2026 Conflict in the Middle East

Conflict in the Middle East transcript

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Well, welcome to the session on the Middle East. As I said at the end of the previous session, we are not going to get into the tactics and discuss whether there will be an extended ceasefire in the next 24 hours, 48 hours or whatever.

We are there to look at a bigger picture, and for that, we have really an exceptional panel. I'm not going to introduce in detail each of the speakers. You have in the booklet, you have their bios.

And I will, since this is a vast topic, I will start right away with Rob Malley. Rob Malley was deeply involved in the, I mean, has been deeply involved in the Middle East, as you see from his bio, for, I think, for most of your professional life, Rob. And he was instrumental in, he was the lead negotiator for the JCPOA.

And then he tried to resuscitate it with the Biden administration. So he knows more about Iran and the issues at hand and the U.S. diplomacy than most. And I would want to ask you, Rob, from a U.S. standpoint, what do you see as a possible endgame for that war? And beyond that, what is the long-term role for the U.S. in the Middle East? And what future does that spell for U.S.-Israel relations? Because we are really in a momentous time at the moment.

Robert Malley:
Well, thanks. First thing, thank you for having me. And it's great to be in company, even virtually, with all the other great participants.

Hard to answer all those questions in a few minutes, but let me at least outline some points. So, first, I think you've given me the unenviable task of trying to speak of an endgame for a war that has no logical starting point. So an unlawful and unnecessary war, I should add, but whose starting point remains murky even today, you know, four, five, six weeks after the war started.

Was the goal, was the starting point an attempt at regime change? Was it a regime readjustment à la Venezuela, the idea, illusory, but still was the idea to try to change some layer of the leadership so that you'd have one that's more friendly to the U.S., even if it's not a wholesale transformation? Was it to further annihilate a nuclear program that had already presumably been annihilated in June 2025, at least according to President Trump?

Was it just to get rid of Iran's other deterrence, its missile capability, its drone capability? It's still unclear to this day. And not just is it unclear whether it's any of those objectives, but today the core objective seems to be a new one, one that didn't even exist at the beginning of the war, which is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was not closed before the war began.

So given all that, it's pretty hard sitting here to try to figure out what a logical, acceptable endgame would be for this most capricious and unpredictable of presidents. But for the sake of this presentation, I'll say that there are several doors that the president could take. One is the quickest, at least the one that makes the most sense from the standpoint of, I'd say, not just regional, but global welfare, of how unsatisfactory it would be, which is a mini deal that is focused along the lines of what we're reading now in terms of memorandum of understanding, which is focused just on lifting the U.S. blockade, lifting the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, provide Iran with some economic relief given the devastating economic cost that this war has cost it, end the war. I should add, you'd have to also find a way to end the war, at least some of the aspects of the war in Lebanon, which is becoming an increasingly dire situation and directly connected to the war waged on Iran, and postpone the negotiations, the broader negotiations on nuclear and sanctions and broader sanctions relief to later.

Now, that outcome would of course be an absolute indictment of the war because it would be ended by addressing an issue that didn't even exist before the war, as I said earlier, but at least it would meet both sides immediate needs or immediate concerns for the U.S., the political and economic concerns caused by the closure of the Strait and for Iran, providing it with some economic relief, ending the war and addressing the Lebanese theater. The second door that President Trump could take and that could represent in his eyes an endgame or at least the beginning of an endgame, which is a more dangerous one.

And from the standpoint of global welfare, the most costly, which is a resumption of U.S. Israeli strikes, perhaps with greater lethality and illegality, I might add, with the goal of extracting better terms for the U.S. It's dangerous. As I said, it's costly. As I said, it's also most likely ineffective because I think if we've learned anything at this point, and I'm sure we'll hear it more later in the panel, is that Iran is not going to give in to further pressure.

It doesn't believe that it is in a position of weakness. It believes that it has proven its resilience and it believes, rightly or wrongly, that it could sustain this conflict longer than the U.S. can. And ultimately, even if President Trump chooses that door, I suspect he then ends up back in door A because he has to figure out how to end the war.

And door A is the more logical one, which is to address the immediate issues. He can also decide, and with President Trump, everything is possible to declare victory, to say, you know, I won this war because I've demolished Iran's military capabilities. And now I'm just going to walk away.

We'll lift our blockade and we'll leave it to the rest of the world to address the consequences of Iran's closure. And at that point, pressure could build on Iran, including from China, to reopen at least to some degree the Strait of Hormuz. That would be an extremely fragile outcome because, again, you still have Israel, which we could talk about, and you still have the Lebanese front.

And finally, again, not an unimaginable outcome. The situation just rocks and it persists for a long time. Nothing happens.

No war, no peace. But countless innocent victims, all the people who are suffering from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and, of course, the risk of continued escalation, as we saw in the last 24, 48 hours. The fact that I can't predict which of these end games will be the one that the U.S. will choose is, to some extent, a reflection of the fact that I don't know what is in Trump's mind. But I suspect it's also a reflection of the fact that Trump himself doesn't know what's in his mind at any given point. And so, you know, this will be a function of domestic pressures, regional pressures and just the mood that the president is at any given point. In the few minutes that I have left, I can't really fully address the other two questions, but just quick thoughts on the longer term U.S. role in the region. I think this war underscores once more the dilemma that the U.S. faces because it wishes to extricate itself from a region without extricating itself from the policies that have led it to become so deeply enmeshed in the region in the first place. System of alliances, military presence, fueling and feeding off of interregional polarization. All of that explains why since now, at least 2009, President Obama had a series of presidents, each one of which at one point has stated that their goal is to pivot away from the Middle East, to stop investing so much resources, time, capabilities in a region that is losing its strategic importance.

Only to find themselves pulled back ever more deeply. And that will continue to be the case until the U.S. revisits some fundamental assumptions about everything I just mentioned, in particular, its alliance system. That finally brings us very quickly to the question of Israel.

And there I'd say again, I mean, there just is, we're at, as you say, a very interesting inflection point potentially because there's a growing divergence given the on the one hand, the unprecedented levels of military and intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Israel. This is the first war that they've jointly waged. And every person I speak to who is involved says they've never seen this degree of interconnection between the U.S. and Israel in all the fields that I mentioned. So the one hand, unprecedented cooperation on the other hand, unprecedented levels of U.S. public alienation towards Israel and its policies. And that divergence is not sustainable. And I suspect, therefore, that some aspects of the relationship will change over time.

The speed and scope of that change, I think, will depend very much on political changes, not just here in the U.S., but also in Israel. And I thought you could speak to us about that and in the region. And I'm confident that our other panelists will provide more clarity on those issues than I could on the question.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you very much for this sobering analysis. I will come back to some of your points. But before that, I want to turn to Hussein Banai, who is a great specialist of Iran.

And you're originally from Iran. And Rob mentioned the possibility among the scenarios of resumption of strikes or justice, the war, war.

Well, it's a pleasure to be on a panel with both of you and Professor Anderson.

I'm trying not to repeat what I just said in the first minute and a half or so. But what I was kind of cautioning at the beginning before I answered the question of what the war has meant for the Iranian leadership and the system is to think about the wider context in which Iranian leaders find themselves at the end of this 20 years crisis or so that started really with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And to me, it started to the reckoning for them really started to take place after October 7th, 2023, when Iran started to really feel pushed back by Israel, especially losing its proxies one after the other.

So there's been a succession of traumatic blows to the Iranian leadership, to the Iranian interest, to the Islamic Republic as a system. And this is to say nothing of the crisis of domestic legitimacy that the government has been dealing with over the course of that period as well. Obviously, in January of this year, right before the war started in February, at the end of February, Iran saw the most brutal crackdown on domestic protests.

Estimates somewhere between, depending on which source you consult, from 7,000 to 40,000 Iranians were slaughtered over the course of just two nights by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, their domestic intelligence force. And, you know, at that point when the war started and the surprise way in which it took place, taking out the supreme leader in the very first strike of the war on February 28th, and also 49 of the most senior leadership of Iran's armed forces, as well as national security figures, all of them gone within the first 24 hours of the war. There was a palpable feeling that the regime, this is it, that, you know, they may have hours to survive.

And certainly that was the case among the Iranian diaspora and many people who hoped for the regime to go as well. But very soon, due to the very strategic incoherence that Rob pointed out from the American war planning perspective, but also here it should be said, of the very idiosyncratic, to put it very kindly, of the manner in which the President of the United States communicated his multiple objectives, his feelings, his thoughts about how everything was going on an almost hourly basis, I think the Iranians kind of saw a massive opening that they could exploit if they could just hold what they had, if they really calibrated the response in such a way that looked like the Lilliputians were having success against the Gulliver by hitting, you know, Persian Gulf allies in the region by hitting some very substantial American assets, military bases, CIA stations, FBI stations. I heard from some FBI officers in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in Kuwait and elsewhere, they managed to really find a way to not be seen as falling overnight, the way it had happened in Venezuela, the way it had happened, frankly, against the, you know, during the Libya war against Gaddafi or, you know, in the Iraq war against Saddam, that they actually had multiple layers of leadership in place. Now, I think that was the good news for them, that they could kind of drag this out and create at least the impression of resilience.

That has not addressed any of the number of domestic problems that they still face. They have a crisis of succession that has been seemingly overnight solved by the Revolutionary Guards pledging fealty to and recognizing and forcing all the evidence that we have. The appointment of the son of Ali Khamenei, the previous supreme leader, to be the new supreme leader, he still is in hiding.

We don't know exactly what the status of his health is. So how in control is he is a kind of a guessing game on a daily basis. You probably saw the news headline that the Iranian president, Massoud Pazeshian, tendered his resignation yesterday, according to some sources, although it's still not fully verified by the Iranian media, complaining that the Revolutionary Guards had basically taken over all functions of civilian government inside Iran, that he doesn't have any decision, meaningful decision making power whatsoever, and that he would like to have an audience with the supreme leader, which he apparently has only been granted once.

So internally, how are these different factional politics are going to play out is worse off now than when the war first started. There is a total capture of the state by the national security apparatus. There's no question about it.

And they very proudly, publicly boast about this on Iranian media, which they control. And they say this is a state of emergency. Anyone who speaks or questions the aims of our campaign of resilience against the foreign usurpers will be tried for treason.

The head of Iran's judiciary has said this, and he's been, you know, while he's been busy hanging people on the side, you know, purportedly for cooperating with Israel or being spies of Israel and the U.S. inside Iran. So that sense of, I think, panic is something that is from our perspective, because this war did not end so quickly. And Iran seems to hold its, the Iranian government seems to hold its position from outside may seem like, oh, well, they're in charge.

They're entrenching. But there's a lot of fissures inside the Iranian leadership that could blow up at any given moment. And this is not to say anything about the dire state of the Iranian economy.

Iran's currency collapsed in December, which was the trigger behind those protests that ended up in massive crackdowns by the state. Iran's economy is in a far worse position than it was in December, obviously because of the blockage of the blockade that the U.S. had put in place, making sure Iranian shipping of Iranian oil is not taking place. There's no revenue coming in.

They can be sustained by Russia and China in some strategic ways and by ways of intelligence sharing or even, you know, smuggling networks that I've been reading about, you know, from the north around the Caspian Sea region, trying to kind of help and prop the regime. But how much longer can they hold on to this dire economic situation is an open question as well. And I suspect some of that plays into the thinking of the Trump administration that, you know, if they hold out, too, maybe the Iranians will become more incentivized and more desperate over time as well.

Let me leave it there since we had some technical difficulties that ate up into our time. And then I'm happy to, in the back and forth, elaborate more on this. Yes, sir.

I don't think a civil war is going to be the likely event. And for the simple reason, the fact that the Iranian government really does have a monopoly over the coercive apparatus of the state, they can quell and quash very easily a rebellion that does not have, you know, substantial foreign support behind it. And the Iranian people, you know, over the course of the last 47 years have tried a variety of different from like, you know, peaceful protests to violent protests to, you know, mass labor strikes.

And each of them have been met with the brutal force of the regime. I do think as if the state gets more and more desperate economically, and it is more isolated, that one model it could repeat is that of a combination of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a very kind of a brutal crackdowns in rebellious provinces or against particular specific minorities, be that, you know, the Kurdish minority or the Baluchis. And the other side of the combination of basically a kind of a Hezbollah, a provisional system for the supporters of the regime.

And, you know, try to buy time that way enough to pass the legitimacy crisis it's experienced.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Okay. No, I was saying that I was introducing you and about to ask, I mean, this war that has now lasted for several months, how do you see its impact on Israeli public opinion?

Dahlia Scheindlin:
Yeah. Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you for hosting me and for bearing with the technology.

I think that, you know, to explain public opinion, let me give you some of the background. I mean, start from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For him, this is frankly a disaster.

Okay. It is something like his life's project that has not really worked out very well and his back is to the wall on some level because this is the big thing that he had been trying to advance for not just a year or two years, but I mean really his whole political life. It was all around Iran.

And I think that it's very obvious to Israelis or to anybody, frankly, watching what happened that given Netanyahu's stated or implied aims, none of them have been accomplished, right? I mean, he was certainly hinting and making it quite clear that the first aim really was toppling the regime, even though he didn't quite say it explicitly, but he said it in enough, you know, sort of circuitous ways for it to be very clear. But beyond that, what he had been talking about from the beginning of the escalation with Iran in June 2025 and for much longer before that, of course, you know, the main goals of ending Iran's nuclear program, ending the ballistic missiles, ending its support for proxies.

And I think that, you know, it's so clear that none of those have happened that you really can't, you know, you can't really stop the Israeli public from seeing that. The other thing is that as we move, as this has gone on, we see that the kind of deal shaping up, you know, this is being very widely seen as, you know, in this way, as it's filtering into the Israeli, you know, political conversation and through the media is that if there is a new deal under discussion in the rubric of a potential ceasefire, which right now doesn't look so good. I think that the basic, you know, the basic framing that everybody's understanding is that everybody's understanding about it is that it's the same broad equation of the JCPOA, right?

Sanctions relief and financial relief for Iran in return for some sort of limitation, maybe a stronger limitation on its nuclear program, with possibly the hope of some better terms within the nuclear file that could be very significant. But even that emerging deal doesn't touch the issue of ballistic missile, ballistic missile program or the proxies. And so, you know, in those, in those very broad terms, Israelis are very aware that this makes Netanyahu look bad.

It also makes the entire effort of the war look bad. And that kind of gets into even a bigger failure from the Israeli perspective. Again, this is all still a bit of a prelude to public opinion versus this kind of disaster with relation to Iran from Netanyahu's perspective.

Although, of course, he doesn't tell himself that, right? This is a personality that portrays everything as some sort of grand strategy. But the other bigger picture is that, you know, Israelis are internalizing that on every front, or the three major ones of the last two and a half years, they have not been able to achieve their aims.

The Iranian regime, of course, is still there. But Hezbollah, you know, of course, is not only still there, but this is basically re-escalated. And the Israeli public, frankly, wants it to re-escalate because they think the job has not been done there.

But, you know, the bottom line is that right now, you know, the North is, frankly, something like uninhabitable for Israelis. I mean, people are living there and they haven't been evacuated, but life is extremely, extremely disrupted. And, you know, all the promises from late 2024, from the escalation between, you know, August and the ceasefire in late November 2024, you know, turned out to be false.

Needless to say, I think people have finally internalized that the war with Hamas in Gaza has gone nowhere, has not achieved the aim of getting rid of Hamas, and that Israel is still, you know, there. And despite, at the same time, you know, we have very hardline attitudes towards Gaza, but it's, you know, very clear to everybody that this extremely, you know, brutal war on Gaza, frankly, has not achieved the aim of somehow getting rid of Hamas. And so all of those three fronts, which are the three most important ones, do not look good right now.

So all of that, I would say, is the backdrop to how Israelis are seeing it. Now, to get into public opinion a little bit, I think the first thing to realize is that the turnaround in attitudes towards the war with Iran is, frankly, it's a little bit extraordinary. I mean, the turnaround has been very fast from extremely high consensus support at the beginning of the war in every single survey.

I'm not even going to point to one, because they all said the same thing. I should also specify among the Jewish-Israeli population. But right now, we have more recent data showing that society at best is sort of split with around, you know, depending on which question that, you know, you can look at, that maybe 41% who think that Israel will or can still win the war in Iran, all the rest say no, but also a major decline from 60% in March, who said they were, that they were pleased with the achievements of the war, satisfied with the achievements of the war. That's down to 37%. And those are according to the most recent polls or questions from the Institute for National Security Studies, which does tracking on the issue.

A couple more quick data points. 48% think the war in Lebanon has made the country safer, so not even half. Sorry, the opposite.

48% think that the war in Lebanon has made security worse, but just 28% think it's made it better. So it's a 20 point, it's not half think it's worse, but it's 20 points more who say security is worse with relation to the Lebanon war than those who think it's better. And a similar dynamic with Iran, 45% think that that war made security worse, and only 31% say that it's gotten better.

So it's a striking reversal, partly because those aims were not achieved. But also, there's a very strong theme here, that Israel lost its its freedom of action, right? And that the partnership with America, as Rob pointed out, there's a great deal of satisfaction and pride with the incredible level of partnership.

And people see that as a very important strategic advantage in the Middle East. But I think that probably the louder conversation right now is that Israel has lost freedom of action, that it's Trump making the decisions, Netanyahu is not in control, and that the situation itself is tying Israel's hands. So you have to remember that Israelis are dissatisfied with those results, as I pointed out, because they think the wars had not did not complete the job.

And they need to, you know, continue and, you know, unleash all of the power that Israel has in order to do so. So you have great disappointment, but I would not translate that into some sort of desire for peace. It's quite the opposite.

It's a hardline level of disappointment. Having said all of that, I mean, I can't really do this analysis without bringing in the Israeli political dimension, because, you know, just today, the Knesset has been advancing to the first stage of a law that will disband the Knesset and come up with a date for new elections. And so, you know, as previous speakers, I think Rob already said that some of this, or maybe I think it was Rob who already said that, you know, Israel's foreign relations might only improve once, you know, there's a change of leadership.

But the elections are very hard to predict, because despite all of this dissatisfaction that I just mentioned, the polls with relation to elections have been remarkably stagnant. And it's a very murky situation, because Netanyahu and his coalition allies are not able to get a majority of parliamentary seats in any credible survey, really, since the government was established, even before the war. And yet the opposition parties don't have any easy path to a government, because there's a big taboo with Zionist parties forming a coalition with parties representing Arab or Palestinian citizens of Israel.

And so we're looking at a bit of a hamstrung situation right now, unless something radically changes that. But, you know, there will probably still be surprises. But just to impress upon you how stable these surveys have been, I mean, we've gone through, you know, the entire year of 2023, before October 7.

I mean, a terrible crash for government popularity after October 7. But based on the regional escalations, really, in 2024, the government recovered to a kind of ceiling, where it is now, which is not great. And nothing has changed those that basic breakdown, whereby the government's parties, the coalition parties, are not able to win a majority in surveys, including, you know, decapitating, you know, Hezbollah, and, you know, the Supreme Leader and the wars with Iran, which in the earlier stages were considered somehow, you know, something like victories.

So the political situation is very stagnant. And then, you know, to get into the final question of, you know, where is all this going for Israel's policy? For one thing, we don't know if there will be an alternate, you know, change of government.

If there is, they've given no indication of significant differences of policy, mostly because either they don't want to reveal their positions, or frankly, I think a lot of the political opposition leaders are not really big thinkers about policy and haven't truly developed their idea other than to say they would do what Netanyahu is doing, but better, without the constraints of his, you know, domestic political considerations. And I think that, you know, the only way I can characterize Israeli policy right now in terms of bigger Middle East is, you know, sheer force.

There is no role for diplomacy right now. I mean, we can talk briefly if we want to about the negotiation attempt with Lebanon, which is a breakthrough on some level, just the fact that it's happening. But really, under this government, there is no world for diplomacy.

I, you know, I think that there is a habit of assuming that the weaker Israel's neighbors, the weaker the states around it, somehow the stronger Israel will be, and the better that will be for Israel, which I disagree with. I wrote an article about it in New Line's magazine recently. And I also think there's an impression that if you just, you know, strike the top, and then we hear this a lot, kill the successors and the successors of the successors, and all the way down the line, that somehow that will, you know, maintain this, you know, military superiority, which is supposed to be enough somehow in the long term.

And I think we're already seeing people questioning how sustainable that really is. So I probably went over time, but I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
No, thank you very much. Do you hear me? So I'm going to ask you now, I'm going to turn to Lisa Anderson.

And Lisa has been the Dean of SIPA, has been the President of the American University in Cairo. She has been watching Arab states for throughout her professional life. And so I want to ask her, what's the impact of this war with no end in sight?

Is there more fragmentation? We heard from Hussein Banai on Iran, it's a rather bleak picture. But we see a bleak picture on the Israeli side.

On the Arab side, what's going to happen?

Lisa Anderson:
Thank you very much. I am not going to bring glad tidings. So it's bleak all the way across.

And once again, let me thank the program for inviting me and including me in this distinguished group. The Arab world has, from the perspective of the United States and Europe, for decades and decades, sort of they've been trying to find a cleavage of sort of the good guys and the bad guys. So, you know, during the 1980s into the 90s, there were the radicals and the moderates.

And nobody really, neither of those labels had any substance. But the moderates were the people that the United States could deal with and the radicals were the ones they couldn't. And, you know, it was never clear what the dimension on which these regimes were arrayed, but we tried to think that way.

Then, you know, starting turn of the century, a little bit before 9-11, a little bit after 9-11, we were basically, again, this is mostly American, but you know, the Europeans played along for reasons that are obvious. There were the democratizing countries after the end of the Cold War, and we liked them. And so we labeled, for example, Mubarak as a democratizer in Egypt, even though he was, we had to admit, going very slowly against the radical terrorists who were trying to undermine democracy and undermine, so forth and so on.

So for a while, that was the way the regime, the regimes were arrayed from the perspective of Washington and Brussels. After the uprisings of 2011, and thereafter, that sort of began to come apart, and it wasn't clear how the United States, the Europeans would identify friends and enemies, and so forth. But one of the great merits from the perspective of Washington of the Abraham Accords is that it sort of gave us a pile of countries that we liked, and expected other countries to join in.

So interestingly, you had the Abraham Accord countries, which as you know, was Israel, particularly, but other countries provided a sort of facade of it being more than those two. And then the alternative was sort of who is not joining, and why are they not joining? And that was clearly countries that were being undermined by Iraq, in some way, or groups that so you had the sort of, the bad guys were Iran and Iran proxies, and the good guys were the Abraham Accord countries.

And so that seemed fairly stable. In fact, that's not the way the region looks from the region itself at all. So how does, how do people who are living in Cairo, for example, see the world?

They're seeing something that and I recommend for those of you who are actually interested in anywhere, but particularly in Arab or read popular fiction, there is a theme that's now 20-25 years old, of this horrible dystopian world, in which the wealthy live in gated communities, garrisons, and the poor are impoverished and outside. It's not about the countries. It's not about the governments, even.

It's really this sense that there's a deep, deep inequality across the region. And some people are beneficiaries, and most people aren't. So then you think, how does that track on the kinds of what we see as the interstate conflicts?

Keep in mind that a lot of this is not about interstate conflicts, it may be about intrastate conflicts, some of the things that we saw during the uprisings of 2011. But you have garrison states that are incredibly high tech. So you see the UAE is an example, just an extraordinary capacity to monitor, to surveil, to make life convenient, to make it comfortable.

And in some ways, Israel is like that. Similarly, a garrison state for the beneficiaries of the state, comfortable, high tech, very fancy. So you can see the common interests of the rulers of states like that, why they would see themselves having interests against other regimes.

And there's almost a video game fantasy quality to this. And in fact, keep in mind that many, many of the rulers that we, you all are going to be dealing with that we all deal with these days are gamers. So they're seeing the world in a way that those of us who live in real life don't necessarily see the world.

But this is, you know, the way this ends up in real life is the fancy exploding cell phones that the Israelis were able to deploy, incredibly technologically sophisticated, and it left a lot of Lebanese missing fingers. But hey, you know, they were carrying the cell phones, so it's their problem. And similarly, there are all sorts of the capacity to assassinate people into other countries and so forth and so on.

The targeting, the really remarkable, you know, technical abilities, these kinds of efforts are reminiscent of the kinds of things that people who are gamers want to be able to do and sort of begin to think are possible and valuable and you're going to get points for them. So in a way, we're operating a little bit within these garrison states in a fantasy world. But of course, it has real life implications for everybody who's not in those little states.

What does this mean for the current conflict, or the run up to the current conflict? Iran ends up being, much as there are many, much skepticism about the regime, it is the champion of the oppressed. And it's going to stay the champion of the oppressed, as long as the region sees itself divided in this kind of way, that there are the beneficiaries, the wealthy, the protected in the gated communities who can helicopter from the airport to their gated community and never actually set foot in the country in which they are ostensibly citizens.

And the people who don't have that capacity are resentful and angry and feel abandoned. And so there's not, and Iran has played into that for decades now, really. The rhetoric, the proxy, the rhetoric of the proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, these are the champions of the oppressed.

These are the people who are representing and arguing on behalf of people who don't have all of those kinds of access and benefits and so forth. So what we see is the mapping of interstate conflict in a region where state borders are actually pretty porous, people are moving around a fair lot. They can see what the lucky people have.

They can see that they themselves are not part of that. So there's, and they are obviously across the region, politically disenfranchised, not as if they can vote their governments out. And so there is a layering on top of enormous alienation, dissatisfaction, unhappiness on the part of ordinary people.

So this is something that all of the governments in the Arab world are very sensitive to. Now, I've spent a fair amount of my adult life in Egypt, and boy is the Egyptian government that the beneficiaries of the garrison state that Sisi has built in the last decade is a tiny, tiny minority of the 120 million Egyptians. So they have to try and navigate through the fact that much of their foreign aid, most of their military aid is coming from the United States and the United Arab Republic.

So they can't alienate those. On the other hand, the vast majority of Egyptians don't have any reason to support that government. So they have to be careful to stay under the wing of their external beneficiaries or patrons, they are the beneficiaries of the patrons, without seeming to abandon their.

Now, for Israel and for the UAE, there's not much debate, as Dahlia has pointed out, about the government policy. It may not have been prosecuted satisfactorily. But the idea that Israelis are living in a garrison state is something that they've felt for decades.

So this is not new. But they're all inside. And the Emiratis have such a small population, that they too can pretty much have everybody inside the garrison state.

You can't do that in Egypt. You can't do that in Lebanon. You can't do that in Syria.

You can't do that in Iraq. You can't do that anywhere. And as it turns out, you can't even do it in Saudi Arabia, which is one of the reasons why the gamer who is making policy in Saudi Arabia is beginning to pull back from some of the fantasy investments that Vision 2030 was supposed to produce, and is refusing to entertain serious discussions about joining the Abraham Accords, because he's got 20 million people who are not necessarily going to be enthused about that prospect. So as we think about particular governments negotiating positions and how they see their relationships with each other, keep in mind that even these autocrats have domestic populations. And they have to think about the fact that people in the region have now for decades begun to feel that their governments were not only not paying attention to them, but actually immiserating them.

And that complicates any negotiating position of any of these governments. So with that, I'm perfectly happy to have us discuss particular dyads of negotiation and how governments are going to think about what kinds of things they can do. But believe me, the Palestinians across, you know, in Gaza, and the West Bank, and the Lebanese, and much of southwestern Syria are feeling really, really belittled.

And who is championing them, but the Iranian government. So it's not pretty, but I'll stop there.

[Speaker 12]
Thank you very much.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Okay. So well, when I listen to all the speakers, it's a pretty bleak picture of the of the region. We see an Iran that is on the verge of not collapse, but it's a security state is trying to keep control, but barely, but can barely do it.

We just heard from Lisa Anderson, this immense divide between those who can live in gated communities, the tiny minority, who can benefit from an efficient security state, and then the masses, who are just objects. And we heard from Rob Malley that there isn't really, we don't clearly see an American strategy for the future. And I get a feeling listening to all of you that the situation is really the people in the region rather than external powers that will make a difference.

The external powers, they complicate things more than they help. And the bleakest maybe was Dahlia Shaheen, because she said, on the one hand, that there was a great dissatisfaction with the policies presently pursued. But at the same time, there was not an emerging alternative, essentially.

So in a way, I have a question for the whole panel on when you put together all these bleak statements, what is the most likely, if you had to describe the region five years from now, what would you think is the most likely description? And if you had to recommend policies for countries which are not in the region, what would you recommend? Is there anything that would make sense that would help a bit get out of the present morass and tragic morass in which the region is? Yes, Rob, you start?

Robert Malley:
Sure, very briefly. I think listening to everyone who just underscores a point, which is, this is a war, again, that should never have been waged and from which everyone will emerge a loser.

I mean, I think it's pretty clear from what Dahlia said and what everyone said, that there's going to be no victor coming out of this war. At some level, Iran, relatively speaking, may seem in a stronger position, but I think we heard very clearly that it has, economic crisis has been compounded by the war and I have no clue how they're going to be able to address the needs of their people. So that's, you know, just to add to the bleakness that this is a war from which no matter what the outcome is, I don't see how anyone comes out in a strong and sustainable position.

Now, what that means in terms of your question, I'm not going to project five years. I mean, you know, we could all add up to the pessimism of this panel by adding to things that could happen in the West Bank and in Gaza and Lebanon that could all trend in a negative direction. I'd say it's a very plastic moment.

I mean, it really is a moment where so much is up for grabs in terms of, you know, the future of the region, the future of U.S. relations with Israel, the future of American thinking about the Middle East. What Donna said was extremely compelling about the state of Israeli public opinion. At some point, does it occur to the Israeli public that if this is failed, doubling down is not going to succeed and they need to think of a different diplomatic way forward?

I'll leave it to her. So a lot can happen. I think that's the core lesson is that there's going to be pretty dramatic transformations.

And you ask what outside countries could do. You know, right now, many of them have little leverage, but the leverage they have, I think they need to exercise with real in a principled way. And we that has really been lacking, in particular, from from a number of European countries that have taken a position of I mean, they brought double standards to in some ways to new heights in terms of how they judge situations and the use of force and violations of international law.

I think at a minimum, they should be consistent in their principles. And then, you know, I do think that a number of countries in the region have leverage if they could exercise it. And this is been equally bleak in her assessment of our politics.

But to the extent that in particular Gulf countries want to use their leverage, they have leverage with the U.S., they have leverage with Israel to the extent that you might have an Israeli government that's interested in normalization. And again, I think they should use it in a more principled way in terms of what political outcomes are looking for Palestinians and for the region at large. So don't have either a recipe or prescription.

But I think that the lesson from what we heard is how much everything right now is up for grabs, which which means handling it with care, but well could could lead to different outcomes in the future.

Hussein Banai:
So I'll say something. I'll make the picture bleaker for a second, and then hopefully there will be some rainbow at the end of it. I think from the start of this conflict, I mean, a lot of us who watch the Middle East closely and as a longtime observer of U.S.-Iran relations and Iran's issues in the region more generally, I think what has made this particular conflict especially bleak has a single independent variable to use a social scientific term. And that is the current occupant in the White House. I mean, I'll be far less polite than Rob has been here. I do think that we have to look at this conflict as not just a kind of another, you know, a regional, a very difficult regional problem to solve.

The Middle East always has, you know, issues and, you know, no shortage of knots to undo. But there has been a particular injection of American power, a particular incoherence, to my mind, a very focused set of interests that diverge from the traditional American national security interests of the United States. We have to talk about the fact that the kind of garrison state that Professor Anderson, I think, very nicely laid out is a major policy objective of this White House to fortify around the world.

I mean, that entire global order has been, I mean, you've heard this term over and over again, you know, the liberal international order is crumbling before our very eyes. Alliances have been tested. International law, norms, rules, none of them matter anymore.

Well, there's been a very particularly, I think, destructive wrecking ball trying to, you know, hasten the end of what, you know, semblance of order there was. And so if we're to be positive in five years from now, to answer your question, or where we might go, I think just as American domestic politics was a major ingredient in this conflict in terms of the outbreak of the war in the manner that it did. Multiple American presidents, multiple advisors to American presidents have come out and said, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu used to come up to us ritually asking for an attack against Iran in the manner that it happened.

And each administration said no, except this one. And this one also made a point from day one, you know, the first president the foreign travel of this president was to Riyadh. It was not to Ottawa.

It was not to London. It was to go see Mohammed bin Salman to, you know, as in many respects, as a kind of sign of approval of the tribute system that he prefers for management of international relations. And not the kind of traditional alliance structure, you know, complaining about the Europeans and traditional allies, not even framing US Israel relationship in terms of a special relationship anymore, but in very openly transactional ways of, you know, what's good for the president or the White House at any given moment.

So if we're looking five years ahead, what might abate this picture and improve it? Well, improvement in the most in the composition of the most powerful superpower that has started this conflict is where we can look to and that's elections, you know, this fall and then in 2028. But I really do think we have seen the consequences of, you know, what a different temperament, what a different set of ideas of American national interest would do to a region that already is embroiled in multiple crises.

You know, at the time when this conflict started, a good mentor of mine who just happens to be living, lost his home almost in the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, he said, you know, I had this image of, you know, these firefighting planes that dump water from the ocean to try to combat the fires in our hills. Similarly, when it comes to Iran, except that the plane is filled with gasoline. And that's what I feel like the Trump administration did.

It went over a region not to put out fires, but to pour gasoline from above and all in terms of the interest that it has of the kind of the, you know, post fire or the chaos, the politics of chaos in terms of how it would benefit it in the short term. So I think for me, the thing that I'm watching very closely for the first time is not what happens in Iran. The mystery, as I've been saying over and over again in articles and interviews, is for the first time not in Tehran, but it's in Washington.

There has been a creeping regime change taking place. And this is fundamentally at odds with what the bipartisan American approach to the Middle East has been for a very long time. And I think we have to really take a look at that critically.

And if we're looking for changes, I would start there. Dahlia, that's you.

Dahlia Scheindlin:
Oh, yeah. Great. Okay.

Sorry. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, I had the benefit of, you know, a few extra minutes while my colleagues were talking to think of things. And guess what? I didn't think of anything that is rocket science.

Most of it is wishful thinking. But if we're talking about what should be in the next five years that could ameliorate stuff, let me just start with five items. One, diplomacy to end the current war in Iran.

It is a huge wishful thinking. Nobody needs to me to tell them that. But I think that, you know, if there is even something like, you know, a deal that, despite the critiques that I just put out there, at least from the perspective of Israelis, I personally was supporter of the JCPOA.

So I didn't think that was so bad. And given how bad the strategic situation is, some sort of deal along the lines that we heard over the last couple of weeks is probably the best you can do. We have some of the top Iran analysts here in Israel even saying so.

But I think the second point is to realize that we are there, you know, there are three active fronts going on right now. It's the US-Israel-Iran, it's Israel and Hezbollah, and it's Gaza, right? Israel and Gaza, or frankly, the Americans are so deeply involved, you can almost call it an American-Israeli war against Gaza as well, which really is nothing, nothing like a ceasefire right now.

And I can't emphasize enough that this is another escalation war that, well, it never stopped, and it's waiting to happen again. There is, you know, a completely chaotic structure that is not taking shape, trying to implement a UN Resolution 2803. But the point is, these are three different fronts, and they are linked.

And, you know, as much as Israel has tried so desperately to de-link fronts over the course of the last two and a half years, it has failed. And maybe there's just no point in trying to de-link them anymore. I think, honestly, you know, we're hearing commentators even today talking about Israel's most recent escalation and the Prime Minister's statement today about, you know, striking Dahiya.

It's all, you know, an attempt to kind of de-link the fronts. And for anybody who didn't see the recent update, Iran is now relinking them by saying, we are not going to continue the negotiations until Israel, you know, de-escalates with Lebanon and Gaza. So they are linked.

And so in my wish list, the second point is that we look at this big picture, go with the reality that they are linked and try to get to a diplomatic resolution on all of them. But of course, the third point is that the Israel-Palestine file is its own special file. And there's a reason to try to, you know, really never give up on reaching some sort of an agreement there, because it fuels all the other ones.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Israel-Palestine is the cause of everything that's wrong in the Middle East. I think that is a, you know, grossly misleading and, you know, poor reading of reality. But it's certainly, you know, it adds a lot.

It's another one of those planes dumping fuel and, you know, great mobilizing force for, you know, the Iran axis and for a lot of destabilization. Now, that's why I think that no matter how, you know, it may sound like a dinosaur kind of thing to say, but there is no getting out of trying to resolve it. It can only be resolved, you know, the idea of a resolution will have to involve Palestinian self-determination in an independent state.

You know, if I had my way, it would be two states in a confederated arrangement along the lines of the movement, A Land for All. But that's only because I think that is the most realistic, pragmatic and fair approach, which is my version of resolution. Number four, I think that none of that will happen without serious, you know, triple front leverage, right?

The U.S., Arab Gulf states and the European Union, hopefully. Like, I just think if they can coordinate all their policies together and push for this, that's the only way that the parties will move. Israel is not going to voluntarily do any of, you know, assent to any of the things that I just mentioned.

And finally, I think that going back to something that has come up a couple of times now, you know, Israel needs to be de-exceptionalized in general, in the world, the sense that it is something radically different from everything else out there is no good for understandings of the conflict, but it's also not good for the U.S.-Israel relationship anymore. I think that, you know, Chris Van Hollen made this very clear in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, saying it's time to start treating Israel like other countries. And that is the only thing I think that will eventually help, you know, improve the relationship between Israel and the U.S. I don't think a change of government here is going to be enough. That's what I hear from every diplomat I speak to. It's not just about getting rid of Netanyahu. It's changing policy.

And by that logic, you know, Netanyahu was not the source of everything wrong right now. Yes, the Iran thing is mostly his, but I just would urge anybody who really, you know, is trying to advance de-escalation in this region not to be fooled if Netanyahu ever does go, which I would not take that for granted, but if he ever does go, you can't be lulled into a sense that suddenly everything will get better. If those first four things don't happen, I don't think anything will get better.

I know those sound like pie in the sky, but that's all I've got.

[Speaker 8]
Thank you.

Lisa Anderson:
Thank you very much, Daya, and Rob as well. I don't have any clever solution to all of this, except to say, I think the sort of immiseration of the region has been going on for decades. This is not a Trump thing.

It's not a Netanyahu thing. The assumption that we could turn away and not pay attention to the deleterious consequences of policy was longstanding, wrong from the beginning, but here we are. So, yes, I think the Trump administration has certainly accelerated that, made it somewhat more visible.

The idea that Gaza was going to be turned into Riviera and so forth and so on, clearly not reality testing, but honestly, the prospect that all of the people who are running any of these countries right now were to disappear tomorrow, appealing as it is, as a prospect, doesn't address what needs to happen next. So I do think that a real, you know, why was it that for so many decades, everybody averted their eyes? The Italians decided, I just got back from Libya, and so I have it on my mind.

The Italians decided that the solution to Libya was to pay off the Coast Guard in Libya so there'd be no migrants. That's not a solution to the problem. So over and over and over again, whether it's the Europeans together or singly, whether it's the United States, whether it's the governments in the region, everybody has decided that they're going to be able to kick this can down another decade or so, and somebody else will have that problem.

You know, the destruction of USAID is going to be contributing to further accelerating immiseration, but it's not where it started. USAID was a sort of band-aid most of the time anyway. We weren't really addressing these kinds of problems.

So in my view, I think we could think somewhat more structurally about why it is that these kinds of governments have been able to get in power and stay there for such a long time without actually doing anything we would describe as serving their citizens. But I'm not optimistic that, you know, the successor to Trump is going to be able to roll this back, and I'm not even sure I want it rolled back. It wasn't so great before, if I can say that.

And I don't, and I completely agree with Dahlia that I don't think that a successor to Netanyahu is going to be substantially different. I don't think a different regime in Iran is going to be substantially different at this point. You may get a sort of building socialism in one country, but that's about it.

So to try and figure out ways to think about international politics and the Middle East in particular, without being tied to the hope that somebody is going to appear and change everything, I think would be worthwhile. It's just hard to imagine how we would do that.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you very much. I think we are, I mean, if the panelists can stay, we should have a few minutes for questions. But since we will fix that technical glitch, but for the moment, it's not fixed.

So I would suggest that anybody who wants to ask a question comes to the podium. Yes. So get in line there and get to the podium.

Let's see if that microphone works.

[Speaker 8]
I don't know if you can hear me.

Robert Malley:
Yes, if you stay as close to the mic as possible.

[Speaker 6]
Okay. Got it. Right.

So my name is Kevin. I'm with the Mission of Kenya. And thank you to all the panelists for their insight, for their experience.

And it's clearly carrying too. I have two quick questions and we are short of time. And so we've heard from Robert and I think some of the other panelists as well, the challenge of there not being a clear end game for the United States in the context of the Iran conflict.

But I'd also be grateful to hear something on the possible end game for Israel. So what is the goal for Israel in this context? Is it just ending the nuclear program?

Is it ending support for the proxies or complete regime change? And in the case of regime change, what follows that? So you've got some data of the Islamic Republic, the IRGC structure, and what happens?

Do you install no rates of alavi? What follows that? And then my second question, and I'm very grateful, Dahlia, that you mentioned Al-Anfal, because part of the preparation for this program was looking at the manifesto, the brochure of black.

And it posits basically that there is a precedence for solutions to what appear to be intractable conflict, Ireland and Bosnia and other places. But it also points out that the solution in those cases has been reached on the basis of a parity of esteem, right? So parity of esteem, which means that the parties kind of regard each other as equals, right?

You sit across the table and you can actually have a conversation. Does that exist? And I'd be grateful to hear from Robert specifically on this, and of course, the other panelists.

But does that exist in the Middle East? And specifically between Israel and the other parties in the conflict? And again, between Israel and Palestine, right?

Because if that's the basis for a two-state solution, does that exist in this case? Is there a possibility? Thank you.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you. Let's collect a few questions and then the panelists.

[Speaker 7]
Thank you very much to the panelists for this very interesting discussion. As it was said, domestic public opinions play a key role in conflict dynamics. And in this one in Portugal, I'll have a question about the Israeli domestic public opinion.

As we heard, recent developments have led to some changes in the public opinion. Yet when you look at the polls for the upcoming elections, the party of Prime Minister Netanyahu still leads the race. And the opposition, let's say that would be led by the newly established party between Bennett and Lapid, is made of political figures which have not really strongly spoken against Netanyahu's foreign policy choices.

So is it that those changes that you mentioned caused by what you qualified as some favors are not as strong as we might think? Or is it just that they have not yet translated into the political order? Thank you.

Dahlia Scheindlin:
Could somebody repeat the last part of the question? Because something hasn't translated yet into political change, but I couldn't quite make out the last part.

[Speaker 7]
Yes, into the translated into the political order in Israel, like the changes you mentioned of the... Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 9]
Thank you. My name is Rustem. I'm with the mission of Kazakhstan.

First of all, I would like to thank you, thank all the panelists for very insightful discussion. I have three questions. The first one is to Mr. Hussain Banai. As you know, as Kazakhstan, we share the Caspian region with Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan as well. Could you please elaborate on the nature and scale of alleged Russian and Chinese support to Iran via Caspian? And two other questions to the all panelists.

So the second question is the future of peacekeeping in the Middle East. So as we know, the mandate of UNIFIL, the most largest peacekeeping mission in the Middle East, will end this year. So my question is, will there will be any international or UN presence after UNIFIL?

If yes, so how will this look like? And the third one is, how do you assess the prospects of the World of Peace becoming an effective mechanism for conflict resolution in the Gaza? Thank you.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you. So we have two, three, six questions, I think. Oh, there's another one.

[Speaker 10]
Thank you. I'm sorry. Just just a quick question.

First of all, okay, Metin Esen from the Turkish mission to the United Nations. First of all, I would like to thank the panelists for this comprehensive presentation. I'm going to ask just a quick question.

Actually, as a diplomat who worked in Iraq between 2022 and 2024, I had the opportunity to follow up the recent issues in the Middle East. Actually, you know, there are lots of dimensions of the conflict, but I'm not planning to go into details here. At the end of today, I can say that unfortunately, comprehensive and sustainable peace in the Middle East doesn't appear to be on the immediate horizon, as you all know.

And I mean, international community has failed to bring peace to the region, despite many mechanisms. So my question is that, do you believe existing diplomatic mechanisms are still capable of preventing escalation? Or does the region require a fundamental new framework for regional dialogue and de-confliction?

Thank you very much.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you. So some questions were addressed to specific panelists, like some to Darya Shaini. Maybe you want to start with the question that were addressed to you.

Dahlia Scheindlin:
Okay, I'll try to do that quickly to leave time for my colleagues. So in terms of Israel's endgame, of course, Israel's wish list is to end Iran's nuclear program, not just push it back, not just defer it, dismantle or destroy all the facilities, get all the enriched uranium out, get all the uranium, I mean, you know, even the low grade. I mean, that's the wish list.

And of course, deal with the ballistic missile program, somehow end that program, stop Iran's support for proxies or what we call proxies, not the best term. And yes, ideally, Netanyahu would like regime change. But I think that's much more Netanyahu's thing.

More people are skeptical of it. And I think that there is no plan for what comes next, you know, some, I mean, we've read about all these really, frankly, shocking plans, whether it was, you know, a few months earlier this year, the idea that, you know, the Pahlavi dynasty is going to, is going to come back or Kurdish forces or Ahmadinejad, but that's just evidence that there is no really good plan. Quickly, the question on parity of esteem.

Yeah, I mean, the program of A Land for All and you know, I think my understanding of a confederation is that it has to start with the idea that the two sides are equal as nations. In addition to working towards individual equality of everybody in the region of Israel and Palestine, you have to understand that both nations have equal rights of self-determination, equal rights to the land and how it gets shared in terms of sovereignty is, you know, the nature of that confederated arrangement. You said, can that happen?

Well, it's a, I mean, it would have to be a very, very radical, bold, forward-thinking, leadership-driven decision because the publics are not there right now, certainly not the Israeli public. Now, just to contrast that, remember we have a long history of Israeli and American policy whereby Israel exists based on its qualitative military edge in the entire Middle East. So that is considered a completely normal aim for Israel to have total military superiority.

It would be an, you know, a total transition for Israel to think of itself in any way as, you know, in a relationship of parity, certainly with Palestinians. So yeah, it is very, you know, far-reaching. In terms of public opinion, I think the question was why the dissatisfaction with many areas of life, by the way, not only, you know, the poor results on these three front, the three front wars, but in many areas of domestic policy, the majority is against Netanyahu.

And the reason why it really hasn't translated, I think, politically is because of the coalition-building system. You know, I think partly, I mean, for one thing, Netanyahu has a very, very strong, committed core group of supporters who want him as prime minister, and that is 40 to 45 percent of the population. So it's not just his party, it's the people who prefer that he be prime minister who will vote for any of his parties.

And they are, you know, if they've stuck with him through everything now, it will be hard to move them. But then everybody else is the majority, just that they have a coalition-building problem that prevents them from having a horizon. I can't get to everything, but peacekeeping in the Middle East, UNIFIL ending, I don't know if there will be something to replace UNIFIL, but let's just say, look at what's going on with the international stabilization force that's supposed to be part of the ceasefire deal with Gaza.

Very slow, painful going, if at all. We have some countries that have committed supposedly to troops, nothing is in place yet, which, you know, if you look at that from the bottom up, makes the Board of Peace look like a sham. They can't, they haven't raised their money, you know, they can't manage to get this international stabilization force, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is stuck in Cairo, unable to do much.

So it looks like that plan is frankly in shambles. It's basically laying the groundwork for the next war, if you ask me. At this point, if it could have worked, I would have been happy, I mean, for something to develop on that.

And in terms of peacekeeping in the region, yeah, I think it kind of what you mentioned about moving to a regional structure seems to somehow glom on or sort of, you know, correspond to what I was saying about the fact that these fronts are linked. And, you know, it would be nice if we could just de-link all the files and solve them one by one, but that doesn't seem to be working at all. And so I have no problem with greater cooperation, greater partnership in the region and with global actors, if they're really you know, willing to use their leverage.

I think it's not a bad approach. Really, anything that works is fine with me. I wish I was, I mean, I'm not making the decisions, but I'll stop there.

Thank you for great questions.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Rob, do you want to add something?

Robert Malley:
Yes, I'll make, I'll try to answer, group up the questions. And unfortunately, I have to leave almost immediately after that. First, you know, I want to, I want to footstomp something that Lisa said, but also I think Dahlia said, and however much I agree with you saying that Trump is a sort of a novelty in all of this, who's made things worse.

I mean, it's not, this is not just about Trump. It's not just about Netanyahu. These are longstanding issues.

I'm not saying this was the inevitable conclusion, but in some ways, it is the product of decades of policy that relied on over militarization, polarization of the region, use of sanctions, letting problems fester rather than resolve them through the belief that more pressure and more sanctions would get, would produce the desired outcomes. I think that's been proven wrong and wrong again, and including, I must say, administrations that I served. So I think there's a much broader rethink that's necessary.

And it's not going to simply happen because Trump disappears or because Netanyahu goes. Second point on Israel-Palestine and the question of parity, of course, and I think again, Dahlia made the point, these are not two equal parties and the asymmetry of power is such that if you just leave it to them to resolve their problems, it makes perfect sense for Israel to do what it's doing. It may be strategically unsound, morally and ethically reprehensible, but it makes sense from an Israeli political point of view that they would not make concessions to Palestinians when they have no incentive and no pressure.

They're not paying any price for the perpetuation of the status quo, which is why you're going to need the kind of changes that Dahlia mentioned in terms of the pressure and the incentive structure. Otherwise, yes, this asymmetry, this lack of parity is going to stand in the way of any resolution, which of course brings me to the Board of Peace. And for that, I say that my only wish for the Board of Peace is that it rest in because it really is the embodiment of precisely the kind of asymmetry that we're talking about, but made sort of anointed internationally in which the Palestinians have to prove their worthiness to acquire the right to self-determination, in which the Palestinian have to atone for the massacres they committed on October 7th, but Israel doesn't have to atone for anything of the slaughter that it committed in its aftermath. And if that's the logic, in other words, the logic is you take the asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians, and you compound it by the fact that the party that's going to come mediate, in this case, the United States, is going to side entirely with the stronger party of the two.

That is certainly not a recipe for resolution. It's going to take some of the changes, again, that Dahlia mentioned. I'm not particularly hopeful, but at a minimum, let's give up on the, or let's abandon the fantasy, the illusion that some people may have held at the outset that, you know, at least the peace is going to try to do something, what it's done in this, in everything we've seen so far, is just make matters worse, and just either lay the seeds for the next explosion, or plant the seeds for the continued initiation, and even worse, of the people of Gaza. Unfortunately, I have to end there.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno:
Thank you very much for your participation. Thank you, Hussein.

Hussein Banai:
Thank you. Thank you, Rob and Dahlia, for your comments. I just want to clarify one thing about my apparently not helpful attempt at injecting a ray of sunlight into Prognostic for the next five years or so.

I was specifically talking about Trump's relationship to this war. I think a lot of the structural problems that existed, whether it's Israel-Palestine, whether it's Iran's regional proxies, or whether it's the militarization of U.S. policy, sanctions regime, etc., all of those things are absolutely longstanding. But with respect to the genesis of this war, it's the manner in which it's being prosecuted, and the manner in which it is, I think, really failing to be resolved, the obstacle you cannot look and say, we do not have diplomatic blueprints that have worked in the past, even with the most hardened of enemies.

It's very clear that there is a qualitative difference with this White House and other administrations. And the question of the war with Iran, why did it happen in this timeline that it happened? Why it is that this Iranian leadership has found it so confounding that the U.S. political system has not been able to deal with them in the way that it has in the past? I think the Trump administration really is an outlier compared to other administrations. Now, all the other things are the fires that were burning before the Trump plane dumped the gasoline on top of it, and they're there. And I'm not going to at all pretend that it's going to go away when Trump goes away, or if Netanyahu goes away.

And I certainly don't want to give the impression that Netanyahu is the one that got Trump into this war. I think there is a sui generis characteristic with this president, and the Iran nuclear file, that probably goes back to his contempt for Barack Obama's deal, and the way in which he characterized it in 2016, and then held on to it, and then added more and more layers to it. I mean, it got fantastical to such a degree that he even alleged members of the, I wish Rob was still here, the Obama-Biden administration hand-delivered pallets of cash to the Iranians on the tarmac.

I mean, when you construct such a fantastically false narrative about a major diplomatic landmark, and then try to devise policy to prove, and really will it into being the thing that never was, I think that says something qualitatively different about this White House and this president than what we've seen before, that we have to really account for it. I think there will be a qualitative change if he is gone. But all the other issues, obviously, have longstanding structural problems linked to them.

I'll very quickly address the question of regime change in Iran, and whether there is a viable alternative to the Islamic Republic. I think we have gotten a very good answer to this over the course of the last three months or so. The Iranian opposition, a substantial part of which that had invested its hopes into the figure of Reza Pahlavi, the Crown Prince of Iran, has demonstrated that it has neither the support, nor really, frankly, sorry, the foreign support from the United States government, nor really at all significant support by the Iranian population to take over.

Even this Trump White House that was so eager for regime change, at least in the first week and a half of this war, when the headlines were writing themselves for them, repeatedly refused to meet with the Crown Prince, and to give him a legitimacy that they thought the intelligence reporting was suggesting that he did not have inside Iran. Since then, if anyone here who might follow the Iranian diaspora politics, there has been massive fissures, huge infighting. It's never been more fragmented than before.

I don't see a viable alternative in Reza Pahlavi or any other group in the interim. On top of this, I have to say there is now emerging a counter narrative by people who supported regime change to say, well, this government really has demonstrated resilience at a level we've seen before. They are standing up to forces that many of them believe are conspiring to break up Iran into multiple nations.

I hear this over and over again from people who just mere months ago were carrying an alternative flag and saying, Reza Shah, come back to Iran, now saying that this government actually is demonstrating that they can defend the national interest better than anyone else. For the moment, we're just going to at least not say negative things about it. That's astonishing.

It's one of those bewildering things that I follow on a daily basis. On the question that was posed about Iran getting help from China and Russia through the Caspian region, I think Dahlia needs to go. Good to see you, Dahlia.

I'm just going to broadcast everyone. It was a pleasure to be on the panel with you. The cooperation between Russia and Iran, let me address that first, has been very clearly coordinated at the intelligence gathering level.

I think Iranians openly, Iranian generals have talked about how they got a lot of targeting information from the Russians in terms of where to hit when they were under bombardment. After the first two weeks of the conflict, Russia really increased its intelligence support to the Iranians.

[Speaker 11]
We are scheduled for a break and then a follow-up discussion. Lunch will not be ready until one. Why don't we take a 15-minute break and stretch, and then we'll have a half an hour discussion amongst ourselves about what we just heard.

Thank you so much to all the panelists for staying so long. I'm so sorry about all the technical problems we had, but the discussion was fascinating. Thank you.

Let's take a 15-minute break. Thank you.