What the US Election Means for the Middle East

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Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris offer vastly different visions of United States foreign policy, particularly toward the Middle East. What are the key distinctions in their approaches? What are the implications of the upcoming election for US allies in the region? And how might each candidate alter the US-Israel relationship?

For a discussion of these questions, join Research Fellow Zineb Riboua, Senior Fellow Michael Doran, and Executive Director of the Alexander Hamilton Society Gabriel Scheinmann.

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Zineb Riboua:

Hello, I’m Zineb Riboua, research fellow and program manager of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. Thank you very much for joining us today for this important conversation. With me Dr. Gabriel Scheinmann, the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, an independent non-partisan, not-for-profit membership organization dedicated to promoting constructive debate on basic principles and contemporary issues in foreign economic and national security policy.

Before joining AHS, Dr. Scheinmann worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a research analyst, and then served as the policy director at the Jewish Policy Center where he co-edited a Journal of International Affairs. And also with me, Dr. Michael Doran, senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and co-host of the Israel Updates Podcast. He served as a senior director in the National Security Council, senior advisor in the State Department, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon in the Bush administration. Thank you for joining me today. So the elections are approaching, many people are asking, what are the implications for the Middle East? What does it mean? But first just let’s start by taking a step back. Actually, Gabe, how would you analyze the Biden administration’s foreign policy doctrine? Do you see it as an extension of Obama’s and do you think Harris’ will be a bit of the same?

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Well, Zineb, thank you for hosting me. Mike, thanks for having here and to the Hudson Institute for having us here today. A long time fan of Hudson in so many ways and really the great work that you guys all do here. I really appreciate your contributions. You listed three sort of things, Biden, Harris, and then there’s also the Obama, I think question throughout all this. And I think when the Biden administration began its term, you would say that actually would be different than where the Obama administration ended it, despite the fact that the cast of characters were actually the same and they all got a promotion right? President Biden was vice president under Obama, Secretary of State Blinken was Deputy Secretary of State and National Security before National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was deputy. I mean, they all basically got a promotion, but there was still this sense that because Biden was a fundamentally different politician than Obama was, came from a fundamentally different ideological frame.

It would be different. And at the end of the day, even if they came from different places, and I don’t think there is the same ideological roots in the Biden administration that you’ve seen in the Obama administration, they’ve ended up more or less in the same place. And the difference is really not that different.

And so I do think when some people pose out there this sort of question of, will a Harris administration be more like Obama 2.0 or Biden 2.0, I don’t think it’s the right question. I think it’s more like, is it Obama 4.0 or not? And I think the major thing at the end of the day was this. . . they’ve used the word more recently repeatedly, deescalation, which is not a word that Obama used as much. But I think the basic idea here is to de-emphasize the American rule in the world, de-emphasize the importance of certain American commitments, de-emphasize the importance of the American national interests for so-called transnational issues in different ways with the idea or the hope to be able to focus on a variety of domestic transformational issues that the Biden administration certainly began. And you could argue whether they’ve actually been successful in that or not.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. Mike, do you agree with this assessment on that it’s really an extension of Obama’s-

Michael Doran:

I agree with that entirely. I have a slight difference of opinion with Gabe in that I do think they set out to be Obama 3.0. But I agree with his general assessment. And the key issue there is Iran, that the Biden administration believed it could stabilize the Middle East by engaging Iran. And that is proving impossible. And I think it has really misdiagnosed the Middle East. I think that diagnosis was never correct, but I think that it has revealed itself starkly as incorrect since October 7th. And there’s a great tension between the ideas they have, which they’re holding onto about how to stabilize the region and reality that’s confronting them every day, then they’re having to respond to, and what that’s done to them is it’s put them in conflict management mode rather than conflict resolution. So their answer to every development from the beginning of the war has been to deescalate.

And that’s because they have defined the conflict as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather than a US or let’s say an Israeli-Iranian conflict. I actually believe it’s a US-Iranian conflict. I believe that Iran is orchestrating this seven front war against Israel in order to diminish the American security system. But they’re in this conflict management mode saying, deescalate, deescalate, deescalate, which doesn’t deter Iran or its proxies, and it doesn’t allow them to organize a coherent strategy so that the different parts of the US national power are all pointing in the same direction. So our military is working to protect Israel from Iran, but our economic policy is filling the coffers of Iran with money from oil sales to China. It doesn’t all add up to anything coherent.

Zineb Riboua:

So before we dive in into the different approaches between Trump and Harris, let’s start with Harris. I mean, she’s part of the Biden administration. She was very supportive of Obama’s, et cetera. Do you think that there is something that distinguishes her from the Biden administration’s approach, especially regarding the Middle East?

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Well, I think if you ask her, the answer to that is no right? I mean, this has sort of been the biggest question, the known, known question that she has struggled to answer since she became a candidate for president, which is what would you do different than the Biden administration? And for the most part, answer have been no. And I think she somehow stumbled into, “I’ll appoint a Republican in my cabinet.” That’s the extent. So if we believe what she is saying, then the answer is no. There isn’t a lot of independent track record of hers, whether in her time in California politics, her time in the Senate, or as vice president that is independent, let’s say, of the record of the Biden-Harris administration. And even during the campaign, she has made sort of head nods, let’s say, to the direction of being more critical of Israel on a variety of humanitarian and civilian casualty measures, let’s say.

But it’s not that the President hasn’t been there already on these things, and you might be able to chalk that up to some campaigning, but from an independent record, I just don’t think it’s there. I do think where there is a record is how she’s engaged politically on a whole bunch of other issues that’s not Middle East specific, but it gives you a sense of how she positions herself and how she positioned herself first in running for Senate for California, and then within the barely dry two years on her oath to the Senate running for president the first time is she positioned herself on basically every single other domestic issue firmly in the more radical left side of the Democratic Party. She didn’t do that on Israel’s stuff. It’s true. But the question is, as president, if she were to win next week, and she’s going to have to deal with this smorgasbord of the Democratic Party groups on these issues, is she more likely to try and assert some independence on it or go along with where the crowd is?

I think she’s more likely to go along with where the zeitgeist is. The Biden administration to its credit, if you want, has continuously felt conflicted about this. They have not totally thrown in their lot in that direction. There are times where what they’ve said is very good. That speech that he gave is now a year ago, but two weeks or a week after coming back from Israel could have been said by almost any American Cold War president. That’s not what the policy’s been, but it certainly couldn’t have been sent that way. And it doesn’t seem like she has an inkling to want to do that.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. So Mike, you’ve been tracking the gap between the rhetoric and the policy. Do you see a bit of the with Harris?

Michael Doran:

I do. I do. I think I see it pretty much exactly like Gabe does. The track record on foreign policy is thin just by the nature of her career so far. Her instincts, to the extent that obviously I think are to go toward the left, but since she ran for president, she has tacked to the center on Israel questions. The problem that she’ll have, I think, is the problem of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in general, or the Democratic Party in general, caught between the reality of American alliances, the realities of the Middle East and the ideas that they have. On October 7th, one of the first things that went through the mind of all the senior leaders in the Biden administration is, “We can’t let this conflict destroy our Iran outreach, but also we can’t let this conflict end up with a victory for the Israeli right.”

It’s really quite striking what we haven’t seen from the administration, which is a global attempt to hold Iran accountable in any way for this multi-theater war that it has orchestrated, to isolate Iran in any way. But there is an effort by the administration going on to isolate the Israeli right, which we see in a number of different ways, including the sanctions that they’re putting on the Israeli right, but also just the public messaging. There was an amazing article in the Washington Post about a month ago about. . . the whole article. . . the subject of the article was, “Why has the Biden administration been unable to get its hands around this conflict? Why haven’t its stated policies or its aspirations been fulfilled?” And the article was full of quotes from senior Biden officials saying, “Our problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s our ally, not our enemy.”

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. Before I move to my next question, can you please elaborate and expand on what you said about how the Biden administration had a sanction machine basically on the Israelis? Can you just-

Michael Doran:

They are withholding arms from Israel, but for the most part, they’ve only publicly. . . after President Biden admitted publicly that they were holding up. . . as the Israelis were poised to enter into Rafah, the president said that he was holding up 2000 pound bombs. But news started to come out, and I learned from talking to a number of sources inside the administration and in Jerusalem that it wasn’t just the 2000 pound bombs. Those are the ones that the US was officially holding up, but there were lots of others that were not being delivered and the administration was basically slow rolling the delivery, hiding behind a lot of bureaucratic processes, not admitting that this was part of a policy. So you have the arms, the delayed delivery of arms and armaments, and then you have this sanctions machine that they have put together also as a matter of strategy from the top, basically the Biden administration has created an inter-agency team that is tasked with producing sanctions against the Israeli right, the settler right on a schedule of once a month.

And if you go back and you look, about every month there’s a new tranche of sanctions that come out, and this is an information operation or a political warfare by the administration against the Israeli right because they’re afraid that the two-state solution. . . If we had them in the room here, Secretary of State Blinken, Jake Sullivan and so on, and they were to talk freely about what they think they’re doing with this policy, they would say, “We are preserving the two-state solution. The war is endangering the possibility of a two-state solution. We know that there are all kinds of obstacles in the short term to achieving it, but this is the only answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it’s our job to preserve it.” And so they have this machine to de-legitimate the Israeli right because they fear that it will take over Gaza, resettle, put Jewish settlements in Gaza, undermine the Palestinian authority on the West Bank, and so on.

Zineb Riboua:

Okay. Now let’s move to Trump. Gabe, you wrote a piece in August where you said that while many expect a Trump 2.0 to be a more intense version of Trump 1.0, his response to the dramatic changes in the geopolitical environment could lead to unexpected outcomes. Can you please elaborate a bit on that? And do you see, even in Trump campaign, a change in rhetoric? Because there are many people who are concerned about NATO and so on. If you can also expand on that.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Sure. Yeah. I don’t think that what you were seeing coming out of the Trump campaign this time around, and this is the longest presidential campaign in American history, he actually declared quite early if you think about it, compared to on the Harris side, the shortest of political campaign in American history. I actually don’t think you’re seeing that much difference in the things that he is saying and on not just the Middle East issues, on foreign policy issues, on domestic issues. It’s really not that dramatically different than the agenda, let’s say, that he was proposing for his first term. What I do think has changed a lot is the world has changed quite a lot since he left office or since he entered office the first time. So on a macroeconomic level, for example, the American economy, both in Trump’s first term and then post-COVID, certainly in Biden’s term, has grown so far greater in relative terms to basically our own allies, let alone even the Chinese and some of our adversaries.

When I think Trump entered office, our economy was four times the size of Japan’s. If he wins and he returns, it’ll be nearly eight, double just in that. And the same is true versus the European Union, the Eurozone, et cetera. And so what that means, I think, is he’s going to, if he wins, enter his office with a lot more leverage and leverage is what he enjoys, craves, utilizes, deploys right? So let’s just start with that in the first part. And that could lead to a lot of, I think, more interesting trade deals than the way that people think. Certainly true on the Iranian nuclear program, or a maximum pressure strategy in Iran. It’s a perfect example. Part of the reason why the Biden administration, and even in the early months of the Trump administration, I think, were a little bit more hesitant on how to do any of this was the concern over blowback on the American energy market, the price of oil. Same thing in the Biden administration in terms of sanctions vis-a-vis Russia. We are nowhere near, despite the rhetoric coming out of the White House, any sort of full maximum pressure economic strategy against Russia, and it’s part of the reason why the Russians have been able to now, almost three years on, be able to regenerate a lot of what they’re doing. But part of the concern is over energy. Well, guess what? American energy production these days, despite being held back by this administration’s policies, is through the roof compared to four years ago.

We’re the number one energy producer in the world. Oil, gas. We’re, I think, the number one oil exporter in the world now. There’s a lot of these statistics that are different than four or five years ago. And so similarly, I think he’s going to come into office being frankly less reticent or less worried about turning up the dial economically on Russia and Iran. And then lastly, because there are many ways you can do this and go too long, is, I think the thing that was the hardest or missing the most on Iran’s strategy in the first term was a willingness to do maximum pressure militarily. It came through only in the last year because of the strike on Qasem Soleimani, but I think that was the part that was always a little missing, a little reticent. Because of the attacks of 10/7, because the Israelis have rightly more or less ignored the Biden administration’s attempt to deescalate and stopping all these things, we are now in a situation where the Israelis are the ones that are applying the military pressure on Iran directly, and have normalized it for that matter too.

If we had been sitting here five or six years ago, I think the traditional scenario in Washington when thinking about a potential Israeli or American military strike on Iran was, you only have one shot. It’s going to be very difficult. You’re not going to be able to get all of it. They can regenerate. You can’t bomb knowledge. The list sort of goes on. And it’ll spur World War III on the top of all that. And now we’re in the situation on which because of the Israeli response in April, and then obviously now just last week, where it has been normalized, World War III is not created, and the Israelis did things in such a way that actually opens up even a lot more avenues to military pressure, military campaigns from them or us in a different way. And so I think he is actually going, if he wins, entering office with a lot more leverage on a variety of fronts that allows us, the United States, to be able to follow through in a lot of policies that I think in the first term, we weren’t quite willing to do.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. So as Gabe said, there’s a new geopolitical landscape, especially with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea forming an axis in the Middle East. And how do you see Trump responding to that?

Michael Doran:

I’m trying to look for ways that I can violently disagree with Gabe, but I’m having a difficult time here because I do-

Gabriel Scheinmann:

You can do so peacefully. You can disagree peacefully.

Michael Doran:

I can’t even find anything for peaceful disagreement, because I basically agree with the picture that Gabe just drew. I think we are entering into a, I don’t know if it’s a new Cold War, but increasingly the world is divided into the pro-Western bloc and the China, Russia, Iran, North Korea bloc. Of course, in the Middle East, for us, it’s mainly the pro-Western bloc which would include Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, et cetera, and the Iranian Resistance Axis, as the Iranians call it. The Trump administration will have all of the leverage that Gabe mentioned. The key question that’s going to be in front of them if he wins is the Israeli aspirations to take out the Iranian nuclear program.

Something dramatic happened this last week that didn’t get a lot of press, and that’s that in the opening of the Knesset in Israel, in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Netanyahu openly stated that the major war aim, the end state that he seeks in this war is an end to the Iranian nuclear program. I think that was just. . . People thought he was just. . . He’s always said that he had the nuclear program in his crosshairs, so I think they just took it as more of the same, but I think that they’re really quite serious about this. And what they’ve done in the last attack against Iran has opened up, as Gabe said, new potential, because we can now see with the kind of precision bombing that they did to take out production capabilities of ballistic missiles, these are the intermediate range ballistic missiles that are the greatest threat to the Israelis. They have ended the production of them in Iran.

The next stage is the Israelis will go in and start taking out the existing stockpiles so that. . . Iran is now naked because Israel has decapitated Hezbollah, which was the first shield of the Iranian nuclear program, and now it is degrading and I think will soon have destroyed or at least eliminated the ballistic missiles as a serious threat to Israel. The Iranian nuclear program is naked before the Israelis, and they’re going to be urging both the Biden administration and the incoming Harris administration if Harris wins, or the Trump administration if Trump wins. They’re going to get a much more sympathetic hearing about this from the Trump administration, but it’s not clear to me that President Trump, if he is elected, will say, “Yes, go for it.”

He said, “Go for it,” in the election because it was a good. . . Maybe he truly believes that and he’ll say, “Go for it,” when he’s in power, but that was also in the middle of a campaign when he was distinguishing himself from the Biden administration. When he’s actually in power and he has all of his advisors around him, and they’re weighing all the pros and cons of the Israelis doing that, maybe he’ll have some more hesitation of the kind that we saw when he was in power before, and he had a lot of hesitation about using military power. But the Israelis see an opportunity and they’re going to be pushing hard, and it’s going to be very hard to say no to them.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

But also-

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Sorry, can I just respond to that?

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

So I agree with that, but I think also what you’re saying, just to drive it a bit deeper though, is that holding everything else the same, the magnitude of the Israeli, again, victory might not quite be the right word because we don’t quite know where this ends, obviously, but the magnitude of the Israeli achievements, both physical but also psychological in near-defeating Hamas, decimating Hezbollah, and showing to your point that the Iranians are naked, presented that to an American audience and it fundamentally changes, in fact, lowers from the American perspective, the risk that we might see in whether them doing that or us getting involved in different ways.

I think even a couple years ago, even under an administration that was far more sympathetic, if the Israelis would’ve brought this to them and said, “We’re going to do all this,” you don’t really know what the reaction is going to be. And so even a debate inside a sympathetic administration would be like, “I don’t think you want to do this. This is going to be bad for us.” Now you have evidence. And the same thing on the Houthis stuff, which we can get to too, which is, we have evidence that the Houthis are receiving actionable Iranian intelligence in order to target Western American ships. There was a report in the, I think it was the Wall Street Journal last week or two weeks ago, that they’re receiving Russian intelligence-

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, Russian intelligence.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

. . . to target ships. There’s a report, I think it was also in the Journal, that the Russian convicted arms dealer that the Biden administration released in a prisoner exchange for American journalists and others held hostage is back to helping supply the Houthis weapons. We have all these things now which we didn’t have a couple years ago, but there’s no fear in the same way, or there shouldn’t be. There is clearly in the Biden administration. But I think with the Trump administration, the biggest difference is that there isn’t going to be the same gravitas, let’s say, given to different opinions inside saying, “Well, this could cause World War III,” and so forth, because the other side is going to say, “Well, look at what the Israelis have been doing with active American pressure not to do it, and it’s not caused World War III.”

Michael Doran:

That’s a great point. Can I add something onto that?

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, one-

Michael Doran:

Go ahead. Sure.

Zineb Riboua:

Before you expand, just on what you said on Netanyahu talking about going after Iran, there’s also the fact that when he visited Washington, he talked an Abraham Alliance against Iran. Do you see that Netanyahu is actually trying to just send some ideas and put some ideas out there for the United States to grab and develop a greater anti-Iran-

Michael Doran:

Oh, for sure. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu was one of the main architects of the Abraham Accords, and he helped shape Donald Trump’s thinking about what was possible to do in the Middle East. Before, the relations were not perfect between them, but I think there was a real exchange of ideas, as I expect there will be if Trump wins next Tuesday. The Biden administration, you’ll remember, came into office hostile to the Abraham Accords, and they downplayed them completely. And at the beginning, they wouldn’t even say the word, “Abraham Accords.” And then at a certain point, they recognized that the American public, including the Democratic voters, think that peace between Arabs and Israelis is a good thing-

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Fancy that.

Michael Doran:

And so they started supporting it. But this is a great example, I think though, of how they didn’t have the different elements of American power in alignment. The Trump administration’s understanding of the Abraham Accords is it was the political and diplomatic platform on which you were going to build a security-ist arrangement, a security alliance against Iran. So the Trump team saw Iran as the problem in the region, and the goal was to build a network of allies who could take some of the burden off of the United States of containing Iran. So the security element was always in the back of their minds, or even in the front of their minds as they were putting together the political and economic infrastructure for it, or superstructure, whatever metaphor you want to use. But the Biden administration came in and they saw it completely differently.

They saw the Abraham Accords, or the extension of the Abraham Accords was Saudi-Israeli normalization as a mechanism for bringing back the Palestine question, putting the Palestinians back at center stage in American foreign policy. Because when Trump created the Abraham Accords, he ended the Palestinian veto on security relationships or any kind of normalization between Israel and Arab states. So in the Biden conception, the Obama-Biden conception, this was a huge mistake, and so they attached to Saudi-Israeli normalization a pathway to a two-state solution. This is why they have this reaction that they had to October 7th, where we have to preserve the two-state solution.

At the same time, there’s no security dimension to their idea of Saudi-Israeli normalization. The Biden administration does not see itself as the leader of a coalition to contain Iran. It sees itself more as a mediator between the traditional American allies and the Iranians. And that’s why throughout this war, they have repeatedly put a shield over Iran, and they have prevented the United States from attacking Iran, and they have forbidden the American military to attack Iran. When the Houthis, under Iranian guidance, attack American ships, and they are attacking American naval vessels directly, the United States doesn’t respond by killing Iranian advisors in Yemen. It certainly doesn’t carry out any attacks against the Iranians. Time and again, their message to Israel has been. . . First after the April 13 attack, ballistic missile attack against Israel, the message was, “Don’t counterattack at all.”

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah.

Michael Doran:

This time, after the second ballistic missile attack, they relented a little bit, but it was, “Keep it narrow. Keep it only on military targets. No senior leaders, no energy infrastructure, no nuclear infrastructure.” So they’re forever restraining Israel with respect to Iran and then going to the Iranians and saying, “Let’s de-escalate together and solve this whole problem.” That will not be the Trump approach.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Can I just say two things to that? So tying together the first part you said, so I think what’s happened over the last couple of years is there’s been a lot of myth-busting. So we all remember towards the end of the Obama presidency, Secretary John Kerry gives that big speech of, “Let me tell you, I’ve talked to everybody. There is absolutely not going to be,” I’m paraphrasing, “There’s absolutely not going to be any sort of separate Israeli-Arab state peace without a resolution to the Palestinian question, Palestinian state.” That was a thing, and obviously, that was proven wrong by the Abraham Accords.

Michael Doran:

I’ll quote it directly, it was, “No, no, no, no.” It was like four no’s with John Kerry.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

And the attempt by the Biden administration to smuggle the Palestinian question back in reminds me of the Jimmy Carter administration, where the post-’73 Nixon-Ford Kissinger approach to try and de-link the Egyptians from the Soviet Union, which the Egyptians were desperate to do, and Jimmy Carter comes back in and basically brings the Soviet Union back into. . . With that UN resolution in early September of ‘77, to it. And that’s fundamentally what causes Sadat to go to Jerusalem because he says he’s not understanding the problem here, “I want get out from the Soviet thumb,” and does it. And so you now have this situation similarly here where the Saudis and others are signaling a bit more quietly, but they’re trying to say, “You don’t get it. We want to move on from this. We have Vision 2030, we have the Iranian problem, we have the Muslim brother. We have all these things. Why are you bringing us back in?” And that’s why it’s slow-rode so much, they don’t actually want to be dependent on it. So the myth-busting’s there. One, they tried to bring it back in and I don’t think Trump is going to be as beholden to that approach in the same way. The second obviously is the normalization of military campaign against Iran, which is myth-busting what we said before in terms of it’s not World War III and can make a big difference. I think again, if he wins, he’s going to come into office with just a totally different mindset on it and that leads to the Palestinian question, which is, again, it’s during a political campaign and so who knows whether it’s true, but he’s been asked multiple times since October 7th in public, “Do you support a Palestinian state?”

And he said, “I don’t know if I do. I don’t know. What do you think? I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t.” And again, it’s kind of in the way in which he talks, but it’s a very clear shift. It’s multiple times compared to where the administration ended, right? The way the administration ended, they didn’t start off this way, but was a reiteration of a support fundamentally different in different ways than the conventional, whatever, traditional way you want to call it. But the contrast between Trump signaling that he is, I don’t want to say a blank slate, but seems to be open to a total reimagining or rethinking about what the Palestinian question might look like when it comes to governance and authority and sovereignty and security and all those things, compared to the Biden administration approach that has been reiterated by Harris, which is the time-bound, irreversible, I’m missing the third one, whatever it is, commitment to a Palestinian state with specific parameters on it and that contrast is pretty significant.

Zineb Riboua:

I mean, what I find the most interesting, for example, when we were talking about the Red Sea and the Houthis, I mean, for example, having Jake Sullivan saying that basically we should actually talk to China because China can help us counter the Houthis. I was looking at the numbers yesterday from the Defense Intelligence Agency, 65 in total are the countries that Houthis have targeted and they’re all US partners and allies. Of course, the Houthis target the Chinese and the Russians, but it’s because the Houthis, I mean, it’s only recently that they’ve learned how to use ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

So they really have a strategy of actually going after anyone that has any type of relationship with the United States and it seems that, from the Biden administration’s perspective and Harris probably, is that if we leave conflicts alone, like Ukraine, Gaza, and the Houthis, China, Iran, and Russia with the United States can all get along so that they can work on these transnational issues like climate change and other issues. It seems that from the Trump administration’s perspective, and I think it’s still the case now, where they see that the United States has adversaries, which are China, Russia, and Iran, and that the United States should maximize its share of power as much as possible if this is how you both see it.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Can I say two quick things and then Mike, jump in. So to use the Houthi as an example, so the administration has defined our objectives as restoring freedom of navigation. That’s not incorrect. That is what has happened. But that’s the wrong way to frame it and the wrong way to think about it because at the end of the day, it is not that the Houthis have disrupted freedom of navigation for everybody, which is to your point, right? Russian ships and Chinese ships and Iranian ships are going through. It’s only to certain people.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

I.e us in the West. And so much like I’ve written about this before, much like when Trump entered office the first time, the counter-ISIS campaign had already started. I mean, Obama sort of had forced to go back, but it wasn’t progressing or moving as fast as you want it to. It was not clearing the objectives. The objectives were there, he changed it a little bit, and reoriented the military strategy in order to make much more significant progress on that. So I don’t think it’s so crazy to see the analogy with the Houthis here to the Islamic state of it’s almost eight years ago, which is there is a military campaign, there is a military coalition that we have put together a number of ways. The objective, even if it’s phrased a little differently, is not necessarily the wrong one, but the way in which we’re going about doing it obviously is almost self-defeating, right?

I mean, it’s certainly not working and it might even be self-defeating. And I do see there’s an opportunity here for the Trump administration to come in and take that effort and rejigger it in a way and also present it I think to Trump much like that counter-ISIS effort in that way. But again, I go back to your point about the, and then I’ll let Mike jump in, about the transnational or sort of global issues which the Obama Biden Harris like to talk about a lot. The freedom of navigation part is not what’s going on, right? This is an Iranian-backed attempt to eject, physically, literally if you think about maritime shipping, American and European and Israeli ships out of the region in probably the most effective way than anybody else has done in a very, very long time.

Michael Doran:

There’s been an interesting shift in the Biden administration’s policy with respect to the Houthis that I think just reinforces what Gabe was saying. The Biden administration was trying, as I said, to be extremely targeted and limited and just defensive with respect to the Houthi attacks in the hopes of not escalating the war further and with its eyes all the time on getting a ceasefire in Gaza. So in its theory, if we’ve got a ceasefire in Gaza, we’ll get a ceasefire in Lebanon and we’ll get a ceasefire with the Houthi. So it’s all focused on the Israeli-Palestinian-

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Linkage. Back to linkage.

Michael Doran:

Back to linkage of the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic. The Iranians orchestrated all of their proxies against Israel and sent the message to the Americans that, “Yes, we will de-escalate across the board if you keep, basically, if you let Hamas live.” That was the goal of the Iranian policy. So American diplomacy was reinforcing the Iranian policy of unifying all of the arenas against Israel, which was self-defeating in the way that Gabe was suggesting. But as the Americans have responded to events though, they have moved closer in some ways to the Israeli view of the world, the view of the world that I have as well, which is Russia, China, Iran against the West.

And you can see it in the attacks against the Houthis. The Americans had purely defensive rules of engagement. So if you saw the Houthis putting a missile on a launcher, you could hit the launcher, which couldn’t take out the Houthi leadership, you couldn’t take out any economic infrastructure, and you sure couldn’t hit an Iranian in Yemen. But then the Israelis went and took out Hodeidah. I have it on pretty good authority that the, and it stands to reason that this would’ve been the case, that the Israelis notified the Americans ahead of time that they were going to do this and they didn’t get a red light.

And then now in this negotiation that went on, this complex negotiation that went on between Israel and Washington about the Israeli counterattack against Iran after Iran’s most recent ballistic missile barrage, the Americans and the British carried out an attack against the Houthis. It was a much more significant attack than any of the previous ones and it was different. They hit an underground target. I don’t know what it was, but it was clearly part of, it was American-British messaging, not just against the Houthis, but against the Iranians because they were, again though within this de-escalation framework, they realized that they could not restrain the Israelis from hitting the Iranians so they tried to shape the Israeli response so that it would be as light as possible and then they wanted to deter the Iranians from hitting back.

And so they did that by carrying out a military operation, a significant military operation against the Houthis. The Iranians understood then that there was a level of coordination between Jerusalem and Washington with respect to Iran that they had not seen before. It hasn’t been reported like that, but that’s what happened. And in order to get there, the administration had to move closer to seeing itself as Israel’s ally against Iran. And that’s the closest we’ve ever come to it.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Can I, just one other thing? So I think also traditionally, and by that I don’t mean either Biden or Harris, Trump, I mean putting aside the political context, the idea of the alliance structure, which here is the heavyweights match up against the heavyweights and the featherweight against featherweight, the lightweight against lightweight and so that when we think of a US-Iran question, to your point, it’s an Israel-Hezbollah and Israel-Hamas question, right? Historically, there never really is discussion about American use of force against Hamas directly or against Hezbollah because those are Israel’s to deal with in that way and we deal with Iran.

The example you just gave, which happened two weeks ago or whenever it was, now it’s an inverse, which is the Israelis are taking on the Iranians directly and all the sudden we are actually going after the proxies. And whether that’s smart or not, I’d have to think about it a bit more because from the American perspective, it’s a little bit of a, what’s the expression? You kill the chicken to scare the monkey or whatever it is. But from the Israeli perspective, it’s certainly in my view a good thing that they seem out of necessity clearly, not because they want to, but out of necessity, taking on a much larger regional role in a way that we have not been doing, but there is this reversal. I don’t know what you think-

Michael Doran:

Yeah, yeah. It’s very interesting. Let me just point out another component of that, which I alluded to before. If you go to Gabe’s analogy about the ‘73 war back in Jimmy Carter, the Nixon and Carter era, the Israelis needed the United States to be the counterbalance to the Soviet Union. There’s no way the Israelis could match up pound for pound against the Soviet Union and you saw that in the ‘73 war when they started running through their magazine and losing equipment at an incredible rate. They needed the United States for resupply and they needed the United States to deter the Soviets from putting Soviet troops into the arena. There’s been a similar kind of matchup, or an analogous matchup, in this conflict from October 7th where if you had the Iranians in the role of the Soviet Union and the United States is the counterbalance to them. But the thing here is that Iran is not the equivalent of the Soviet Union.

It’s a very strange power in that it is a middle power in a way, but it doesn’t have many of the essential characteristics of a middle power. It doesn’t have a navy to speak of. It doesn’t have an air force to speak of. It doesn’t have a regular land army. What it has is terrorism, the ballistic missiles, drones, and cruise missiles, these disruptive military capabilities and its nuclear weapons program. The United States was treating it, in the Biden administration’s dealings with the Israelis, it was treating the Iranians as the functional equivalent of the Soviet Union. The Israelis had to buy that, accept that structure of relations, for three reasons. One, they were caught by surprise in Gaza and were not ready for it and were in great difficulty and needed the American political support and resupply. Secondly, they did not have a good answer to the ballistic missile threat from Iran and also from Hezbollah.

And they need the American defensive shield. Now that they’ve decapitated Hezbollah and destroyed much of its stockpile and now that they have started to degrade the serious ballistic missile, the most serious ballistic missile threat from the Iranians, and they’ve also learned that they can absorb the blows from the ballistic missiles and without much concern, then they need the United States less and less with respect to Iran. There’s still a dependence there because they have about a thousand ballistic missiles they could shoot at Israel and that would overwhelm Israel’s sensors. But Israel is going to gradually, as I say, the Israelis are intensely aware of what is creating the intense dependence on America and they understand how to remove the threats from Iran that are enhancing that dependence.

So I think we’re going to see more and more Israel become the equivalent. We’re not going to have the structure anymore of US, Iran, Israel, and Iran’s proxies. It’s going to be Israel versus Iran and Israel has the upper hand. This is the thing that there’s been a dramatic change in the Middle Eastern balance of power in the last couple of months and people’s heads, they haven’t gotten around yet, is incredibly dramatic. Israel is now has the upper hand, clear upper hand against Iran and we have to watch how everyone responds to that. How are the Chinese going to respond? How are the Russians? How are the Turks?

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. Regarding the Chinese, to get back to the elections question, during the Biden administration there was this huge Saudi deal that the Chinese brokered to normalize relations with Iran. And basically because the Saudis were also just learned a lesson, you can’t really go against Iran in this case. They basically had to move on from the Yemeni conflict and just basically normalize relations with the Houthis. The Biden administration said, “This is wonderful actually. This is exactly what we want to see. We want to see Saudi Arabia and Iran normalized relations.”

When I think of the Trump administration, I see Trump maybe thinking more of China’s our adversary. There is no way we want Saudi Arabia have a relationship with them in that way. Precisely because if there is a war in Taiwan, you want to have a package of sanctions and China depends on Saudi Arabia for their energy security. Do you have the same assessment for that? How do you see Harris and Trump regarding their vision of China in the Middle East?

Gabriel Scheinmann:

I mean, I don’t think Harris has a vision of China in the middle, I mean, it doesn’t seem like they’ve thought about it very much. I mean, certainly in the Biden administration and it’s I think sort of just a reflex, not because they spent a lot of time on it, but there is this concern or they are aware of, at least at a top level, that says, “Oh, if the US doesn’t do this and the US isn’t president of that, someone else will.” There’s a lot of truth to that obviously. But they’ve taken it to the point it means that if the US isn’t pressuring Israel to end the war, while China will come and reap the gains. If the US isn’t pressuring our allies to appease their enemies, then China will come in. But they’re doing it in the wrong way. So I don’t think we are. . . Mike would, I think, be better placed to answer this. I don’t think we are ever going to be able to convince our allies, our coalition in the region to look at the global coalition of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea as one entity in the way that we may be able to convince our European or our Asian allies to be able to do that. I don’t think we’re ever going to get the Israelis or the Saudis to look at it in that way.

I think we are increasingly looking through the Middle East through that competition lens. There’s concern about technology transfers or other things. But at the end of the day, we still have this situation where we, the United States, are weakly providing. . . weakly, not in a every week basis. Weakly as in not strongly providing some sort of security order but the Chinese are still underneath of that. Still coming in and investing amount.

So the Iran-Saudi deal that you’re referring to is the Saudis very clearly saying, “Well, the Americans want to give us the stiff arm. Biden’s trying to show us the Heisman. They’re trying to kill off the combustion engine and the use of fossil fuels. What good will we be to them if they do that? And I have this Vision 2030 transformative agenda, and the Americans aren’t going to. . . the noise coming out of Washington is Saudi pariah. There isn’t going to be a lot of American investment here. I need, need. . .”

The scale of this is so massive. And where the only sources of capital that can do that that actually need to be able to do is China. So I think it’s for a variety of factors. I don’t know. I don’t think that, even under a Trump administration coming in, and as a consequence of the Israeli actions, resetting the scale on the security landscape will solve that in and of its own because I still think they’ll say at the end of the day, “Beijing can provide billions and billions and billions of the capital that we need and want to be able to do all this and the customers be able to do it.” It’s not just energy. I think it’s other things, too, and the Americans can’t do that.

Zineb Riboua:

Do you agree with-

Michael Doran:

I don’t think the Biden administration, and I assume that Kamala Harris shares the view of the Biden administration. I don’t think the Biden administration sees the Middle East as an arena of serious competition with the Chinese. There are certain areas where they’ve drawn red lines for Middle Eastern allies who are moving in the direction of China, but they fundamentally believe, as Secretary Blinken said to his Chinese counterpart in Anchorage when they first met, when Blinken and Sullivan met with the Chinese. Blinken gave some remarks where he said, “In the Middle East, our interests and your interests are compatible.”

And they believe that they can stabilize.. They believed, and that I don’t think they have left this conception completely, they could stabilize the Middle East, downgrade it in American. . . in the-

Zineb Riboua:

The list of priorities?

Michael Doran:

In the list of priorities for American foreign policy and live comfortably with the Chinese in the region. I believe that it was a mistake. I believe that the Chinese are competing with US asymmetrically in the Middle East and that Iran is a major element of their. . . a disruptive, anti-American Iran on the march against the American security system is part of the Chinese strategy, that Iran is working as a stalking horse for the Chinese.

But I don’t think that the Biden administration sees it that way. I think the Trump administration will be more inclined to see it that way. But there is this wing of the Republican Party which sees the Middle East pretty much like the. . . which is an important part of Donald Trump’s base. There’s a big current of opinion in MAGA world that sees the Middle East as of secondary importance, sees the conflict with Iran as overblown, that we are being catapulted by Israel into this conflict with Iran. It basically ends up being in the same place that the progressives are with respect to Iran.

And Donald Trump, I think if he becomes president will contend with it like we saw him contend with it in the first term. He has this method that is quite disconcerting to people where he says, “Well, I got John Bolton over here and he loves war. And I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s making a lot of sense.” And he makes public some of the disputes that go on within an administration which traditionally are not made public, and we hear about it.

One of the amazing things about the Biden administration is that you never hear really about the disagreements at the top, even though the president himself I don’t think is a particularly strong chief executive. But it hasn’t led to all kinds of disagreements. Trump brings those out in public. Sometimes it gets a little messy when he does that. I think there’s a bit of a method to his madness in that he uses it to show his. . . he’s doing a straddle between traditional Republican national security constituencies and those on the restraintist wing of the Republican Party in his coalition, and he’s showing himself to be caught. “Oh, they’re pulling me this way. They’re pulling me that way.” He did that on Syria a lot, where he kept claiming that we was going to pull all the troops out of Syria, and giving the order to pull them out, but then they never got pulled out. I think he was partly frustrated with General Mattis in Syria, and he was being open about that. But I think he was also comfortable letting everyone see that he was contending with these different strains in his administration.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Just that, and again, because it’s the last couple of weeks before the election you can decide how big of a grand assault you want to take things, but Trump encourages the Israelis to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, Iranian energy sites. They were open about it. A week later, his running mate, Senator JD Vance, says, “Well, we should, the United States, should never want to get in a war with Iran.”

Michael Doran:

This is a great example.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Now, you can actually square that circle because of what we just talked about, which is some of the changes here, which is if we’ve been treating Iran as a heavyweight and instead they’re actually, I’m going to screw up my boxing analogy, they’re actually a welterweight. And we’ve been treating the Israelis as a featherweight and they should be a welterweight. And actually that’s the way to do it, and we just need to support them. So you can square those two things. But in terms of messaging from the Republican ticket, again, within a few days of each other on a pretty big issue, those aren’t exactly the same messages

Michael Doran:

Yeah. As domestic politics, it’s managing the straddle in the same way.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. Just to continue on that, one last question. I just hear whenever I read the op-eds and what is going on in the campaigns, especially on the Republican side there is this fear of restraintism and isolationism being a big faction now. And you mentioned it before about this, that they share sometimes the same ideas as the progressive left on several issues. Do you see it as really a developing ideology or do you see it as, as you mentioned before, just Trump trying to appease his constituency but also responding to them?

Gabriel Scheinmann:

So I think the restraintism, which I think there are a lot of different terms of it, it’s different than isolationism in the narrow sense but, more importantly, it’s really a coalition. The people who fly that banner don’t all arrive there coming from the same places. Some of them are. . . again, the horseshoe theory of politics is there really is no different than the Bernie Sanders wing of these things to it, which is essentially America’s a bad country and if it stopped doing bad things, there’d be fewer bad things that happened to us. There are those people in there now in the Republican Party in a different way, and it manifests itself in this against the war machine sort of thing.

Then there are others who, again, where Hudson, Walter Russell Mead has written about this extensively over a couple of decades. Then there are some who are actually in this sort of Jacksonian mode of things that sometimes come across as, “Well, we really shouldn’t be engaging in all of these things.”

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

But sometimes we actually do need to, and we will. And if you cross us, you’re never going to see it again. And they often do show up now increasingly under that banner. But it’s a totally different ilk than what we were talking about before. You can have a totally reasonable debate about whether the United States should be taking military action against Iran between two people who are fundamental conservative internationalist hawks, because that has to do with prudential judgment.

So just because one ends up against this at this moment for this thing doesn’t necessarily make one a restrainer, even though somehow they get enveloped in this coalition in that way. I don’t think Trump himself flies under one of the sub-banners over those things, and so he is able to float above it or mix it together in such a way where sometimes it makes a lot of sense.

We’re a long way from this obviously, but even when under discussion today when talking about military action against Iran when it does come up, which is still not a majority idea by any stretch of the imagination inside the Republican coalition, it is still of a totally different ilk than the discussion 15 or 20 years ago when it came to post-9/11 and Iraq among those things. It’s night and day in terms of what we were talking about.

So I think the restraint stuff is real. It’s not that it’s not. Mike’s right. It’s real. I think it’s growing. I think it also. . . a lot of the work my organization does is on the other side of that, a belief in American exceptionalism, which a lot of the restrainers don’t have. But in terms of its manifestation at the highest level of American politics, and particularly in the Republican Party, it is still a minority and it’s diffuse or diverse and on different issues ends up being much weaker or much stronger, depending on the issue.

Michael Doran:

I agree with that with one caveat, which is that. . . I think Gabe did a very good job of describing the deeper approaches to foreign policy that informed these attitudes at this moment, but there has kind of coalesced an ideology around the Trump, the MAGA movement that pulls all of these together. And the ideology kind of has a life of its own. And the ideology says, “Our elite is corrupt and they are committed to the empire at the expense of the republic.”

And so we have to pull back on the imperial inclinations. I believe that that ideology will not hold up over the long term because, just as the progressives have had to deal with the realities of the Middle East, and it doesn’t conform to their view of how everything. . . they believe if I push against Israel, then I get peace. And they keep pushing against Israel and they get more war from Iran.

They’re going to find out, the Trump administration will find out in power as it makes decisions that things don’t go the way they’re supposed to according to the ideology. And that ideology I think is a much more ephemeral one than the progressive one. The progressive is rooted deep in. It’s being instilled in every university across the country. This one is a product of a moment, of a political moment, and it will develop. It’ll go away rather quickly, but it does have a life of its own.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Can I just? Not to try and take the last word, but oftentimes when people take-

Michael Doran:

I want to get the last because I have one thing I want to say.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

When people do talk about restraint, they often marry it with the word realism.

Zineb Riboua:

Yes.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Realism and restraint. Realists and restrainers. That’s the sort of ideology we’re talking about here. The words power and prudence might come across as synonyms to those two words. Power and realism, prudence and restraint in that way. And so they’re actually very close to one another, but they mean two fundamentally different, different things. And if you go back and look, Secretary Pompeo in the last year of the administration in Trump’s first term, gave a couple speeches. And I can’t remember if this one was at the Nixon Library or somewhere else, but where he laid out some of these words using the words realism and restraint, but actually meaning power and prudence on these things. And I actually think that, to me, is where the debate will be, at least inside the Republican Party, on not so much, what are the words that are used? But what is their actual true meaning? But you can have the last word.

Zineb Riboua:

The last word to you.

Michael Doran:

I just wanted to make a point that I believe the Biden team after the election is going to push through in the UN one or two resolutions designed to undermine the Israeli right. This is being debated now.

Zineb Riboua:

Is it on the Lebanon?

Michael Doran:

It will be one on the war, a ceasefire now resolution and calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied. And the second one will be about a two-state solution. Trying to set up the irreversible pathway to. . . the parameters. To define in international law the parameters of the two-state solution in such a way that will undermine the Israeli right. It will be the equivalent of. . . he’s going to get the last word. It’s going to be the equivalent of Obama’s Resolution 2334. I say, “Obama’s resolution.” It was New Zealand who pushed it through, and Obama was powerless to stand up to New Zealand. But-

Gabriel Scheinmann:

I totally agree with you if Trump wins. Do you think they’d still do that if Harris wins?

Michael Doran:

Yes, they’re going to do it.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

You don’t think she’ll say, “You’re creating problems for me?”

Michael Doran:

No. No, no, no, no. They have to. This is deep in their understanding of the Middle East. The job of the United States is to keep the two-state solution alive. They believe they’re doing God’s work. They’re proud of this. It’s not just vengeance against Netanyahu, although it will feel good to them to kick Netanyahu. They think they’re doing God’s work.

Zineb Riboua:

Okay. Well, Mike, Gabe, thank you very much for joining me.

Gabriel Scheinmann:

Thank you.

Michael Doran:

Thank you.

Zineb Riboua:

And thank you for joining us today. Please check Hudson.com and the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. Thank you. See you next time.