Dr. Michael Doran argues October 7’s Hamas attack ignited an asymmetric Iran-Israel war, with Israel’s counterstrikes crippling but not collapsing Iran—akin to a boxer recovering. He dismisses U.S. media claims of Israeli control over America and frames Gaza’s conflict as ending only when Hamas is destroyed, despite public backlash against Israeli concessions. Doran highlights China’s Houthi missile targeting as a direct threat to U.S. naval dominance, while Trump’s Gulf diplomacy seeks to stabilize the region amid Iran’s decline. He warns an Israel-Turkey war could destabilize the bloc of Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, with Erdogan backing Hamas and MBS shifting toward nationalism. The U.S., he insists, must demand Hamas’s elimination and cut ties with UNRWA, exposing civilian deaths as strategic tools in proxy warfare. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Michael Duran.
Whenever I listen to people discussing foreign policy, the one thing that seems to be missing is actually a sense of realism.
Everyone's got a position on right and wrong and ideals, and those are all, of course, very useful things to talk about, but you can't accomplish the impossible and trying to accomplish the impossible usually makes things worse no matter what your ideals are.
After the 9-11 terrorist attacks by Islamists, for example, George W. Bush wanted to transform the Middle East into a bastion of democracy to stem the rise of Islamist violence, which was a great idea as long as you didn't actually try to do it or think you could do it.
I would like to transform myself into a Yankees center fielder, but I think it would just cause a lot more trouble than it would help anybody, especially the Yankees.
Mike Duran is a realist.
This is why I always like talking to him about the Middle East.
He is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.
He specializes in Middle East security, and ever since the horrible attacks of October 7th, he has been really one of the common sense, not common sense, the uncommon sense voices out there.
All he cares about are American interests, and all he wants to know is where American interests lie and who we can work with to accomplish them.
Mike, it's always good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
It's great to be here.
And great to hear you have to say all those nice things about me.
Yeah, it's not like real life.
This is not like real life.
Yeah.
So I keep seeing you, wherever I turn on the TV, that's why I actually threw away my television and says, whenever I turn on the TV, there you are talking about this.
And it really is true that everyone else is sort of talking out of their heads, but you have an actual sense of the people at play.
So let's just begin with this.
Why We Keep Seeing Him00:11:20
October 7th is now, what, two years ago?
One and a half years ago?
Coming up on two years.
This has been a very, very substantive war between, essentially, between Israel and Iran.
You've been looking at the Middle East all this time.
What is the state of play right now, as far as you're concerned?
Well, you just put your finger on the key issue, which is that we need to keep in mind, which is that October 7th was not the beginning of a Hamas-Israel war.
Of course, it was that, but to really understand what's going on is we need to see that for what it was, the beginning of an Iran-Israel war.
And an asymmetric war by Iran against the United States by extension.
That's the proper way of understanding it.
That's what the Iranians thought they were doing in opening this.
So if we want to see it from the Iranian point of view and they were the instigators, that's what happened.
We just had this what's now called the 12-day war, which I think we should see this as a major Israeli counterattack in this larger Israel-Iran war.
And the Israelis won it pretty decisively, although it was not a knockout blow.
So Iran has been weakened significantly by what happened during the 12-day war, but it's like a boxer that took a big blow to the nose, dropped to its knees, but it's getting up again.
It's going to get up again.
It's going to shake itself off, and the war is going to continue.
It's not over, but it's in its last stage.
All that the Iranians have left is at this stage is they're still in power and they have control of that over Iran.
And then they have the Houthis, but all of their other proxies have been not necessarily eliminated.
Assad was eliminated.
Hezbollah has been decimated.
Hamas totally decapitated.
And so they don't have much to, in terms of the kind of power that they have been projecting, they just have the Houthis.
So now Israel, I mean, one of the things that's so frustrating is you get all this kind of source, anonymous source stories in the news.
Trump is angry at Netanyahu because he's bombing everybody.
You know, why won't they stop the war in Gaza?
What is your feeling about what's happening now and whether or not the war in Gaza should or could be stopped?
The war in Gaza is not going to end until Israel wins.
And Israel winning means Hamas destroyed.
And that is what is going to happen.
I can't tell you how quickly it's going to happen.
I wouldn't have thought, if you'd have asked me, a friend of mine just reminded me of this right after October 7th.
Was Israel going to win this war?
And I said, if win this war means destroying Hamas, then they have only a 15 or 20% chance of doing that.
I thought at some point there would be a ceasefire imposed by the United States on the Israelis, which would leave Hamas in power.
I no longer believe that that's going to happen.
I think things have changed so much since then.
The Israelis have prevailed.
They are going to eliminate Hamas from Gaza.
No politician in Israel can campaign on anything other than that.
There's a huge, you know, the Israelis are very divided.
They were divided before October 7th.
They've been divided throughout.
The anti-Netanyahu forces who are as insanely, or there's a BB derangement syndrome, which is the exact counterpart to the Trump derangement syndrome.
And it affects a huge segment of the Israeli elite and certainly the Israeli press.
And they have been using the war to try to take down Netanyahu.
That effort continues.
It's going to continue until Netanyahu is not there anymore.
And they're trying to, they would like to bring a ceasefire, go to elections, and bring down Netanyahu.
But the problem they have is that a ceasefire will leave Hamas in power, and they cannot win an election on saying they want Hamas to remain in power.
So any politician in Israel that says we should cut a deal with Hamas and leave it in power is not going to succeed.
Netanyahu is going to continue to campaign on that.
And that's what's going to prevail in the end.
They could be doing a better job, a quicker job, but this is what's going to happen eventually.
So one of the things that's happening on the right is this kind of identitarian right.
That's what they call them, the bigots.
And they feel kind of excluded, I think, from the MAGA Trump administration.
And they're looking to kind of amp their influence.
And they're saying the one thing they keep saying is that Israel is in charge of America.
Candace Owens called Israel the master of the world, I think she said.
She also said they're an occult nation because the Star of David is a hexagram.
As a convert from Judaism to Christianity, Do you get to remain part of the conspiracy or do you lose that ability?
No, it's wonderful.
First of all, this conspiracy, no one has ever called me and asked me to join.
I'm really ticked off about that because I would have joined a conspiracy to run the world instantaneously.
I was right there.
But no, the people who hate Jews still hate me.
And the people who hate everybody else hate me.
So I'm covered.
Oh, good.
But you're not actually part of the elders.
I know.
It sucks.
I know.
Where are your checks?
Where's my checks?
I'm waiting for my call.
It seems to me that America does nothing but basically get in Israel's way, sometimes in ways that I approve of.
I think I'm interested in America's interests, and I don't want to see the Middle East go up in flames.
I don't think that helps us at all.
But why is it good for us?
Is what's happening now?
Is this good for the U.S.?
Oh, it's fantastic for the U.S.
And by the way, just a word on the bigots, anti-Semites.
I thought your show last week was fabulous on that, really.
I want to see more people calling these people out for what they are.
It's grotesque.
It's not American and it's not MA and it won't take us where we need to go.
Everything that you said, I just want to say, how do they say it?
I want to associate myself with your remarks.
The key here is that Israel is our best ally.
It's certainly our best ally in the Middle East.
It may be our best ally in the world.
Why?
Because the United States is pulling back.
The United States does have to focus resources on East Asia.
Something happened around about 2017, maybe when I picked that date just out of the air.
But sometime in that timeframe, there was a revolution in American foreign policy that didn't get announced.
And the revolution was that the Pentagon leadership understood that we could lose a war over Taiwan.
We might go to war and we might lose.
And from the end of the Cold War until that day, the assumption was that the United States could win any war that it chose to get involved in.
It doesn't mean that we were necessarily wanted to expend the resources necessary, but we couldn't imagine a war in which we would fully devote ourselves and lose.
And now we know that that's possible.
The buildup, the Chinese buildup has been so great that we cannot necessarily prevail.
And so that's led to a change.
And there's a reordering going on and reprioritization.
And the Middle East got downgraded somewhat.
Now, there are voices out there that are saying we should just get the hell out of the Middle East entirely.
And that is not going to happen.
You cannot, the globalization, there's globalism and there's globalization.
Globalization is an aspect of the world today.
We don't have any control over it.
Globalism is the ideology that says this is a fantastic thing and we have to do more to advance it and so on.
And I think MAGA is against globalism, but it can't be against globalization.
Globalization is a fact.
Supply chains go across the world.
Energy goes across the world.
Trade cuts across the Middle East.
You can't play chess against China on three quadrants of the board and say, but I'm not going to move any of my pieces into this other quadrant, the Middle East.
The minute you do that, what's China going to do?
They're going to move right into that quadrant.
Which they're doing, by the way, very surreptitiously.
For example, they are giving targeting data to the Houthis.
Why?
Drew, there are two entities in the world that have built anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Do you want to guess who the two are?
China and us.
The Houthis.
The Houthis, of course.
Okay.
So all of this, all of these, all of these missiles the Houthis are sending against American naval assets and against global shipping.
This is a big, for the Chinese, this is a big test arena where they can collect data on how the U.S. military responds to these actions.
It also moves assets out of East Asia over into the Middle East, which is what they want to see.
An anti-ship ballistic missile has only one purpose in the world, and that's to take down an American aircraft carrier.
That's the purpose of it.
So the Chinese are playing in this arena.
There's lots of other ways the Chinese are playing.
I'll just give that as one example.
We're not leaving the Middle East.
Donald Trump expressed that very clearly when the first major trip he made as president was to the Gulf, right?
And announced now we're up to $5 trillion in deals.
These are Trump numbers.
I don't think the real number is $5 trillion, but he's expressing a real interest in what happens in the Gulf.
The Saudis and the Emiratis are developing massive AI projects.
AI is going to determine the future of the global economy, and it's going to determine the future of the military balance.
U.S. Stakes in the Middle East00:02:48
They have unlimited energy.
AI is a big energy user.
They have unlimited land to use for their plant.
And they have this other thing that we don't have, no regulation.
So they can do whatever they want.
So the AI systems that they build are going to be very important in determining the global balance.
The Middle East remains strategically important, but we have to prioritize toward East Asia.
We need allies on the ground who can whack our enemies and can work effectively with us.
There are only two American allies in the Middle East that have militaries that can project power beyond their borders.
That's Turkey and Israel.
That's it.
That's it.
The others have militaries.
The Saudis have a military.
The Jordanians have a military.
The Emiratis have a military, but they can't project power.
So if the United States is not going to create the stability in this area, which is vital to our interests, we have to have allies who will and allies who have capabilities.
The Israelis just showed the kind of capabilities they have.
We need them in order to have a Middle East that remains part of the American alliance system against the Chinese, or at least is not working against us against the Chinese.
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Saudi-Turk Dynamics00:16:07
What's happening in Syria?
I mean, one of the things about the Middle East is I keep forgetting who's who and what is what.
You know, what is going on in Syria now?
So this is the place, if you accept the picture that I just gave you, this is the place where the Turks and the Israelis are bumping up against each other.
And the job of the United States there is to create a buffer between the two.
Because we have only two allies with militaries that can project power, but they don't like each other.
And this is a problem.
This is not a new problem for the United States.
I mean, the United States was on the Greeks and the Turks.
And we've been balancing between Palestinians and Israelis.
We're very familiar with being on both sides of these really deep, horrible, horrible conflicts.
And the case of the Turks and the Israelis, it's not a deep, horrible one, but it's a pretty serious one.
Our job is to be a buffer there.
Shara, the new guy in Damascus, has a shady past of ISIS past.
He's an Islamist, doesn't have total control over all of the people under him.
And the Israelis have created a buffer zone in the south, but there's a big gray area between the area that Damascus controls and the area that the Israelis have created as a buffer zone.
And a lot of forces are working to create tension between Damascus and Israel through the violence that erupted between the Druze and the Bedouin on the ground.
I won't get into all the details about who's who on the ground killing each other.
The American interest in this is that there be a stable understanding between Damascus and the Israelis and that there be an understanding between Ankara and Jerusalem.
The big threat in Syria is not the violence that just erupted there.
The big threat is that the Turks try to turn Syria into a Turkish military base and we get a war between Israel and Turkey.
That's the thing that the United States should be trying to prevent.
Donald Trump is on that portfolio.
He's on that problem, which is good.
He has Tom Barak in Ankara.
That's the ambassador to Turkey.
But Barak is also the special envoy for Syria.
And Barak understands that this is the problem.
He understands that this is his goal and he's working it.
That's what we should all hope for.
So Iran, up until now, Iran has been this kind of big bogey, you know, this kind of the bully of the area.
Everybody's been afraid of it.
Obama was working to make them stronger for reasons I've never been able to comprehend.
You say they're down, but they're not out.
What are you expecting to happen?
What I'm expecting to happen, well, what's already happening is we're already moving toward the new order because we're in like, if we compare Iran to the Soviet Union, we're in the sort of Gorbachev era.
I mean, there's no reform coming up in Iran, but Iran had all these assets around the region which have been weakened.
Donald Trump is hoping that this will lead to a flowering of the Abraham Accords, a new kind of stability.
Everybody will realize that they want to just work to get rich.
I don't think we're there yet.
First of all, the different elements, the three key elements, non-Iranian elements are Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia.
They're all jockeying or swirling around each other to see who gets to pick up the pieces that Iran just abandoned or that have been taken away from Iran.
Israel has this incredible military, but it can't project political influence into the Muslim world in the way the Saudis and the Turks are.
The Saudis and the Turks are quietly competing with each other.
The Saudis would like to have a much more, because Syria is an Arab power, they would like to be the dominant power in Syria.
The problem they have is the Turks have the military power, and the Turks are the guys on the spot with the border in Syria.
Another way to think about this, Drew, is it's a competition among the Turks, the Israelis, and the Saudis to say who gets to be the privileged interlocutor of Donald Trump about creating the new order.
And neither the Saudis nor the Turks want to be subordinate to the Israelis on this question for cultural, political, and all kinds of other reasons.
But the Iranians are not out of the game.
They're not out of the game.
For the last 15 years, 10 years, they've had these drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles, and that took their game up to a new level.
That's been taken away from them for the moment.
But let's not forget that they were on the scene before they had these tools.
And they used terrorism, political warfare, lots of asymmetric muscle movements to cause a lot of problems.
So I'm expecting to see people assassinated by the Iranians.
A classic Iranian move was October 7th.
The Iranians are masters at, you know, the Middle East has all these different fragments, all these different groups that hate each other for reasons that you and I, you know, we can't even begin to imagine all the reasons that they have to hate each other.
And the Iranians are good at embroiling actors against each other in ways that advances their interests.
That's what they did on October 7th.
Just before October 7th, Saudi Arabia and Israel were moving toward normalization, brokered by the United States.
The Turks and the Israelis were thawing their relations.
If you're sitting in Tehran, you look at that, you see this is an American brokered bloc.
Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, they don't all love each other, but they're all moving in the same direction under American authority.
If you're Iran, you want to bust that up.
How do they do it?
Palestine.
And the attack against the Israelis.
And that put a huge wedge between Riyadh and Jerusalem and also between Ankara and Jerusalem.
We're going to see a lot of that kind of same playbook as Donald Trump tries to recreate this Turkey-Israel-Saudi Arabia arrangement in one way or another, whether it's a formal arrangement or informal arrangement.
We're going to see the Iranians using all of their cleverness to bust it up.
What about the idea after the bombing of their nuclear facilities?
There was some kind of hesitant talk about regime change over there that maybe these guys can be overthrown.
Is that not a realistic possibility?
I don't think it's a realistic possibility.
I mean, it could happen.
The Iranians could take matters into their own hands.
The regime is incredibly weak.
I mean, weaker than it's ever been since it came into existence.
But Donald Trump doesn't want regime change.
Rejabtabe Erdogan doesn't want regime change.
Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia doesn't want regime change.
Middle Easterners, Middle Eastern leaders, the allies of the United States, they don't want all the disruption.
They don't want the refugees.
They don't want the wars that could result over the, you know, if Iran fragments, who's going to come into power?
Who's going to become the dominant player there?
They want stability and economic development.
And that's the language that Donald Trump speaks too.
So I don't see the United States adopting that policy.
And I don't see the America's allies supporting it.
If the United States wanted to do it, I think the Israelis would be on board.
Netanyahu made noise in that direction during the 12 Days War, but none of the military goals that they set for themselves were seriously designed to promote regime change.
Netanyahu was using regime change rhetoric because he knows it scares the regime in Tehran, and he wanted them to the Israeli strategy was to force the Iranians to seek redress against Israel by coming to some kind of agreement with Donald Trump about the nuclear program.
Because only the United States can restrain Israel.
Russia can't do it.
China can't do it.
Only the United States can.
And that's the great way to use Israeli power.
Israel is the club that we use against horrendous regimes like Iran in order to impose American will on them.
That's fascinating.
Okay.
So after 9-11, there were years of talk that Islamism was an existential threat to the West.
I mean, it sometimes seems to me that Great Britain is now sort of gone, you know, just completely taken over.
But it also seems to me in the Middle East that some of the leaders in the Middle East are no longer as interested in feeding those guys to keep their power.
I mean, there seemed to be before a system where they let the Islamists run free as long as they got to keep their palaces.
But now they seem a little bit sick of that.
Is that just wishful thinking on my part, or is that true?
Oh, no, there's definitely been a change.
There's a huge change in Saudi Arabia.
I mean, Mohammed bin Salman represents the flowering of a kind of Saudi nationalism.
I mean, how do you have a nationalism that's named after one family?
But there's something to it.
It's a Saudi-based political identity.
They're working on it very demonstratively.
They have moved the religious establishment aside, downgraded it considerably.
Things that you couldn't imagine before.
Like there's tourism in Saudi Arabia now.
There's pre-Islamic Arabian monuments you can go visit.
Now, this is under the, you know, the mentality of the Saudi clerics was a lot like the Taliban.
You know, anything that was pre-Islamic was pagan and therefore off-limits.
So the Saudis are now actually promoting.
You can go see some of the pre-Islamic monuments in Saudi Arabia.
You can't imagine this previously.
So, and it's popular in Saudi Arabia.
You go and you talk to, you can feel it.
It's palpable when you talk to people.
You can't hide this kind of thing, you know, behind propaganda campaigns.
When you talk to restaurant owners and business people and you bring up Mohammed bin Salman and they express just how enthusiastic they are about this project, it's a fascinating thing.
I've never seen anything like it, Drew, where you had a revolution from on top and the people were already there, ready for it.
I don't, you know, it's a kind of interesting thing to witness.
But that's absolutely true.
But the Islamists are still there.
They're there in Syria, obviously.
Some leaders have more sympathy for them than others.
Erdogan has embraced Hamas, who is anathema to the Saudis and to the Emiratis and so forth.
There's still going to be players in the mix.
They're not just going to disappear.
But you outed me at the beginning, actually, correctly.
I don't identify myself as a realist, but that's what I am.
I don't call myself a realist because there is this whole school of realism that's represented by Mearsheimer and Walt, who are bigots, anti-Israel.
I mean, from my point of view, if you're a realist, you want to just think about what's possible, what are our assets that we can use to create the best world for ourselves, then this ally we have, Israel, has to be at the center of our strategy.
And the so-called realists are anti-Israel.
So I don't try to explain this to people, but yes, I'm what a realist would be if we actually had realists.
So now I lost, I was actually making a point in there somewhere, which was, oh, yeah, I'm against any analysis of the Middle East that starts with the Islamism question or starts with any ideological understanding of this region.
There's no leader in the Middle East who doesn't have a strong pragmatic side.
He may be playing the Islamist card this way or that way.
But we have to start with the state interests and then move after that to the ideological questions.
Don't start with the ideology.
Start with the state interests.
What are each one of these players trying to achieve?
And start with the military balance.
The Middle East is the cockpit of power politics in the world.
So often we always, analyses of the Middle East talk about ideological issues, religious issues, and so on.
Start with the military.
Yes, all this other stuff exists.
Sometimes it matters.
Sometimes it's very important.
But start with the military balance.
So if I'm following that analysis properly, the Palestinians are basically pawns.
Is that fair to say?
And what do you think is going to happen to them?
They are pawns.
They always have been pawns.
Their purpose is they are a dagger at the heart of Israel, a dagger at the heart of the Western alliance system.
There have always been elements in the Palestinian elite that were happy to be used by pawns against the West.
That's not so much true, in my view, of the Palestinian Authority right now.
I don't think the Palestinian Authority is a model of great governance, but I would draw a distinction between it and Hamas.
But the Hamas leadership, happy to be used as pawns and happy to use every Palestinian in Gaza as a pawn in this struggle.
I mean, it's remarkable, Drew.
They are using civilian deaths as part of their strategy.
It's not just that they're willing to accept, they hide their forces behind the civilians sometimes.
They want a lot of civilians dead.
That's what they want.
It is the most obscene strategy I have ever seen by a leadership with regard to its own population.
And they're not called out for it.
They're not called out for it.
There's no leader in the West right now who's saying we have to defeat Hamas.
Hamas is responsible for every death in Gaza.
And it's in the American interest that Hamas be eliminated and removed from Gaza completely.
I'm out of time, but just can you give me a one-word answer, yes or no answer?
The starvation that I'm reading about now that's going on in Gaza, is that actually being arranged by the UN?
Yes.
Okay.
The UN, UNRWA, and Hamas are allied.
Unbelievable.
They are allies.
So a MAGA America First policy should want to get the UN out of Gaza.
Yeah.
That was one of the clearest explanations of what's going on there I've ever heard.
It was absolutely great.
I appreciate your coming on with that.
Once again, Mike Duran.
Michael Duran from the Hudson Institute, the director of the Center of Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson Institute.
Great talking to you.
That was really instructive.
I appreciate it.
Thanks.
No kidding.
That was one of the clearest explanations of what's happening in the Middle East, focusing on the realistic, you know, balance of forces rather than the ideologies which are impossible to follow or understand.
Again, Mike Durand from the Hudson Institute, really one of the best observers of the situation I know of.
If you would like more fantastic content, come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.