Pleased to be here. It's more of a seminar.
It's not a big group here. So I hope we can turn this into a kind of a dialogue rather than a lecture.
But I will start off and make a few points.
First of all, what's not in that bio is the fact that a lot of my research writing on the Middle East is not public.
It's not published. It's for commissioned papers, mainly for the U.S. government.
That sounds like my phone and my phone.
And therefore, a lot of you don't know what my expertise is, but my interest has always been in the Middle East.
I first went to the Middle East in 1966 and became very much fascinated with with Egypt and Nasser and Sadat as a starting point,
gives you some idea of where my expertise is, what I'm going to do.
And this little talk is talk about the Middle East and the four camps, which I call them, whether these four camps are meaningful anymore.
And then I'm going to kind of leave land gently, I hope, in the area that I'm very focussed on right now, which is the future of Syria.
Syria, as all of you know, is very much in the news and we're at a bit of of of uncertainty and sense.
Uncertainty is is something that attracts me.
I don't like to deal with certitudes and boring stuff.
I'm going to probably dwell at length on this. The other thing you should know.
Just for background, you know, you know, where is this guy coming from?
Where I'm an American, but I'm also I've become an expert, shall we say, on how Israel views its regional challenges,
because that was the paper that I just finished that I was commissioned on, that the commissioner was not in the Middle East.
It was in Washington. So.
So you you're probably get some thoughts on that perspective that you won't get in ordinary newspapers because I kind of dug in deep.
I talked to a lot of people, talked to a lot of senior people.
And I think I get it. I've been doing this for several years, so I have kind of built up a kind of a cadre of people that I can talk to.
And it is something that I follow every morning, every morning I read to what is happening.
So what's what's happening? What's the latest this morning?
I don't know. The latest is that Israel now has an Iron Dome mechanism that can be fired off of ships in order to
protect its oil rigs from Hezbollah or or this future Iranian sea base that they're worried about.
But anyway, that's a little taste of what you're going to get.
I'm probably going to go for 35 minutes, and I have a feeling the way I've launched this introduction,
it's not going to be as tight as they probably should be.
We have time for this is the term and it's also the this is the most difficult period for any American.
The first 48 hours after Thanksgiving weekend is Thanksgiving week.
And you just shut it down and it takes you so long to get to where you have to get to on Monday that you're really completely wasted.
I don't have that excuse, but I am an American and I did celebrate Thanksgiving on Sunday night.
Anyway, what I would like to pose is the following question.
We divided the Middle East into four camps in recent years.
You've probably heard this before. There's the Saudi led camp, which are what we call the moderates, the moderate Sunnis,
the monarchies, Egypt, Tunisia, what we consider most of the members of the Arab League.
Then you have the Turkey led kind of political Islam Muslim Brotherhood camp, which really Turkey, Qatar, maybe Hamas, maybe it's really a small camp.
You could call it a fringe group within the Sunni world or a separate camp.
Then, of course, you have the Iran led Shiite camp.
And finally you have this I don't know how to be politically correct, but Takfiri Salafist jihadi camp, AQ, Daesh or ISIS.
So those are the four camps that we've been thinking about.
And the question is clearly there have been if you had to use a political science terminology,
the Middle East, you would say, is now characterised by shifting alliances.
And volatility of power constructions, shifting alliances along, constantly shifting.
Look at Turkey with Putin now. I mean, just a year and a half ago, Turkey shot down a Russian fired look at it.
Look at Qatar and the GCC, look at Israel and Saudi.
So you have these shifting alliances. So does do these four camps make sense anymore?
And what I've decided on the trend right here is that, no, the camps still work.
What what is happening is a logical conclusion of the camps.
It's one thing to say here you've got these four different camps. But then what is the conclusion?
Well, Iran gets Iran supports the Houthis.
The Houthis launch missiles that are more precise than they should be on their own.
So they're getting help from somebody like Hezbollah and Iran.
And they they are aimed at the Riyadh International Airport.
And so all of a sudden, you have the Saudis speaking up quite loudly, spoke up in a number of ways, and Hariri resigned.
They accuse Lebanon of making war on them. They accused Iran of making war on them.
So all of a sudden, you have the logical conclusion, which, by the way, I thought back in 1974 when I was a junior at Yale,
which is one of the results of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, would be a tacit alliance between two status quo powers, Israel and the Saudi Arabia.
Now, nobody thought of that in 1974, and to be frank with you, it's taken a little bit longer to happen.
And the years of that time, huh?
Yeah, that's a pretty long prediction. What is happening?
It is happening because it's logical. You have at that time there wasn't even an Iran that was an Islamic republic.
But it was still clear to me that time you could argue that Egypt was the revisionist power,
but clearly Saudi Arabia, with its aggression of wealth, was going to be a very important player.
That's when I made my decision to leave the Midwest and go to the Middle East, because if you remember,
the United States had a horrific recession in 1974 caused by a lot of things,
but basically the oil embargo, that was mainly the work of key figures of Saudi Arabia.
So anyway, Saudi Arabia's been very much on my mind. The big question is, in 43 years, why hasn't it been able to convert its wealth into power?
So for those of you who are interested in power as a major power, one thing for sure is it's not just money because they've had plenty of it.
And the way they have I like the way John Jenkins put it recently, they have plenty of capacity.
I mean, how many jets do they have from the most advanced equipment?
But they seem to as as we see in the their performance in the Yemen war, they seem to have less than ample competence.
On the other hand, Iran has not so much capacity and it seems to be performing with very much competence.
So when Jenkins raised this point in a seminar a few weeks ago, I raised the question, well,
that would explain the need for Saudi Arabia maybe to align itself with somebody that's competent,
not only has capacity, but has competence, particularly in the military field.
So what's going on in Saudi Arabia is quite interesting.
You're having a revolution from above, not from below.
You're having this guy embeds who's centralising power so that Saudi Arabia can begin to exert power before this.
Saudi Arabia. How is Saudi Arabia? First of all, you had the mid powers and the religious wing that was pushing radical Islam,
that was not winning too many friends particularly, and those of us in the counterterrorism field.
Second, you had this phenomenon where all these persons were like their own foreign ministers.
You had hundreds of foreign ministers doing their own thing.
Some supported al Qaeda, some supported the United States.
And and and so in part because I wrote about this in my first study for the US Government in 2000 to 2003 was on the future of Saudi Arabia.
It was neat the way they had separated.
Basically three or four power centres was the Saudi National Guard, which was run by King, the late King Abdullah's father family.
And then you had the Ministry of Defence, which was run by. Sultan and Bandar is the son of certain colleges.
All sign up sometime that family around the family.
And then you had the minister of interior that was run by the Nayak family.
And I. I thought that was kind of a clever way to kind of gain key constituencies, but also balance power.
The National Guard was very good at preventing any coups.
And the Ministry of Defence, of course, was guys buying all these weapons from the United States and Britain.
But what's happened is that Mohammed bin Salman, what's the first thing he and his father?
I think they're very much together. I think he's the favourite son of his father.
There are other some children, much older.
But this one in particular, his father thought, gets it and can work.
And he's demonstrating anything. He has a lot of energy and ambition.
So he what is it, the first thing he does well in June or is it the beginning of Ramadan this year,
he basically managed to have the crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef removed and he was replaced as crown prince,
thereby neutralising the presumed succession.
And then recently, he removed the son of King Abdullah from the National Guard, which was that that was that Abdullah family,
certain guy named Mehtab, who could have been a challenge to a future king, Mohammed bin Salman.
So he'd been moved off to the Interior and the National Guard are now consolidating on the foreign front.
What's interesting is that he starts to make noise about Lebanon.
I mean, we've all seen what's happened in Lebanon, not so much as in 26, but in 2008, Lebanon,
basically the Hezbollah basically shut down a Sunni opposition from a military point of view from 2008.
Hezbollah has been the pre-eminent power in Lebanon.
First of all, it has a blocking power in terms of blocking anything.
It didn't want to happen in the parliament and in the ministry.
But second of all, it basically started so and then with the beginning of the rebellion in Syria,
it moved out of Lebanon and became what I call the the fighting force,
the operational command level force for Iran's interests in Syria and not only in Syria.
As I said, since 2009, Hezbollah has been fighting with the 14th Street Houthis and of course,
have been active in Iraq, training Iran proxy pro-Iran militias.
So so the question I go back these four camps do they make sense with despite the shifting alliance the fact that everything seems to be chaotic?
I would argue, yes, Iran on the rise. I think that's clear to everybody.
It's not only Khomeini ism that's on the rise. It's part of Iran's imperial past that's being reflected.
And that's part of the reason why he's so popular domestically. Hey, we made this piece, this nuclear deal with the West.
Now we can assert ourselves traditionally in our in our effort to reclaim the old the old empire of King Cyrus Empire, empire, empire.
And, you know, when China comes up with its own Imperial Belt and Road Initiative, which is to create a new Silk Road.
They need another empire. And Iran would be perfect for them as they go on the road from Xinjiang, from western China,
through the Central Asia, through Iran, and all the way up into Piraeus, Greece, and ultimately into Central Europe.
So a lot going on in Iran.
We'll come back to that and the other phenomenon of the Middle East that's part of what's happening in Syria is the decline of the state.
Since the Arab Spring happened. We've seen it in really stark terms with the rise of Daesh.
It's simple. The Sunni Arab world is in decline.
The state is in decline. And what you've seen is the rise of tribes, the rise of sects, the rise of clans,
and particularly the rise of non-Arab states, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and to some extent, the Kurds.
Maybe we'll talk about the Kurds in Q&A. I want to say, how are we doing, Andrew?
So far, so good. Tremendous achievements. But okay. Well, I'm still in the first four lines of my notes, so speed it up.
Right. Very good. In the room until the 2nd of December. Okay.
All right. All right. But it's great to.
Matt Bai and I was 20 minutes late for lunch, but still be very cordial and listen.
So we have the artificiality of states. And let's just quickly mention bit where this came from, Sykes-Picot.
So the British French concoction at the end of World War One.
But you also had Nasser's Arab nationalism, which came crashing down in 1967.
You had the Saudi response to promote Islam, and we've talked about that.
That's led to a more the most extreme jihadi form, which the Saudis have finally decided enough is enough,
and they want to go into a more moderate direction.
And you have this rise of sectarianism. What are the prospects for Arab reform?
I happened to have a Saudi client who believes in Arab reform.
You have to live in Paris and not in Riyadh.
But he really does believe that there's nothing different from Arabs, from anybody else, from Latin America, from from Eastern Europe,
all the places that have gone through the democratic, democratic transition, which sort of I guess Ukraine at some time are still struggling.
But you know what I mean? Transparency and accountability, a free press, freedom of speech, gender equality.
These are kind of universal things, in his view. To me, you know, I look and I say, I think you're right, but, you know, we can discuss that.
So just to finish up what's happening in Saudi Arabia is NBS is centralising
authority so that so that Saudi Arabia can wield power commensurate with its wealth.
And they are really starting to get nervous about Iran.
Iran is threatening them. If you look around, you don't see the United States there with them.
We can talk about the U.S. policy in the Q&A, but I'm not going to dwell on it in my opening remarks.
Why? Because Trump is kind of a black box, so we kind of kind of have to make it up as we go.
But what I'm talking about here is observable facts.
Okay. The other thing is that we have a very interesting situation in Syria right now.
The United States and Russia have made an agreement.
They can sit down. But basically Trump runs into Putin at these conferences, one in Hamburg and the most recent one somewhere in East Asia.
I think it was Vietnam. They make a deal on Syria, basically.
The deal is that Trump basically delegates Syria to Russia and in particular the issue that
concerns Israel is how far can Iran and Iranian proxies be allowed toward the Israeli Golan?
It's a very, very sensitive issue. It's not the only issue for Israel, but very sensitive.
And in both cases, Israel's interests were shut out.
So what we're seeing now is on the one hand, and Iran dropped with its power from victories, it saved Assad.
It's got a whole bunch of stuff coming to it in terms of strategic and economic interests in Syria.
It has a formula for expanding.
That is, you create local Hezbollah, organically created cells that basically are not Iranian, but they do the bidding of Iran.
They have a great formula, and I attribute it mainly to General Qassem Suleimani,
who is the head of Al Quds, which is part of the Revolutionary Guard.
Keep an eye on him. So what's what's going on here is where is the United States and Israel?
So, you know, when when Lavrov said the next day after Israel protested the latest Vietnam understanding,
Lavrov said Iran is legitimate because they've been legitimate and they've been invited by Hassan, who is the legitimate ruler.
Well, I guess some would argue that Assad is not the legitimate government.
But the fact of the matter is, Russia seems to be supporting Iran's stake in Syria and the United States is kind of saying,
well, there is some language in it that says all foreign forces will have to leave at some point.
So what you're seeing is Israel is reverting to the old Israel that you may remember from the fifties,
sixties, certainly 7280s, where it basically acts on its own.
It asserts its own security interests. It doesn't work behind the United States.
They thought that Trump would be pro-Israel and different from Obama.
And what they're discovering is, despite the lofty language of Trump, particularly when it comes to Iran, that they have basically a de facto Obama.
This is an interesting. So what do you have, I guess is the facilities trap?
What do you have when you have a rising power, Iran, rising toward the Mediterranean and you have a status quo power?
That's the pre-eminent military power in the Middle East, namely Israel. Sounds to me like you're going to have war.
War? I would I would not predict a hot war,
but certainly certainly there going to be some [INAUDIBLE] for tat going to be happening because Israel's red lines
are incompatible with Iran's interests and Iran thinks it deserves what it wants and it's going to get what it wants.
And Russia's sitting there and saying, Oh, my God. I'm going to get their spy chief in Tel Aviv right now.
Oh, my God, Israel, could this whole thing. I mean, you know how easy it is to take out Assad.
They could they took out a guy named Samir Kuntar from an apartment building 60 miles away with a guided missile.
Their intelligence is the best in the Middle East.
There's a big article in Vanity of Vanity Fair.
You may have heard that where Trump was trying to I don't know what he was trying to find to ingratiate his Russian hosts by telling them,
hey, that, you know, you know what I heard? I heard that they you know,
the Israelis reported they had these guys go into northern Syria and plant these listening devices in in Daesh
so that we found out from them that they were going to put laptops in in the aeroplanes and blow them up.
Wow. I, I don't think the Israeli intelligence people were too happy about that disclosure to say the least.
But it does show you that with good intelligence you do have an edge.
So I definitely see with Israel feeling abandoned, if you will, by a lacklustre and confused the United States,
which doesn't seem to have any policy on the future of Syria and a very kind of ambivalent relationship with Russia,
which is on the one hand, Russia thinks Israel is practically Russian to them and they got a Russian speaking defence minister and Bibi Netanyahu.
Made so many visits. Saatchi Saatchi, Saatchi, Saatchi Saatchi.
But on the other hand, as I said from Lavrov's recent statement,
Russia certainly sees Iran and Hezbollah as the foot soldiers to maintain to Assad, which is an interest.
So big question marks on what's going to happen. I predict it's going to be some interesting.
Basically, Israel will use its air force to attack these precision missile factories that Iran is trying to build in Lebanon and Syria.
And the question is whether Russia will try to challenge their airstrikes.
Now, I would get interested because, you know, Russia's power in Syria is more is more bark than bite.
It's not that deep. And Israel, if it had to, could take out the S-300, the S-400, as long as they stay away.
So as long as they stay away from the Russian forces themselves and they could but they could hit in any place around them.
Be really interesting. If Assad says, sure, Iran, you may be on a sea base and an air base here.
What would happen if that sea bass were located by the Russian Sea Base and that air base is located by the Russian air base?
But I to my recollection, I don't think the Iranians have much of an air force,
and I don't think sea bass would I think a sea bass would provide a nice target for the Israeli Air Force.
So when it comes down to it, a lot of these fears or these red lines that Israel say are kind of are kind of exaggerated.
But what they really fear is that Iran is going to basically take over Syria and connect back to Lebanon.
And they've already got so much going on in Iraq.
It's going to be very difficult. Now, the upside is this is people say Iran is what's bringing Saudi Arabia and Israel together.
It's not true. It's the United States. When you think about it,
the United States was Saudi's reliable ally and then they see what the United States did under Obama to Mubarak and threw him under the bus.
They see what Obama did with the JCPOA. That's the nuclear deal, basically, that they basically privileged Iran.
They're their enemy. They see the Palestinian issue isn't as important as it used to be.
Some is new. It may still be very important. We can discuss that.
And I see that, you know, maybe Israel can replace the United States so that there's a lot of upside there.
But from the Israeli point of view, what exactly can Saudi Arabia do for them in Syria?
I mean, in Saudi Arabia, how do they have the Italians?
Do they have Sunni Hezbollah, the equivalent of Sunni Hezbollah?
They have money. That's what they have. And so it's just hard.
And also the other thing and I end with this is when you talk about a Sunni Arab camp without the United States and Israel,
this Sunni Arab camp is not going to come together. Egypt is totally wrapped up with internal issues.
The latest been hundreds of people killed in in northern Sinai.
Who else is there? Iraq is not in that camp. Qatar is outside that camp now.
So it's it's a pretty, pretty weak camp. Are we are we in 35, you know, five, five more minutes.
Okay. Then I'll get to the second half of this in Thanksgiving.
So yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I covered most of my themes.
Trump has no clear strategy in Syria. For him, it's mission accomplished for Israel.
It's the mission. It's just starting for Iran. The mission is continuing and entering a new military, political and diplomatic phase.
The United States, this is particularly controversial, has defeated Iran's enemies three times.
First, right, Iraq, 2003.
Saddam Hussein wasn't a nice guy, but he was the balance against Iran.
It was the second Afghanistans. The Taliban, ruthlessly a.k.a. Shia, may be changing now, but that was an enemy of Iran.
And what's the latest enemy of Iran to the United States like coalition to be or is to be.
It's nice. So it's not that Iran is some incredible superpower, some military giant.
It's that we, the West, have been defeating Iran's enemies.
We've been working for Iran. That's one way to look at it. That's one way to look at it.
And Iran simply is filling the vacuum. So let's talk about that.
Let's talk about that. And that, I think, is so different.
I think that's that's where I want to leave it.