think we need to point out here is that before ’67, there really wasn’t a very strong relationship between the United States and Israel, at least not the way that people think about that relationship now. Israel’s success in the ’67 war was really the moment the United States realized two things, first of all that most of the Arab states were in the Soviet Union’s camp and that there was no getting them back, and second of all, that Israel could be a meaningful partner in balancing power against the Soviet Union in the Middle East. And I bring this up because I think it raises an interesting point, because you’re right that a lot of the seeds of how things developed after ’67 were laid in the results of that war.

But at the same time, if we look 50 years later, a lot of those things are beginning to fall apart, right? The Soviet Union has collapsed, people are making a lot of Russia’s involvement in the Middle East, but it’s very miniscule compared to the chest pumping that everybody talks about. You know the Russians are not funding or massively arming states that are thinking about attacking Israel or other U.S. allies in the region. Egypt is an economic basket case, it just went through a pretty massive political transition, which began you know with the Arab Spring around 2010-2011, and they have issues of their own. Jordan is sort of the miracle of the region, how Jordan hasn’t been affected by the stuff that’s going on in the region is pretty incredible. Syria, I mean Syria is basically half a state right now. The Assad regime has been able to consolidate itself, but Syria, which really was one of the biggest vulnerabilities Israel faced from a military point of view, Syria is completely involved with its own fight against its own anti-regime rebels, and the Islamic State is there and they are having to rely on Hezbollah and all this other stuff.

So when Israel looks out at its current strategic landscape, it doesn’t see Egypt and Syria and Jordan as these major problems anymore. In ’67 the major concern was, well what if Israel gets attacked by three entities at the same time. Those three entities aren’t there. When you think about Israel’s strategic position right now, the sort of first, most immediate thing that comes to mind is Hezbollah. We had those reports recently of Israel just a couple days ago striking a weapons convoy, an alleged weapons convoy of Hezbollah in Palmyra, which is pretty far in for the Israelis to go into Syria. So that’s sort of the first thing. But Hezbollah is also completely distracted by the Syrian civil war. But then you take a step back and the challenges for Israel really aren’t set by 1967, they are set by different things.

So the first thing I would say is that, you know, what is going to happen with the Islamic State? Maybe the Islamic State is going to get defeated and maybe it’s going to collapse but the real concern for Israel is the state of disrepair that is in the Arab world won’t reign forever. Is there any potential for some kind of radical Sunni entity to rise in the Arab world and unite the factions and once again treat Israel as a common enemy? Taking a further step back, you look at Iran which was dealt a setback with the Syrian civil war and with the degradation of the Assad regime, but still maintains a lot of influence in Iraq and is still aggressively trying to push its influence in the region. And then farther back is Turkey. Turkey is rising, one of George Friedman’s most identifiable forecasts and one of the things we write about a lot and that we get a lot of attention for, is our position that Turkey is going to rise and it’s going to be the major power in the Middle East. Right now, there are decent relations between Israel and Turkey, but I think Israel’s long-term thinking is about what a strategic landscape looks like, it has to think about Turkey as this major power reasserting itself in the region.

So I agree with you in the sense that it’s important, and ’67 really did set the chain for a lot of different events, but in some ways, it’s become obsolete. Would you agree with that characterization or do you want to argue with any of that?

KB: No, I think you are right. I think we are still dealing with the post-1967 architecture but with the caveat that that architecture is in a meltdown mode. Defeating three of its neighbors at the same time established Israel’s superiority in a military sense and really consolidated the state of Israel, and since that time, what’s become clear, even though we had the 1973 war, it became clear to Egypt that there was no military solution. This almost romantic view of being able to establish Arab hegemony over all of historic Palestine through military means was shattered. That perception was completely shattered. And even though 1973 happened and was a surprise and intelligence failure for Israel, nonetheless the Egyptians I would argue did not think when they launched that war that they would be able to militarily defeat Israel. There’s always the possibility you could do that, but deep down you know and if you have been dealt a blow like 1967, that really weighs heavily on your national psyche and your military strategy moving forward. And if you look at the way the negotiations panned out after that, with the moderation or the intercession of the United States, it becomes clear that really 1973 from the Egyptian point of view was enhancing your bargaining power. Improving your position to achieve some sort of, if you will, win-win scenario in which the Egyptians can come back and say yes, we were able to retake the Sinai from Israel and we restored national dignity.

But 1967 really showed that the military option was no longer there for the Arabs. And moving forward from the Israeli point of view, those very states that were threatening them in 1967, Israel really relied on their behavior to not wage war against Israel as part of its natural security doctrine. Keep in mind that these are autocratic regimes that may view Israel in a certain way because they believe in it or maybe because it’s pragmatic and because they are in power and have to balance pressures from all sides. But the sentiment in many of these countries until this day is one of hostility towards Israel. Israel relied on these capitols: Damascus, Cairo and Amman, to make sure that that national sentiment did not alter the national behavior of those countries, and Israel would not be threatened again.

Now if you fast forward to the Arab Spring, that whole strategy seems to be falling apart, because if these countries, if these regimes cannot maintain order within their own country, then that is a problem. And if you have a power vacuum, we just recently published a couple of articles on how Jordan is weakening, and the implications particularly for Israel are massive, if the regime were to weaken much and God forbid fall, that could create a vacuum in which Israel faces a new kind of threat, an uncertainty. Clearly this is not a threat from a state, but non-state actors create a new dynamic. If we look at what is happening in Syria and how the Israelis have been trying to balance between the hostile forces on the Sunni side of the conflict, which includes ISIS, which includes al-Qaida and all those whom we call the moderate Sunni Arab rebel forces. They’re not friends of Israel. Given a chance, they would wage war against Israel. On the other side is Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – again enemies of Israel. And Israel has to do this careful balancing act. At the moment, the Sunni side is not in a position to threaten Israel and therefore Israel is trying to make sure that Hezbollah does not gain more power than it already has and pose a bigger threat than it already does to Israel. Should those circumstances be replicated in Jordan and Egypt, then that’s a tough balancing act for Israel to maintain. Because we’re talking three different countries on the entire periphery of the Jewish state.

JS: Well let’s dig into that a little bit then. We know that Syria is in a state of civil war, the Assad regime seems to have been able to consolidate control there. For the most part that situation is actually ok with Israel because it’s weakened an enemy, but not so much that there is just chaos reigning everywhere. But you’ve brought up Jordan and you’ve brought up Egypt. You said that Jordan is weakening. How about we dig a little more into that? What do you mean when you said Jordan is weakening?

KB: Well if you look at Jordan geographically, it is sitting at the crossroads of major areas of conflict. It borders both the countries in which ISIS is operating i.e. Syria and Iraq. It has the second largest refugee population coming from Syria after Turkey. We’re talking somewhere around 680,000 people. That’s a huge strain on an already poor country. The economy really historically hasn’t done well, it’s gotten by with assistance from both the West, the United States and the U.K., and of course assistance from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. But with the price of oil declining, and we know that Saudi Arabia is in trouble on the home front, it has less and less financial bandwidth to come to the aid of Jordan. We also see the situation in the West Bank evolving towards a crisis where President Mahmoud Abbas is at an advanced age. He’s not ill or anything, at least apparently. But when you reach, go beyond 80, you are operating on borrowed time.

So what will happen to the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, especially in the wake of Israeli policies that are now aggressively pushing more settlements? That creates a large pressure on the Jordanians whose population is somewhere a little above 50 percent of Palestinian origin. Many of those people came in the aftermath of the 1948 war, a lot of them came after the 1967 one. But there’s already an existing Palestinian population, which has been to one degree or another, if you will, assimilated into Jordanian mainstream political life. We recently had protests because of the cutting of subsidies by the government. There are no shortage of Islamist forces, from the Muslim Brotherhood, it has at least two major factions. You have a large Salafi population. You have al-Qaida there. The founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is from Jordan and the town of Zarqa. And you have Hizb ut-Tahrir. And then you have the spillover effect from Syria. So these are circumstances, to expect Jordan that it will continue to behave the way it has since the ’67 war or over the decades, I think that would be a mistake. I don’t think that the Israelis are looking at it that way. Recall the recent report in which the Jordanian ambassador to Amman told the IDF chief that he is worried about stability and security in the Jordanian kingdom. We’ve not had these kind of statements coming from Israel. So if the Israelis are worried, I would say that is a good barometer of how the situation is deteriorating in Jordan.

JS: Yeah although, I would challenge you to go a little bit deeper, which is to say that you’ve just laid out a pretty scary laundry list of challenges for any country let alone one like Jordan that really doesn’t have a lot of natural resources of its own, which like you say, has an incredibly diverse population. There’s a lot of Palestinians in Jordan. Really Jordanians are Hashemites right, there are actually very small numbers of people who can actually claim to be Jordanian, so many of them are Bedouins and Circassians and this, that and the other thing. How do you explain the fact that Jordan hasn’t succumbed to all this stuff? Because unlike Syria or unlike Egypt or unlike even Lebanon it has for the most part avoided a lot of the domestic political instability and a lot of the violence that a lot of the Arab states around it haven’t avoided and with much fewer resources.

KB: So I would say that there are three aspects to that in terms of how the Jordanian regime has maintained stability and security. So the first and foremost is that the Jordanian security establishment has been very competent. Particularly the General Intelligence Department, its main intelligence agency, it has a very good handle in pre-empting and not being on the reactive side that things happen and then the Jordanians act. They’ve been ahead of the curve in terms of making sure that any radical elements, be they ISIS or others, that they are kept under lock and key and so that’s one aspect.

The other aspect I mentioned earlier is that there has been this historic relationship between Israel and Jordan, a quiet one that is not really talked about much and understandably so from the Jordanian point of view, and that has helped quite a bit. Then it is a very close ally of the West, the United States and prior to that, the U.K., and the U.K. continues to be an ally of the Hashemite monarchy. They also have had assistance from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to the extent that they have been able to do that.

So I think a mix of forces has allowed Jordan to continue to maintain stability even though we’re six years out from the Arab Spring. But I think that the pressures are building and this is not a sustainable situation. Should there be a, we talk about the southern provinces of Syria where the government and different rebel factions and ISIS is in the mix as well. There’s sort of this lack of clarity over who has the upper hand, its sort of a balance of weakness in southern Syria when it comes to the civil war, it has not been a major theater compared to Aleppo or Palmyra or ISIS-land up near Raqqa or Damascus. These are the things that have maintained order and these are the factors that enabled the regime. But to assume that this will continue, especially at a time when the established states, I mean Saudi Arabia is the largest state in that region and it also shares a large border with Jordan, although historically a quiet one. But nonetheless, if Saudi Arabia is having less and less financial bandwidth to assist countries around its periphery, then we are looking at a situation that is not something that the Jordanians will be able to handle on their own. There’s a lot of hope that goes into this idea that Jordan will continue to manage its domestic politics and of course the wider geopolitics, it’s a balancing act. But I think we need to get out of this assumption that things will continue and nothing will go wrong and there’s a need for out-of-the-box thinking.

JS: Although I just want to drive home for our listeners that a lot of people when they think about geopolitics, they think about geographical determinism, and what I mean by that is they think that it’s as easy as looking at a map. And a map is going to be able to tell you exactly what’s wrong with a country and what is going to happen to a particular country. Jordan is a really good example of where just the basics of a map or just the basics of geography or a layout of resources isn’t enough to tell you everything. I think there is a conservative element in Jordanian society and an element that has always had to fight an uphill battle against a real lack of resources. I mean Jordan, its borders were not drawn in any logical way when you are thinking in terms of nationality or economic production or just about anything. So I agree with you that Jordan faces many challenges, but one of the things about Jordan is this intangible thing that has kept the kingdom together so far, and I think will serve it in good stead. But leaving Jordan aside for now, it’s a relatively small country.

One of the things that people brought up from the last podcast and I think it fits in exactly with this conversation, because we started by talking about 1967 and as you mentioned, in a lot of ways 1967 was one of the moments where Israel and the United States realized that they had interests in common. Those interests really were about blocking the Soviet Union and about Israel becoming a U.S. ally in a region that was becoming dominated by Arab states that were allied with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union obviously is no longer there, and the strategic basis of the relationship between Israel and the United States is not as strong as it once was. I know that there was a lot of talk about how special the relationship is and how close it is.

But that strategic reason for the relationship has gone away and I think you’ve seen the United States and Israel pull away from each other a little bit. That’s both because Israel has a lot more freedom of action than it did before and also because from a U.S. perspective the interests don’t line up quite as well as they used to. But the question that I am circling around here is, so we’ve talked about how we’re in this 50 years since 1967, but we’re also in a Middle East that is changing rapidly, how does the U.S. respond to the things were talking about here, how does the U.S. respond to the hollowing out of the Arab world, how does the U.S. respond to Jordan and the serious challenges that Jordan is facing and what is the U.S.-Israel relationship going to look like going forward?

I know that a lot of people were thinking that Donald Trump was going to make that relationship much different than the relationship with Obama, but as with so many things with President Trump, he said one thing before getting into office and continues to say things all the time, but the things that he’s actually doing don’t always line up with what he says. He has not moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he has criticized the Netanyahu administration for settlements at some level, all things that Trump said he was going to do, but when we look in practice, it looks remarkably similar to before and it also seems like Trump is willing to throw his hat in the ring and to be yet another U.S. president who wants to try and solve the eternal conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, so I just threw some things at you but I think the main thing is so what does the U.S. do, how does the U.S. deal with all these dynamics we’ve brought up?

KB: We’ve written about how the United States is pursuing a balance of power strategy. A balance of power strategy doesn’t mean that there is a nice balance, that you can essentially create this system that’s going to work for a while. It’s a constant act of balancing, it doesn’t end at one point, it doesn’t begin at one point. You just have to continue to play with it, tweak it, to make sure that it is working and the U.S. balance of power strategy relies on working with the major powers of the region, we’ve identified them as Turkey, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Now if you go into each one of them, we’ve talked about the historic relationship with Israel, and there is this disconnect between Israeli and American interests, but I still think that despite that divergence in interests, the United States and Israel aren’t really that far apart if you look at it from a strategic point of view. Yes, tactically there can be many differences, you know, we can say that the United States does not want Israel to build new settlements but I think that that’s sort of a minor issue in the larger regional geopolitical scheme of things. I don’t think that the United States does not want Israel to assume a posture or an aggressive interventionist posture in its neighborhood and I don’t think that the Israelis want to do that either. So if you look at the airstrikes in Syria, they do not demonstrate any desire on the part of the Israelis to intervene in the way they did in Lebanon, and that’s great from an American perspective, because the United States is already dealing with a whole lot. The United States under the Obama administration was able to end that hostility that erupted between Turkey and Israel over the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010, and there was the re-establishment of full diplomatic relations and a sort of normalization. So I think that there again is another example of the United States trying to balance. The United States needs Turkey to manage Syria, and it has made it very clear to the Israelis that we need your cooperation. If the Israelis and the Turks are going after each other, then that undermines the United States’ interests.

You flip over to Iran’s nuclear program and the way the nuclear agreement was forged, yes there was a lot of huffing and puffing on the part of the Israelis, there was a lot of bellicose rhetoric and unhappiness, and the media was all about how Netanyahu’s personality clashes with that of Obama, but at the end of the day, Israel didn’t do anything substantive to block that agreement from taking place. Israel maintains that it has very little faith in that agreement to produce the desired outcome, but that’s a different story than saying we will go and actively work against American interests.

JS: I am going to jump in and disagree with you a little bit in the sense that I think you are understating just how much the Netanyahu administration opposed the Iran deal. Israel didn’t do anything in terms of Iran’s nuclear program and won’t do anything in terms of Iran’s nuclear program, at least anything overt, because it doesn’t have the capability. It simply does not have the military capability to go in and knock out the Iranian nuclear program. If it did, I would submit that it probably already would have done it. It did that with Iraq, it did that with Syria. If it felt like it had the capability, I think it would have gone and done it already. And I don’t think it was a small thing what Netanyahu did when he came and addressed the U.S. Senate and gave that very flowery speech about how it was a bad deal and how the Obama administration had committed a catastrophic mistake. I don’t think that Israel had much of a choice in the end though.

At the end of the day, Israel knows where its bread is buttered and knows that it needs the United States as a key strategic ally. If this was the path that the United States would go down and this was the path that the United States thought was most in U.S. interests, Israel wasn’t going to be able to thwart that. But I think that Israel in general is very intimidated by Iran, especially by Iran’s rhetoric, and they would’ve preferred a much stronger U.S. reaction to Iran. I think that’s one of the areas where you see that there’s not going to be a break in relations between the United States and Israel but I think there you see a very, very different set of priorities. Israel is still a small country in a very hostile neighborhood that looks at things one way and the United States is the most powerful country in the world with a lot of different challenges in a lot of different regions. You’ve got everything going on with Russia, you’ve got everything going on with China, you’ve got allies all over the place, you’ve got a NATO alliance that isn’t working the way the United States wants it to, the United States does not have time to get involved in every little thing inside the Middle East.

The United States really can use Iran, not necessarily as an ally, I am not saying the United States and Iran are going to become best friends or anything, but the United States needs an Iran it can work with on a pragmatic basis, because there are bigger fish to fry. You’ve got ISIS sitting there right smack dab in the Middle East, you’ve got whatever is going to come after ISIS, you’ve got this huge jostling and competition for what’s going to come after the hulking carcasses of Syria and Iraq going on there, so I think that’s actually one of the areas where you see a little bit of the divergence and where you see that the challenges of ’67 and the challenges that have really defined relations in the region since ’67 are beginning to change.

KB: Yes they are changing, but what I was pointing towards or trying to make the case for is that there is the divergence, and yes it is a function of capability that Israel did not opt for a military solution to the Iranian nuclear issue and went along with the U.S. diplomatic option, but at the end of the day, this is that difficult balancing act we’ve been talking about. The difficulty in maintaining a balance of power strategy whether it’s between Turkey and Israel or Israel and Iran, I mean even between Turkey and Iran, although this is one of those relations that has yet to really emerge in terms of where it’s going at this point. Even though they are at odds with one another over the outcome of Syria, Tehran and Ankara are not going to be seeing eye-to-eye, but for now they have both decided that it’s not in their interests to go head-to-head with one another.

I mean similarly if you look at how the U.S. is sort of caught. On one hand, there is an Iran that can be useful in the fight against ISIS in making sure that Iraq functions in some kind of semi-coherent way. But at the same time, the more that the Americans appear to be working with the Iranians – that deeply upsets the Saudis and the other Arab states, and therefore yet again you have a balancing act. We saw a lot of this balancing, it’s not as if the United States can just say okay, Saudi Arabia has very little to offer and Iran has a little more to offer, therefore we’re going to sort of swing that pendulum in the direction of Tehran. I don’t think that would sort of undermine the entire thesis of a balance of power strategy, but once you immerse yourself into that, you put yourself in the shoes of Washington, it’s a difficult balancing act. How do you make sure that the enmity between the Iranians and the Saudis does not upset your interests in the region. On one hand, the United States does not like the Saudis sponsoring militias in Syria that are not very different honestly from al-Qaida and ISIS. But at the same time, the United States needs the Saudis to make sure that the Iranians don’t jump out of their box and become disproportionately powerful.

So I guess, I am talking about a very complex balance of power strategy that will continue to twist and turn whether it involves the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the U.S.-Iranian tensions, the tensions that currently exist between Turkey, which we have identified as being the key to the American strategy for the long haul in Syria and in the wider region. We see great tensions, at least in the short term, there’s a divergence of interests especially over the Kurds and the extent to which Turkey wants to commit forces in the fight against ISIS. But nonetheless the two sides have to work with each other, so Washington has been caught in between these four powers.

JS: It’s funny as you were talking, it’s really striking to me when you think in terms of, you know, if you think about the 1960s and ’70s, it was punctuated by these very intense wars. We call them wars in the full sense of the term. But overall it was a much more stable situation in the Middle East. You know, there were the people that were in the U.S. camp, there were the states that were in the Soviet camp and the states themselves were fairly stable. Egypt was a fairly stable state, Syria you know, there was the coup d’etat in ‘61 that brought the Baath party to power, but once the Assads eventually came to power, Syria also was very stable, the Hashemite kingdom has also been there since the 1940s. Right now, it’s not so simple.

The Arab world, as you said, really has been hollowed out. And there’s a great deal of instability and there’s a great deal of uncertainty about what is going to emerge out of it. I would suggest that if we are looking forward another 50 years, if we are talking about 100 years from 1967, I think that what we might see is we might see the pendulum swing back to the stability that we saw in ’67. I just think the actors are going to be very different. I don’t think that Egypt and Syria and war between Arabs and the Israelis is going to be the thing animating the region. I think the thing to really focus on is the rise of Turkey, how Iran is going to respond to that, how the Arab world is going to deal both with its own problems with radical Islam and then how Israel is going to try to navigate through all this and who the U.S. is going to use and how.

I want to close, I just want to hit one more topic while we’re here Kamran. It’s one we’ve sort of danced around and it’s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it feels like the eternal conflict. And in some ways, it’s strange to go to this issue after talking about such large weighty things, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in strategic terms really does not matter that much. And I wonder how you are going to answer this question, because it’s something that I ask people all the time. Why do you think there is such a degree of fascination and attention with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East? The attention that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it gets, really I don’t think lines up with the strategic importance that it has overall, and I think it’s appropriate to talk about it in this conversation, because as you said 1967 is when Israel takes over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and it hasn’t relinquished them since. And the Palestinians, which used to be – the West Bank was a Jordanian problem and the Gaza Strip was an Egyptian problem. Since ’67 it became an Israeli problem. So why do you think that there is such a level of focus such that even the Trump administration is sending out envoys talking about solution to this conflict that has eluded every single president.

KB: I think there are two reasons for that. I think the first reason has to do with the fact that the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. In many ways there is, as time has gone by and as we move forward, the situation becomes more and more complex and resolution appears more and more elusive. But the fact is that the question of Palestine, the Palestinian issue, has not been resolved in some shape or form to where we can move beyond this idea of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though successive American administrations have failed to really tackle this issue. I think the closest that we ever came was in the Clinton administration when there were final status talks between Yasser Arafat and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the late ’90s. But we’ve drifted far from that and we’ve come to a point where the entire Palestinian landscape has become so incoherent that even before we talk about an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, there has to be some form of intra-Palestinian settlement and nothing tells me when I look at the Gaza Strip, when I look at the West Bank, when I look at Hamas, and when I look at Fatah and I look at the other Palestinian factions and the disunity and the incoherence, I look at it and I say we are moving even further away from anything called a Palestinian national entity. And therefore it becomes even less and less possible for a serious Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

But I think that there is another assumption built into the way we in the West look at this problem. Which is that if we were to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict then somehow the Middle East becomes far more manageable. I don’t believe that. But that is the way I think that many within the various governments in the West, whether it’s the British government or the French or the German or the American. And in many ways, this narrative has been peddled by the Arab regimes and the wider Muslim world, you know Turkey has been pushing this as well on its end, that you need to solve this problem, if you solve this problem then we won’t have radicalism. Radicalism and al-Qaida, ISIS exist largely because of what has happened to the Palestinians and the wider fallout of that. I think there’s the failure to recognize that it’s not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab Muslim world faces a deep malaise. We talked about this in our first podcast a couple of weeks ago. And that is at the heart of this issue, but I think that there is this obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being central to the wider problems of the Middle East.

I will argue that even assuming somehow we can miraculously solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we have this quote-unquote two-state solution before us, the problems of Syria, Egypt and Iraq and the rest of that region are not going to go away. But nonetheless because it’s a historic continuing unfinished business, there is this tendency to sort of organically link it to the other problems, and if you look at every administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration and even now the Trump administration, there’s always this effort, this new effort to say let’s get the Israelis and the Palestinians to start talking in a serious way. But at the end, we haven’t seen any breakthrough, because the fundamentals have not changed, they’ve actually become worse. You have two Palestines, effectively there are two Palestinian Territories, not just geographically separated, they are ideologically separated, they are politically separated. Right now, the Israelis don’t occupy Gaza, that is a Palestinian sort of self-ruled territory spinning on its own axis controlled by Hamas. That will continue, I don’t think the Israelis are going to go in anytime soon or in the foreseeable future and reoccupy Gaza. So what can happen in the form of some negotiation is that there may be another Palestinian territory that emerges as a semi-quasi-sovereign in the West Bank. You will effectively have two Palestines. Does that solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I would argue no, it just makes it much, much more complex.

JS: And I think just the way I always talk about the Middle East when people ask me about it is my favorite metaphor to describe it basically as a chess board, that really for over a century now the Middle East has been a chess board for major powers outside the region to try and make moves against each other. And for the most part since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, it’s been mostly pawns on the chess board with mostly people moving back less valuable pieces as they challenge each other. And I think the most important thing to think about going forward when we think about the next 50 years and where we are going to be 50 years from now is to watch the powers in the Middle East itself that are beginning to come up. I think really that means keeping a very close eye on Turkey, keeping a very close eye on Iran, keeping a very close eye on Saudi Arabia and whether and how it’s able to tackle many of the issues facing it. I know that here at GPF, we’re fairly bearish on Saudi Arabia’s ability to do that, they are just facing too much. And then Israel, as it always has been, you know smaller country in a very messy neighborhood trying to figure out its right place in it all and trying to build the right level of strategic relationships that allow it to exist with a maximum amount of independence. All right, thanks Kamran. Thank you for joining me. Thank you everybody for listening. If you want to send us questions or comments, you can comment on our website or on SoundCloud. You can also send comments to [email protected]. Again, I am Jacob Shapiro, I’m the Director of Analysis for GPF and this is Kamran Bokhari, and we will see you next time.