Michael Doran argues America’s Middle East policy should prioritize countering Iran—its $100B+ proxy network (Hezbollah, Hamas) and regional dominance—over domestic culture wars framing Israel. Post-October 7th, he faults Biden’s mediation for ceding advantage to Tehran, exposing intelligence failures and overestimating high-tech deterrence while underrating traditional warfare. Doran rejects constraints on Israel’s strikes, calling them counterproductive, and dismisses the two-state solution as unrealistic with Abu Mazen’s refusal to negotiate. Without U.S. backing, Israel won’t risk direct war with Iran, leaving America vulnerable to China’s Middle East ambitions. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Michael Duran, a Middle East expert from the Hudson Institute.
I was recently listening to an interview with an Israeli journalist named Haviv Reddy Gur on Barry Weiss's Honestly program, and she asked him what he thought of American foreign policy as an Israeli.
And he said, America doesn't have a foreign policy.
It simply has a culture war, and they use their foreign policy as part of that culture war.
And it has no sense of realism or continuity.
All they ever do is call up the Israelis and say, oh, you know, Obama's in power now.
He's not going to be like the last guy where Trump's in power and he's not going to be like Obama.
And that's all they do is basically establish their culture war credentials.
So that is why I wanted to talk to Mike Duran.
He is not just an expert on the Middle East.
He has always had a uniquely realistic take on the Middle East, very down-to-earth.
As he once said to me, the idea of foreign policy is to hurt your enemies and help your friends, which I think is something that we actually do forget here.
So I'm hoping he's going to explain what's going on now.
He is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute and co-host of the Israel Update podcast.
So he is here for an Israel update.
Mike, it's good to see you.
How are you doing?
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
No, it's great to have you on.
So let's start, obviously, with October 7th.
This totally vicious attack unfolds.
People raped to death, children killed, unbelievable.
And on our universities, students pile out into the street to protest the Israelis who are the victims of this attack.
It's all evil colonialism.
Nothing the Israelis can do is right.
And hooray for women to death.
We love those Hamas.
They just do it like nobody else can.
And a lot of people were shocked, but those of us who've been paying attention to the universities were not shocked.
But let us talk about just the American interest, because on the right, there are Jew haters too, and they hate the Jews so much that they don't want us to do anything for Israel.
And that's how they establish all their foreign policies, how much they hate the Jews, and how do the Jews get hurt.
That's on the right.
What is America's interest in this war, if there is one?
So our interest is very simple.
Our interest is to weaken Iran and its allies.
There's a global alignment.
You could call it an alliance.
We can argue, is it an alliance?
Is it an alignment among China, Russia, and Iran?
Each one of them, though, is clearly opposed to the American order.
And each one of them in its own sphere, China in East Asia, Russia in Europe, and Iran in the Middle East, are trying to weaken the American alliance system.
The biggest threat to Iran in the region is Israel.
And so what Iran is trying to do is weaken Israel.
What we should be doing, and we're not doing it, but what we should be doing is aligning with Israel so as to weaken Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Biden administration has adopted a kind of position of a mediator between Iran and Israel.
We shouldn't be just supporting it, weakening Iran.
That's the American interest.
I mean, continually we hear we don't want this to escalate, but it seems to me that escalation is how people win wars.
It's like saying don't have D-Day because that will escalate the war.
I mean, this should be an open attempt to destroy Hamas, right?
Is that wrong?
The problem with you, Drew, is that you just see things in a very simple, straightforward manner, which Cuts out the need for experts.
By the way, you introduced me as an expert.
We don't trust experts anymore.
So I just want to be an interesting amateur, please.
So defeating Hamas, defeating Hezbollah, weakening, defeating Iran, that should be the goal.
Sophisticated people have a lot of other ideas.
The administration, like I said, it sees itself as mediating.
If you don't escalate, so what it's offering Iran and has offered it since October 7th is mutual non-belligerence.
That's what it's offering them.
But what the Iranians are hearing is exactly what you said.
America will not escalate.
America will restrain Israel.
It's putting Israel in a bear hug.
And if our side never escalates, and the other side does escalate, they escalated on October 8th.
So I mean, October 7th was an escalation.
But on October 8th, Hezbollah, which was not attacked by Israel, it entered the fray.
That was an escalation.
Our response to the escalation from Iran and Hezbollah was to tell Israel to restrain itself.
If you will never escalate in the face of an escalation of your enemy, then you're just ceding the victory to your enemy.
It's as simple as that.
There's no way around that.
So let's take the two sides of objections.
The one from the left is that Israel is a colonial power, an imperial power.
It has done something terribly wrong.
It is enslaving the Palestinians.
It is making their, they keep accusing the Israelis of genocide, which that's kind of a joke, but still, that's one of the things they say.
Is there any basis for that complaint?
I mean, I know that the Israelis are sometimes themselves uncomfortable about their situation in regards to the Palestinians.
So where do you stand on that?
Well, see, I was in the White House in 2005 and 2006 when we basically strong-armed or pushed Israel aggressively to get out of the Gaza Strip on the theory that Israel was occupying the Gaza Strip and that that was the cause of the conflict.
And if Israel would just pull out, then Hamas would become a kind of manager of the Palestinian society and it would gradually moderate because it would be more concerned with winning favor with the Palestinian public than carrying out jihad against the Israelis.
So we pushed the Israelis to do that.
And the Israelis asked for us for certain concessions in return about the West Bank, where George W. Bush recognized that major settlement blocks on the West Bank would remain part of Israel, even if Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank.
So at that time, we thought we were creating a two-state solution between the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel.
And this withdrawal would help.
And we got a commitment from Sharon, from Prime Minister Sharon.
Also, his request for us to recognize major settlement blocks meant that he really wanted to separate from the Palestinians and the West Bank as well.
What happened was the rockets and missiles, they followed Israel after the withdrawal from Gaza, coming from Hamas.
And the Palestinian Authority could never make a deal.
I no longer believe in the two-state solution personally because I've seen Abu Mazen up close.
And believe me, everyone who's seen Abu Mazen up close thinks this guy will not cut a deal.
His reputation across the Arab world is very, very bad.
The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, you name it.
The Jordanians, all of them think that Abu Mazen is basically an amoeba who is there to suck money and resources from them, but will never ever cut a deal with the Israelis.
And over time, the security situation on the West Bank has gotten worse and worse, and the Israelis have to go in to the West Bank to protect their security.
There's a deep, there was a when I was in the White House, there was a deep desire in Israeli society and from the political echelon, more importantly, and from Ariel Sharon, who had unimpeachable security credentials to separate from the Palestinians, to pull back.
But there's no partner on the other side.
And today, no Israeli believes there's a partner on the other side.
So for me, all this rhetoric is, you know, it's for people who have not followed this at all, have not been involved in it.
They're using it as a slogan for domestic political purposes.
It's not really based on any kind of serious understanding of what's going on.
Inside Israel, Israel is, first of all, Israel is a democracy, and the minorities in Israel have it better than minorities in any other country in the Middle East.
I don't know what they're when people are focusing in on Israel and presenting it as some kind of unique evil.
Have they looked at Iraq?
Have they looked at Syria?
Have they looked at any other country in the Middle East?
And the minorities in Israel say this very clearly if you listen to them.
So on the right, they say, what has this to do with us?
This is the, I mean, a lot of this just hides anti-Semitism.
You know, it masks anti-Semitism, but that's the argument.
The argument is, why are we spending treasure defending this sliver of a country?
We don't like them.
They're not our friends.
They don't do anything for us.
Why are we involved in this at all?
Oh, there's actually two things going on on the right, I think.
There's traditional anti-Semitism, which has come back like weeds after a rain, which has been kind of surprising to see.
But there's this other thing going on in the sort of wing of the Trump coalition.
There's people who believe that our elite has supported the empire over the republic.
And some of the anti-Zionism you're hearing, I think, is coming from within that framework.
That's the same framework in which people are opposed to the Ukraine war.
So they just, you know, I think Israel is support for Israel is just a good test about whether you support anything abroad.
If you're going to support, if you're going to be against, if you're going to be against a forward-leaning American foreign policy, you're going to be anti-Zionist because it's kind of a way of signaling that.
So that's going on as well.
It's not necessarily anti-Semitic.
But to those people who are not simply anti-Semitic, I would argue with them and say, does the Middle East matter?
If China takes over the Middle East, or if a coalition of Russia, China, and Iran take over the Middle East, does that harm the American interest?
And to me, it's self-evident.
I don't think maybe it's not self-evident.
We have to make the argument and explain it.
But if we think the Middle East still matters to America, then we have to care about Israel because Israel is the strongest ally of the United States.
There are only two countries in the Middle East that are allies of the United States and that have militaries that can project power beyond their borders in any kind of serious way.
And that's Turkey and Israel.
So if we're going to try to find a way to pull back, because I think our political leadership is getting a very clear signal from the right and from the left, or I can say, this is from the left and from the right.
And that's that we're tired of these military commitments to this part of the world.
We're tired of trying to, these boondoggles of trying to reshape these countries, and we want to pull back.
Israel's Four-Star Asset00:02:38
So, okay, I get that signal.
But then if we pull back, that means we have to rely on allies more.
And that means Israel.
And if we think that we're going to, you know, that by being mean to Israel, we're going to be good to the Palestinians, that is ridiculous, basically.
Israel is a four-star asset as a four-star military.
Despite October 7th, it screwed up, but it has a four-star military, as a four-star intelligence service.
It's a cyber superpower, right?
The United States built up this asset into something incredible.
It's also a democracy.
It has very good working relationships with the American elite.
If we're going to cut ties with Israel, it's not going to disappear and the Palestinians aren't going to have their state.
It's going to become an asset of China or of India, of some other, an ally of some other power.
And we're going to have no influence over it whatsoever.
That's how international politics works.
They don't, because we get mad at people doesn't mean they just simply go away.
We should learn that.
We should have learned that by now.
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Houthis, Netanyahu, and War Constraints00:14:52
I'm so lost in my own joke at this point.
All I can say is K-L-A-V-A-N.
That's all I can say.
There are no easing funny bad things.
Can you explain to me, I've asked this question of a number of people, and I've never gotten an answer that makes any sense to me.
What was in Barack Obama's mind when he decided to strengthen Iran?
And Biden, a policy that Biden seems to have taken up entirely, or whoever is playing, Biden is playing.
What was the idea of strengthening this essentially terrorist nation?
Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say, to put it the way you did, that Biden is following Obama on Iran.
There's a debate in my world about whether that's true or not.
To me, again, it's self-evident, but it isn't to a lot of people in Washington.
But that's how I see it exactly.
And I can explain it to you in two ways.
One is following on what Haviv Rette Gore said as an extension of American domestic politics, but it's actually a strategy as well.
So let's start with a strategy.
The Democrats believe, I'm going to call this the Democratic view.
It's important to realize there are a lot of Republicans who have what I'm calling the Democratic view.
And there are some Democrats who have the Republican view, but the center of gravity for this view, the Obama-Biden view, is in the Democratic Party.
And they have a number of assumptions that are all interlocking.
One of them is that Iran is a status quo power.
It's not a revolutionary power trying to overturn, trying to throw the United States out of the Middle East, trying to destroy Israel.
Yes, it says that rhetorically, but it's like the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s.
It has this ideology, but nobody in the country really believes the ideology.
And more important, they don't have the capabilities.
So capabilities are intentions.
If they don't have the capabilities, they just have to focus on what's actually possible for them.
Their number one goal is simply to stay in power.
And if we look at that in crude, realist terms, we can see that they share a lot of interests with the United States.
However, the United States has these allies, in particular Saudi Arabia and Israel, who historically have acted as a catapult, throwing the United States into conflict with Iran, because Israel has an extreme agenda with Iran.
Saudi Arabia has an extreme agenda with Iran.
And we have kind of mindlessly taken our allies' agenda and made it our own.
This is not what I think.
This is what Obama thinks.
This is what Obama thinks.
So what we need to do is we need to start a diplomatic discourse with Iran, more like a normal diplomatic discourse, and position ourselves between Iran and our allies, right?
And that will give us more room to maneuver.
And that will also allow us to explore the difference, to explore the specific interests of Iran's proxies.
So we shouldn't see the Middle East as a zero-sum king between the United States and Iran.
And we shouldn't see all the proxies as simply puppets of Iran doing whatever it wants.
Each one of them, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the militias in Iraq, they all have their individual interests.
And if we position ourselves as kind of mediators, then we can work with Tehran to find accommodations for each of its proxies that are acceptable to it, acceptable to us, and acceptable to our allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The administration believes that it did that in two cases before October 7th.
For them, it was kind of the test, the proof of concept.
One of them was in Yemen.
Just on October 7th, there was a process was well in place of the Houthis reconciling with Saudi Arabia.
We thought that the Biden administration thought that those two parties were on the verge of a treaty according to which the Houthis would agree not to attack the Saudis and their interests, and the Saudis would deliver money.
So what we were doing is working with Tehran, Tehran to moderate the Houthis, us to moderate the Saudis, us to help enrich the Houthis, and that was going to deliver peace in Yemen.
And there was a similar process at work in Lebanon, where we brokered a maritime border agreement between the Israelis and the Lebanese, which began, the whole process began under the Biden administration with Hezbollah threatening to strike Israeli gas platforms in the Mediterranean with drones.
And in order to prevent a war, we went and we brokered a deal in which the Israelis withdrew their claim to their exclusive economic zone in the Mediterranean, where you can drill for gas.
And an international consortium of energy companies came in and started delivering money to Lebanon.
Again, it's the exact same pattern that was in Yemen.
We get our ally to withdraw and we bring in money to Iran's ally.
And we called that peace.
We called that peace.
We called that a huge win.
Everybody in Washington was really delirious about this and said we're halfway to Abraham Accords between Israel and Hezbollah.
It was total.
I was, I'm almost the only guy in Washington who said this is nuts.
This is appeasement.
This is not going to work.
All we got from Hezbollah was a pinky promise not to be aggressive.
And we see how long that lasted.
So October 7th.
So then October 7th happens, right?
It happens after all this is done.
Yeah.
So how did this happen?
I mean, I heard, I think it was Charlie Kirk the other day saying, oh, you know, Netanyahu wanted this to happen because the judicial reforms were going to cause a civil war and this kind of was going to prop up his administration and keep you.
And people, other people are accusing Netanyahu of drawing this process out so that nobody holds him responsible for the original attacks.
First of all, how did this happen?
How did they let this happen?
There are people on the right, as there are on the left, who, you know, they want a unified field theory of politics so that their opposition to the elite, then that anything that, anything that the that their opponents is doing are doing in international relations is a reflection of the uh uh, of the corruption at home.
Uh anyway, I I just think it's nonsense and there's no, no serious basis to that.
The Israelis, all of the Israelis Netanyahu, the security elite, the left, the right, they were all taken by surprise by october 7th.
It happened because of a huge intelligence failure.
The Israelis call it a concepsia, which is a misconception conception, but the misconception about what was happening.
They believed that, along with the Biden administration, that Hamas was was becoming a manager of its society rather than a jihad or jihadi organization.
Wow, and they were, and they were pumping money into it, which is exactly what the Biden administration is doing in Lebanon as well, or wants to do in Lebanon with Hezbollah.
So why didn't they react faster when it actually did happen?
Because they have.
They have built the wrong army.
There's two issues that work simultaneously.
They have an intelligence failure, a misconception of what Hamas was up to.
But they had a much bigger misconception about the nature of the world today, the nature of warfare today.
And they built a military that was heavy on use of air force.
They believed that big wars didn't happen anymore.
They believed that artillery and tanks, all these things from the 20th century that were the center of warfare were no longer at the center of warfare.
And they believed that they could deter their enemies with a combination of high-tech enabled intel, special forces, and the air force.
And they didn't ever imagine that they would actually need mass like we're seeing in Ukraine, just like the Europeans were surprised by Ukraine and the Israelis were surprised by Gaza.
You know, it's an amazing little statistic that North Korea is building, you know, manufacturing more artillery shells than all of NATO.
So they would just, because the North Koreans still live in a 20th century military concept where you actually use your artillery to make things happen.
So artillery and armor.
The Russians are still in the 20th, in the 20th century.
NATO and the Israelis went to this Star Wars conception where high-tech gizmos can solve all of our problems.
So what do we want to see?
Obviously, nobody wants American boots on the ground in Israel, including the Israelis.
They don't seem to be inviting us to fight over there.
What should we be doing for the Israelis to bring this to a close?
Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to define this as a war between the Iranian alliance system and the American alliance system.
Ultimately, the Iranians are trying to take us down.
The administration has framed this from the beginning as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Barack Obama, who I think is really the, he's the architect of the whole conception that the Biden administration is operating under.
He was on a podcast at Pod Save America in early November, and he said, listen, we have to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in our mind simultaneously.
One of them is that what Hamas did on October 7th, the raping, the murdering, and all that, is horrible.
It's horrendous.
We condemn it and we support Israel's right to defend itself.
On the other hand, the occupation is intolerable.
And we have to do everything we can to stop the occupation.
So ultimately, what he's saying, but you don't have to read too much between the lines to see it, is that Hamas is a deformed and particularly ugly expression of a very legitimate Palestinian desire for self-determination, which is being denied by the Israeli oppressor who is carrying out the occupation.
And if that's your analysis of what happened on October 7th and of the American interest, then the answer to October 7th is a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians and a two-state solution.
What the Biden administration did on October 7th, the first inclination they had is that, oh no, this renewed flare-up of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is going to strengthen the Israeli right.
It's going to strengthen Netanyahu.
And so, what we have to do is we have to constrain, we have to constrain the right.
And so, they have been putting, you know, they have opposed, we have to shut the war down and we have to shut it down in such a way that weakens the Israeli right.
And so, they have been trying from the beginning to stop the war.
It hasn't been well reported, but I know for an absolute fact, there's no doubt about this.
I talked to Netanyahu's advisors when he came.
I was at the speech when he came to Congress a few weeks ago.
The Americans gave them an order not to go into Gaza on the ground.
They gave them an order not to go into Gaza City.
They gave him an order not to go into Khan Yunus.
That was reported, but not well in the papers.
You can go back and you can find it as I've done after this.
But what was very clear is that they told them not to go into Rafah in the south on the Egyptian border.
That was clear because Biden came out and said it explicitly.
And so they want to shut down the war.
If you shut down the war, then Hamas wins.
I mean, because Hamas stays in power on the ground in Gaza.
And so at the same time that they're saying, stop the war, and Hamas remains there, they're saying we need a two-state solution with a revitalized Palestinian authority.
But the Palestinian Authority rules in the West Bank, but Hamas kicked the Palestinian Authority in 2007, violently, kicked it out of Gaza.
They're not going to take them back in.
Now, the administration, you have to say they're either very confused or they're playing a different game than the one they're admitting to publicly.
And of course, it's the opposite.
They want to cut a deal with Hamas, just like they want to cut a deal between Israel and Hamas right now, a temporary deal, by shutting down the war, signaling to Iran that we don't want a wider conflict, just like they're trying to shut down the war in the north with Hezbollah, by signaling to Iran that we don't want a wider conflict and to show that we're restraining Israel.
So the inclination on the part of the administration is put Israel in a bear hug.
When talking to pro-Israel constituencies in our domestic politics, they present the bear hug as love and affection.
And last night at the DNC, Kamala Harris said, I support Israel's right to self-defense.
That's the loving embrace.
But in the secret messaging that we don't ever hear about to Tehran, it's, hey, look, we're holding them.
We're holding them tight.
If you'll tamp down with your guys, then we can get the Middle East back to some kind of peace and stability.
What we should do is we should define this as us against Iran, and we should deploy the Israelis to give maximum pain to Iran and to Hezbollah, especially.
So I only have a second left.
Secret Messaging to Tehran00:01:09
I need a one-word answer to this.
Will Israel take on Iran directly?
Not without us.
They might do things like to deter Iran from escalating itself.
They may carry out certain actions, but they won't enter a major war with Iran as long as we are as hostile to that as we are right now.
Michael Duran, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, and he's co-host of the Israel Update podcast.
And as you can hear, a genuine realist when it comes to foreign policy, which makes you, I think, alone in Washington, D.C., especially when I'm not here.
Mike, it's great to see you.
Thank you very much.
That was really enlightening.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Well, that was a breath of fresh air.
I think most of the stuff that people in America, at least, are saying about the Middle East and about the war between Israel and Gaza is complete nonsense.
But I think what Michael Duran was saying there is actually much, much closer to being factual and the truth.
And we will talk more truth on the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.