CFR-Brookings Institution Election 2024 Virtual Public Event: The Future of the Middle East

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Brookings Institution Foreign Policy Program are collaborating to convene an expert discussion to examine the future of the Middle East.

As part of a series of virtual events convened by CFR and Brookings in the lead-up to Election Day, the conversation will examine the escalating conflicts in the Middle East and the policy options and priorities for an incoming U.S. administration in the region. 

The series is a part of Election 2024, a CFR initiative focused on exploring the United States’ role in the world, how international affairs issues affect voters, and the foreign policy issues at stake in November, and Election ’24: Issues at Stake, a Brookings initiative aimed to bring public attention to consequential policy issues confronting voters and policymakers in the run up to the 2024 election. Both projects are made possible in part by grants from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

SALAMA: Thanks so much, and welcome to today’s Election 2024 virtual public event cohosted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution. My name is Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal, and I’ll be presiding over today’s very timely discussion on the future of the Middle East.

This is the final event in a virtual series cosponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution in the leadup to Election Day, which is now just twenty-eight days away for anyone counting. This series is part of Election 2024, a CFR initiative focused on exploring the United States’ role in the world, how international affairs affect voters, and foreign policy issues at stake in November; and Election ’24: Issues at Stake, the Brookings initiative aimed at bringing public attention to consequential policy issues confronting voters and policymakers in the runup to the 2024 election. Both projects are made possible by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Today’s conversation will examine the escalating conflicts in the Middle East, and the policy options and priorities for an incoming U.S. administration in the region. We may not get to every issue in time together this afternoon, but we do hope to bring up some of the most important issues during your question-and-answer session as well. And so we will be getting to those very shortly.

In the meantime, I do want to introduce today’s very impressive speakers, and you’ll have their full bios in the Zoom chat box.

First, Steven Cook is Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and the director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at CFR. His work focuses on Arab and Turkish politics, as well as U.S.-Middle East policy.

Suzanne Maloney is vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings, where her research focuses on Iran and Persian Gulf energy. She’s a leading voice on U.S. policy toward Iran and the broader Middle East.

Linda Robinson is senior fellow for women and foreign policy at CFR. She focuses on women’s political and economic leadership, the relationship between gender equality and democracy, technology-facilitated violence, and current international affairs.

And Shibley Telhami is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, and the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland. He’s a leading voice on U.S. policy in the Middle East, on Arab politics, and on shifting political identities in the Arab world.

So very impressive group here.

As a reminder, today’s discussion is on the record, and we will be posting it on CFR.org and the Brookings website.

So let’s dive in, folks. Obviously, a very eventful week. We’ve seen Israel’s—what it calls its second stage of its military operation really kick up with its operations in Lebanon. Senior—very senior leaders of Hezbollah have been taken out, have been killed, in those attacks, and a number of different escalations. We’ve seen in the meantime a number of civilian homes destroyed, the death toll is rising, and even historic infrastructures damaged. And so, obviously, this heightens both the pressure on Israel, but also regionally.

And so, Steven, I want to start with you. Given all these events of the last few days, but of course of the last year—and we just marked the memorial of the October 7 attacks yesterday—where do things go from here for Israel in particular?

COOK: Well, thanks very much, Vivian, for the question, and it’s great to be with Shibley and Linda and Suzanne on this panel. And it comes at an extraordinary moment. As you just remarked, it comes a year and one day after the Hamas attacks on Israel, and we have seen this conflict—a horrifying conflict unfold over the course of the last year and is now metastasizing into a regional conflict.

I’m glad you asked me the question about Israel because I was just there not long ago. I was actually there for the beeper and walkie-talkie operations, as well as the first strike on the Hezbollah leadership that took out about twelve very senior commanders oof Hezbollah’s military forces. And in the immediate aftermath of those operations, the Israelis felt that the wind was now at their sails, they had turned the tide. The Gaza war was not the war that they had been preparing to fight; they had actually been preparing for twenty years to fight Hezbollah. They had, obviously, taken a beating in the court of public opinion over the horrifying destruction of the Gaza Strip and the huge numbers of people who had been killed, and now felt that it was time to turn the page on Gaza and change the rules of the game in Israel’s north. Of course, you have 60,000 to 80,000 Israelis who have been evacuated from their homes.

It strikes me, however, that after those heady days—and quickly after that was the killing of Hassan Nasrallah. But the Israelis are not recognizing that this is—despite doing tremendous damage to Hezbollah in these opening weeks of this conflict, Hezbollah has managed to continue to fire on Israel. I think I read there were 800 rockets fired on Israel from Lebanon since Nasrallah was taken out. There are tens of thousands of armed Hezbollah soldiers that the Israeli ground forces are now encountering as they move deeper and deeper into Lebanon. This is going to be a very long and difficult operation for the Israelis, even as Hezbollah has been weakened.

And anybody who thinks that there is some sort of quick end to this conflict—that the United States, and France, and Arab countries are going to negotiate some sort of ceasefire—needs only to look at Gaza. One of the problems with getting a ceasefire with Gaza, separate from what the Hamas leadership has wanted, is that the Israelis have been good to their words since at least October 8 or 9 of last year in which they vowed that they would change the rules of the game—reestablish their deterrence, but not go back to some sort of status quo where they live, from their perspective, under the threat of either Hamas or Hezbollah. And it’s likely to take them a lot of time. As I said, they are encountering resistance despite having decapitated Hezbollah.

I will say this: The Israeli military is not built for these long conflicts in two different theaters. Israeli military doctrine is for short, devastating conflict on enemies’ territories. They are on enemies’ territories, but it is taking them a long time, which is going to—it hasn’t so far outwardly, but going to take a toll on Israeli society and the Israeli economy.

So I think this continues.

SALAMA: Suzanne, let me ask you—and of course, I encourage the others to chime in as well—the U.S. has really been trying to talk Israel down off of a second operation in Lebanon, partially because they were worried about expanding the conflict, broadening this, especially with regard to any provocation of Iran, which is Hezbollah’s closest ally. We saw Iran firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel. Fortunately, it did not cause too much damage, but Israel has now vowed intense retaliation. And so where do we go from here if Israel does, in fact, retaliate with the serious retaliation that Benjamin Netanyahu and many in his top—the top of the government have vowed? And how likely is it that the U.S. would be able to deter any further escalation?

MALONEY: Thanks so much, Vivian. It’s a great question, and I’m just really privileged to be here with you and with our fellow panelists for this conversation.

I do think that the minute the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah came into play, it was inevitable that we would be in a phase of escalation that engaged Iran directly. Hassan Nasrallah was not just a sort of proxy partner of the Islamic Republic of Iran; he was the leader of a group that had been in many ways forged by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the early years after the 1979 revolution in Iran. He had a close personal relationship with the Iranian supreme leader. And so the decision to take out Nasrallah was a decision to escalate the war and to potentially move to a situation in which there would be a direct exchange of fire with Iran. They knew this from the April attacks, I think, that it was understood that Israel’s response to the barrage of missiles that Iran fired in April after the killing of a key Iranian general in Damascus, that Iran would be prepared to cross that Rubicon once again. The Israelis responded at that time in a way that was sophisticated and non-escalatory, but probably not sufficient to deter Iran from firing on Israel once again. That happened last week. And I think we’re all now waiting to see how the Israelis might respond.

The options are, I think, multiple. They could do something along the lines of what they did in April, perhaps another sophisticated attack to demonstrate their technical superiority over Iran’s military, to demonstrate that they can take out key air defense systems, which is what they did in April, but to do it on a larger scale. They could do something that would be a little bit more showy. For example, go after oil and gas installations, particularly export facilities in the Gulf. That would have a couple of benefits, I think, from the Israeli perspective.

It would reinforce the economic pressure that has been applied against Iran since the 2018 decision by the Trump administration to leave the nuclear deal, and perhaps strengthen the sanctions, the economic coercion that has lapsed as Iran has been successful in smuggling its oil. It might minimize civilian casualties. But it would almost certainly escalate, because the Iranians have said over many, many years that if they can’t export, their neighbors won’t be able to export either. And so I think we would potentially see impact on the global economy and further action from Iran, even against other Gulf countries’ export facilities, as they did in 2019.

SALAMA: They moved a lot of their enrichment activities around the country. Do you still think that they could—that Israel, if it retaliates, could put a dent in the program?

MALONEY: Well, that would be the third option. So there’s oil and gas, but then the even more escalatory step would be to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities. I think that that would be quite problematic because the Israelis really don’t have the capacity to take that—to make a significant dent, as you say, in Iran’s nuclear capabilities. And it would almost certainly pull the United States in, in some way, because the Iranians would therefore escalate, I think, against a variety of different American assets and interests in the region. So my guess is that we see something on the lower end, in part because of exactly what Steven noted, that Israel is now in a multifront war and its capacity is going to be stretched over time.

SALAMA: Linda, all the while we’re seeing continued operations in Gaza that have been unrelenting. And in the West Bank you see continued escalation of military activity there. What is the end game for Israel with regard to the Palestinian territories? Where will Netanyahu feel like he has accomplished what he’s seeking to accomplish? And particularly in the West Bank, which, to a large extent, has not been involved—definitely has not been involved in Hamas’ attacks, but it has also tried to sort of be the broker of some sort of agreement, or some sort of understanding with the Israeli government.

ROBINSON: Yes. Thank you, Vivian. And, first, I’d just like to acknowledge, of course, we’re here a day after the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis in the most brutal fashion, and including the mutilation and rape of many women, and 250 hostages, 101 of which are still in Gaza. So we are, unfortunately, deeply mired still in war, and the toll which many people on the line may know but it’s worth noting quickly. The statistics are we’re approaching 42,000 dead in Gaza, 97,000 wounded in Gaza, with another 10,000 probably unaccounted for, and possibly dead.

The figures in the West Bank are not nearly as high. Of course, Gaza has suffered the brunt of the Israeli attack with, of course, Hamas dug into the tunnels there and holding out. But massive destruction of infrastructure in the West Bank—I’m sorry, in Gaza, primarily. Eighty-seven percent of the schools, 63 percent of the physical infrastructure, the buildings. And I just yesterday saw they got out eight patients to Romania to receive urgently needed medical care. There are 12,000 people in Gaza that urgently need medical care. So we need to understand it’s absolutely dire there every day.

In the West Bank there have been almost 900 people killed. That’s a combination of Israeli Defense Force operations and Israeli settlers, as settler violence is at an all-time high. There have been an estimated 15,000 wounded. And these are U.N.-compiled figures. They come, in the case of the West Bank, from the Palestinian Authority government there, and from the Gaza Ministry of Health, in that case. There have been 1,400 settler attacks just this year and almost 5,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes, either from demolition of the homes or seizure of the property. There’s a massive move that’s been underway last year and this year to increase settlements, to expand massively the land for those settlements in the southern perimeter around Jerusalem, bifurcating East Jerusalem from Lebanon—I’m sorry—from Bethlehem and the West Bank.

So this is where I get to the future solutions narrow down dramatically. The ability to form a Palestinian state is now almost physically impossible, if the government of Netanyahu goes through with these plans. Land swaps were always envisioned, but creation of this amount of settlements on a massive scale are going to create facts on the ground and make it very difficult. Now, there is an interim government of the Palestinian Authority, but their proposals have fallen on deaf ears. And even though the U.S. has called for an eventual pathway to a two-state solution, I’ll just note that in July the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, voted—sixty-eight to nine I think was the vote—against the creation of a Palestinian state. So you just have massive rejection of that option.

And I would just end by saying I think we’re at a critical juncture in terms of the loss of U.S. influence. Israeli and U.S. relations, I think, are at absolute rock bottom. There’s been a lack of notification of key strikes by Israel, including the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, and very little exercising of the U.S. leverage that is represented by its massive aid to Israel. The two small efforts made were pause in some weapons delivery earlier in the summer and the withholding of a veto for a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations. So I think we’re really at a point to ask, what is the U.S. going to do? And while it’s going to stand by Israel in the defense of Israel, what do defensive actions constitute versus this incredible escalation that we’ve seen? As Steven indicated, I think under the presumption that there is a military solution, and Israel is going for that.

SALAMA: I’m going to be turning to the U.S. elections momentarily, but Shibley, Linda just mentioned Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah who was killed last week. I guess it was. It’s all a blur. Everything’s been happening so quickly. Ismail Haniyeh, the leader—the political leader of Hamas was also killed in Iran—in a strike in Iran. A number of their top officers, for both Hamas and Hezbollah, have been taken out. So have we seen the last of Hamas and Hezbollah? Because that is what Benjamin Netanyahu has set out to do. Or, for every one of these top militants that are killed, are there ten waiting in the ranks? I mean is this problem going to continue?

TELHAMI: First of all, thank you very much. And before I answer you, again, I also want to remember our colleague from Brookings and the CFR Martin Indyk, who passed over the summer, who has been a friend to all of us on this panel and who would have certainly been part of this conversation. May his memory be a blessing.

Just with regard to the assassinations, obviously these are huge events. They’re showy. They capture the imagination. They change the conversation. And they’re consequential. People—leaders matter. Nasrallah was an important leader, for a lot of reasons. But we’ve been there over and over and over again. Not only prior leaders of Hezbollah that have been assassinated, prior leaders of Hamas that have been assassinated, and somebody emerges the next day, and it doesn’t change. And in this particular case, it wasn’t just Nasrallah, as Steve has said. Obviously, the Israelis have gone after a lot of leaders. This has been a devastating set of operations.

They’ve taken a hit organizationally. But look at what they’ve done since, just in the past week. Where the numbers of rockets they’re sending Israel’s way have actually increased, and the range for those rockets have increased. Just today they had over a hundred rockets, mostly in the Haifa area, that have impacted life in those areas. So I think that that is not—if you’re going to you create a strategy based on that, it is going to be a failed strategy.

Now, let me just say that I like one of the descriptions that have been used about Netanyahu’s own strategy, which is escaping forward. Escaping forward. So you’re mired in a quagmire. You don’t know how to get out of it. You’re getting hit over it. And then you escape into another crisis. That creates a show, and then it looks all good, and you promise a lot more, and then you get stuck in that quagmire pretty quickly, and then you escape into the next one. And I think that’s been the case so far with Netanyahu. Now, I think that part of the problem for all of us at the moment is how do we discuss this issue even, given the fact that we’re still in the middle of so much human tragedy?

Linda has described what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, and only a tiny bit of it. Gaza has been pretty much obliterated. It might take, by estimates of the United Nations, over eighty years to just rebuild what was there, which was not a good place. You are looking at what’s happening in Lebanon. We’re calling it a “limited operation.” Well, according to the numbers that we have, 1.2 million people have already been displaced in this, quote, “limited operation.” So it’s hard to, kind of—like, we don’t want to really escape from discussing this reality. It’s awful. It must come to an end. That we need an end to it.

With regard to the impact of those events, I don’t think that we know for sure how this is going to play itself out. There is no question in my mind that Hezbollah has been weakened. I’d be—one would be blind not to see it. But it looks like they’re still able to fight. It looks—Gaza, after a full year with Gaza being obliterated, pretty much, Hamas is still fighting. They just sent some rockets to Tel Aviv. And with Iran, I think it’s a big issue for Israel even to contemplate, because I think that, as Steve said, the Israeli doctrine is quick wars. For one thing, Israel seeks to avoid wars of attrition. It really dreads wars of attrition, which is why it seeks to maintain what is called escalation dominance—meaning it seeks to escalate quickly and dominate that escalation all the way up to nuclear weapons, if necessary.

And yet, it finds itself in a war of attrition based—this has been a year in the fight with Gaza. It’s going to—in Lebanon we don’t know when this is going to end. And if you enter a war with Iran, even if Israel has the upper hand—it probably does, in terms of weapons and technical and support from the United States, and certainly the nuclear arena—Iran has shown that it has the capability to produce cutting-edge missiles and deliver them. And there is no reason for us to expect that they wouldn’t continue to do in case—if you have an ongoing war with Iran. Well, that defeats the idea of trying to prevent wars of attrition.

So the Israelis don’t know where to go. They didn’t know before October 7. Let’s not pretend the horror of—October 7 was horrible in and of itself, and obviously had huge consequences that we have witnessed in Gaza. But let’s not pretend that things were good before. And many of us thought that there was going to be an explosion pretty soon, in part because—you asked about what the Israelis gain. We know that this particular Israeli government had given up on the two states long before October 7. Now maybe the public opinion also joins them on that, but it had given up on that idea. And their idea was to hopefully annex the West Bank. And some in that government, including Ben-Gvir, had basically also hoped to regain control of Gaza.

So you have this kind of expansionist idea that preceded even what happened in October last year and in the past year. And now, of course, you have the public opinion layered over this where people can’t see possible coexistence. They don’t want two states. They fear one state with equality. And worse than that, everybody sees this now as an existential fight. It’s either us or them. And that’s the worst thing, not just for the prospects of anything fruitful to come out even after there is a ceasefire, but is also terrible for the United States because, given that Israel could not have fought this war for a year without continuous, robust support by the United States. So it is essential in this fight, and seen that way by the Israelis.

It becomes—the conflict comes into our own country, where the fight for supporting Israel or not supporting Israel is seen as an existential fight because it’s so essential for supporting Israel. So we’re in a new territory, the likes of which I have never experienced as a scholar of this issue. And the choices are limited. And we don’t really even know if there’s going to be what people talk about the day after. I don’t even know what a day after means. I don’t even know what is it that—the event that is going to be the thing that after which we say it’s the day after. Maybe a ceasefire, for sure. We all hope for a ceasefire any day, any time. It was—it’s already a year late. Certainly essential. But a ceasefire is only going to be a ceasefire. It’s going to create some reality. We’re going to wake up to a sobering reality of choices that are going to be extremely painful for all the parties concerned.

SALAMA: We have barely skimmed the surface of the challenges facing the future of the Middle East. Of course, this is an election 2024 panel. And so we want to talk about the impact of our elections coming up, because ultimately whoever wins will have a profound impact on the future of the Middle East. I want you all to kind of chime in and make it a little bit collaborative. We only have about—a little less than ten minutes before we turn it to the audience.

But, Steven, just to, again, start with you because you were just in Israel, too. What were you hearing as far as any—what folks in Israel, both government and the public, view as better or worse for their prospects and for the prospects of the region? Obviously, both candidates coming in with slightly nuanced differences, although a lot of similarities as well. (Laughs.) And so, share a little bit about what you heard and what your biggest takeaways were on the election?

COOK: Yeah. Thanks, Vivian. And, actually, let me just start backwards and talk about, for a second, the two candidates. I just did a piece for a Substack called the Liberal Patriot, comparing the Middle East policies of former President Trump and Vice President Harris. And, despite our very polarized politics, there’s more overlap between the two of them at a level of abstraction than I think partisans would like to believe.

I mean, they are both supporters of the two-state solution. Donald Trump’s position with regard to the Iranians was actually to bring the Iranians back to the negotiating table. He took a page from President Obama’s playbook and called it “maximum pressure” to bring them back to the table for a better deal. But he was interested in a deal, not regime change. So while he was bellicose, he continued to allow the Iranians to engage in malign activities around the region, which the stunning irony is now that the vice president is running people, are accusing her and the president of letting the Iranians out of the box. They’ve been out of the box the whole time.

So there are not as stark differences between the two candidates on this. And they both obviously have vowed support for Israel. And as vice president, the vice president has overseen more than 500 American resupply flights to Israel over this year, almost 200 ports of call of American resupply ships to the IDF. I mean, it’s really been unprecedented. It’s gone on for so long, but the last time the United States did something like this it was in the October 1973 war. And that was war that lasted three weeks. So, needless to say, there are not huge differences between the two candidates.

When I was in Israel, I think polls would suggest that more than half of Israelis, if they could vote in our elections, would vote for Donald Trump. But I got that distinct sense it wasn’t so much that it was this idea of Donald Trump, rather than Donald Trump himself. and who they imagine is going to be advising Donald Trump. You know, the names that kept coming up to me were the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senator Tom Cotton. These are people who are notable for being very, very tough on Iran. And by contrast, there is a view in Israel that the people around the vice president, or Democrats more generally, are not as tough on the Iranians as the Republican.

But, as I just laid out, the Trump administration wasn’t actually all that tough on the Iranians. And in fact, in September 2019, that that whole summer President Trump let the Iranians get away with taking oil tankers hostage, mining the Persian Gulf, shooting down an American surveillance drone over the—over the Persian Gulf, and then finally attacking Saudi Arabia, in which the United States did not respond. So—

SALAMA: Well, the irony of that—and Suzanne, please chime in as well—is that one of, I guess, the vulnerabilities that Democrats had going into the last election was that it did talk about revitalizing Iran nuclear talks. But those talks have essentially been dead for the last few years, as Iran’s enrichment has continued. And so it seems to be a moot issue. And yet it still comes up in our election discussions, particularly now with the region as volatile as it is.

MALONEY: Yeah, and I think that’s the one place of difference. Steven pointed to the continuity between administrations, which I think is very much the case. Certainly, on Iran policy and, I think, more broadly on the Middle East as a whole across many administrations over decades, not just the Biden and Trump administrations. But I do think the one distinction is that the Trump administration took the now obviously catastrophic step of walking away from the JCPOA, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which briefly led to severe economic pressure on Iran under the Trump administration. But as soon as it became clear that Iran could marshal a vast ghost fleet of tankers to move their oil, primarily to China, in fact, they haven’t really experienced the severe economic pressure in the past couple of years.

And so what it has meant is that Iran is now much closer to nuclear weapons capability than at any point in its history. And that historically has been the biggest concern, especially for Israel. The challenge is that there isn’t really an obvious pathway toward diplomacy under either administration. I do think, ironically enough, we just heard Vice President Harris in her 60 Minutes interview comment that she sees Iran as the primary adversary for the United States, whereas we know that President Trump has said repeatedly that he thinks he can get a better deal with Iran. And so the options for diplomacy with Iran may actually be greater with a second Trump administration than they might be with the Harris administration.

Just one other point, and it’s something my co-panelists all know well, that Vice President Harris’ team has been deeply engaged with the current Biden administration approach to Israel and handling of the war as a whole. Her national security advisor has been working very closely with the team at the White House around every step of the way, whether it’s a ceasefire, whether it’s managing the escalation. So, I think she may have a different tone in the way that she approaches the issue, and certainly in the way that she speaks about the Palestinians, but I don’t know that her policy toward Israel or the war as a whole would be markedly different.

SALAMA: And, Linda and Shibley, I want to bring you in because we have just a few more minutes before we turn it over to the audience. You know, just as Suzanne was saying, whether or not Vice President Harris’ policies would be that much different, leverage has been a big issue for the Biden administration. Of course, it does have significant leverage, but on issues like weapons sales that was a—that was always where they drew the line, that they were not going to reconsider weapons for Israel. In the meantime, Benjamin Netanyahu has, in many cases, done what he wants to do, even against, at times, U.S. urging to pull back in Gaza and Lebanon, for example. So is there any reason to think that Vice President Harris might have any more leverage? Or do you think that we could see the same thing? And alternatively, would the Trump—would a Trump administration have more leverage if it, say, were to leverage its regional contacts in the Gulf and beyond?

ROBINSON: I’ll just be very broad, because I believe we want to get out to questions. And I want to note that I think there are a couple of points where Kamala Harris has been slightly different in her emphasis. She said how Israel conducts its war matters. And I think that is an opening to some greater pressure and conditionality. I also think that she was the first senior administration official to come out—to call for an immediate ceasefire, when she was there in Selma. I think she is cognizant of the toll this lack of influence of the U.S. on Israeli policy is taking on U.S. standing in the world. And I would note, of course, the new U.K. government has put some restrictions on its aid. You’ve had recent statements by France. I think that there could be an approach to diplomacy and greater pressure from the G-7 or G-7+.

But I do want to just finally say, I think we’re in a grave danger where the Israeli government is going to plow ahead to scenarios that will be highly harmful to its own future, such as reoccupation of Gaza, getting bogged down in trying to create a Lebanese buffer zone, because there is no other way to push—keep Hezbollah from striking Israel without recreation of that. And they have no diplomatic pathway. And then finally, the Iran scenario, while it’s very difficult for Israel alone to take out the nuclear capability of Iran, that is clearly where the government is signaling it wants to go. And I’ll reference the recent statement of Naftali Bennett about cutting off the head of the octopus.

TELHAMI: So, first, on Kamala Harris, I don’t know her. I don’t know where she’s going to be. But I think that it’s very hard to be as ineffective as Biden has been in dealing with the Middle East. It’s very hard for anyone to be as bad. We could talk about that later. But there are some serious dilemmas, it doesn’t matter who’s going to be president. One dilemma that is clear, particularly in Congress, is that there is unanimity, almost, in Congress that the United States should be committed to Israel’s security. But what do you do when you know that the government that is in charge wants a lot more than security? That it’s not only expansionist, but it’s also got goals that go exactly against the way you define your own interest? Where do you draw the boundaries between supporting that government and allowing it to take that aid and run with it in its own way, or just limit to defense of Israel within its ’67 borders?

Obviously, many members of Congress has said we’ll stop offensive weapons and we’ll support defensive weapons. Is that something down the road that is supported by something else that’s going on? Which is another dilemma, is that elected officials, particularly in Congress, still have a gap away from their own constituents. The rank-and-file Democrats, particularly young Democrats, have been extremely angry with the U.S.—degree of U.S. support to Israel. They’re rallying now in the election because they fear Trump. Some may even sit out. We don’t know. It might still hurt the Harris-Walz ticket. We don’t know that for sure. But nonetheless, most Democrats are going to rally behind, including in Congress, because they don’t want Trump to win. What happens after, we don’t know.

Now, Trump would be a whole different order. Not because of that—I agree with Steve, for example, that his policy wasn’t really quite as dramatically different on some of the issues, particularly Iran, as is. But here’s one thing, because there is no clarity about what to do the day after, particularly in Gaza, we know that the hardliners in the Israeli government are pushing for ethnic cleansing. And they’re calling it voluntary—basically creating a mood where Gaza is destroyed. We’re talking about aid that is going to be impossible to get to just deal with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The infrastructure has been destroyed.

And then I think that a Trump administration, not just because of Trump but because the people who he’s likely to bring to the administration, empowerment that he might get in Congress, would be far more open to this than a Democratic administration. One thing that this administration has made clear from day one, they don’t accept that option—because that was put on the table early on. So it could have a major impact on the way Israelis consider what to do in Gaza after the election.

SALAMA: And, of course, one also wonders if they could twist the arm of some of the Arab Gulf nations to take a greater role, use its leverage in that regard. Both administrations, but particularly a future Trump administration. And you’re being so polite and raising your hand, so please close us out before we go to—

COOK: Yeah, just a couple of quick comments. And let me work back from Shibley’s last comments forward to a couple of other things. Look, I think it’s abundantly clear, and I think this is something that’s been underreported, is that the right wing in Israel is seeking both to annex the West Bank—and that’s why they’re looking forward to a Trump administration. They see that they can annex 30 percent of Area C almost immediately should Trump be elected. Second, I think that the administration has been blithely unaware of the settler designs on the Gaza Strip. Saying, oh, well, the IDF doesn’t want to do it, and it would be really difficult. They don’t clearly understand the dynamics in Israeli politics, and that settlers will drop two caravans in the middle of what was Netzarim, and even dare the IDF not to defend it. And that’s how settlements really start. So I think it’s something that we’ve overlooked, and the administration has just been not willing really to deal with.

Last point. On this question of leverage, we love to talk about leverage. Analysts love to talk about it. Journalists love to talk about it. I wonder if we really have any leverage. First, you don’t have leverage if you don’t use it. And if leaders don’t use it because they’re afraid it won’t work, because the parties see that they’re in an existential conflict, we have no leverage. I think that the United States could say tomorrow, no more weapons for Israel, and the Israelis would scour the earth to the last bullet to put in the back of the head of Yahya Sinwar. We just don’t have that kind of leverage. We can talk about it, but it may not work. And that’s—and the fact that it may not work is the reason why we don’t use it, therefore we don’t have it.

SALAMA: Well, I could talk for five hours just about leverage.

COOK: This conflict raises—as Shibley was suggesting—raises a whole host dilemmas in American foreign policy that we have not been forced to confront over a period of time, that now we really do need to talk about.

SALAMA: It’s just that, right?

I have been very self—(off mic)—but I really wanted to give all of you a chance to touch upon a lot of these issues. Operator, please, if you’d open the—(off mic).

OPERATOR: Yes.

Gives queuing instructions.)

We are going to take the first question, written question, from Steven Koltai at the MIT Center for International Studies: Given that both Israel and the Palestinians have enormous internal political leadership legitimacy problems, how, if at all, can any progress be made? Does a solution have to wait for these domestic political dysfunctions to be remedied?

SALAMA: You asked one of my questions. I’m so glad. Who among you would like to take that?

TELHAMI: Well, there are a couple of things. One is that it’s interesting to think about international positions in this—at this moment. There is the International Court of Justice has basically said Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are illegal and must end. And that particular directive or—obviously they don’t have the power of implementing. That’s in the Security Council. It’s essentially not dependent on what you negotiate and don’t negotiate. In practice, obviously, states have to negotiate.

I do think that there is a legitimacy problem. It’s more, I would say, in a way, on the Palestinian side, because there’s no—there is no—there’s no state. It’s asymmetrical. It’s not like you have somebody in control. And especially the Palestinian Authority which is seen as representative the Palestinians and accepted by the international community, has lost even more of its legitimacy. But that’s not the problem, in my opinion. The problem isn’t actually about the representation as much as it is about a path. And I don’t see a path forward in the short term.

One of the fascinating things is that the foreign minister of Jordan a couple of days ago, in a meeting representing the Arab and Muslim groups, said: Look, we, meaning the Arab and Muslim states—all of us are now ready to make a deal with Israel, accept Israel’s existence, even provide guarantees for Israel’s existence, as long as it would, in principle, withdraw from the occupied territories. And he said, quote, “We don’t have,”—of course, the Israelis, would always say, we don’t have a partner on the other side. Now the Arabs are saying, we don’t have a partner on the Israeli side.

And so I think the question—we don’t want to get away from that, because the issue isn’t really about political leadership and legitimacy. Those are used as tricks. It’s about whether there’s a path. And I don’t think the Israeli body politic right—it just didn’t matter who leads. Even if the centrists—if Gantz becomes prime minister, doesn’t really matter. The elections change. They’re not ready for a deal, not along the ones that the U.S. is dealing with. I think, the Palestinians are in the same place. And in any case, even if they did want it, they don’t have any leverage to make it happen.

SALAMA: If no one else wants to chime in, then we can go to the next question. Try to get as many in as possible.

OPERATOR: We will take a spoken question from Trudy Rubin.

Q: Thanks. Thanks very much. I agree with everything that—oh, Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer. Hello, everyone that I know—(laughs)—so well.

I agree with everything that’s been said about no path with Gaza, West Bank, and Israel. But Suzanne said there’s not an obvious path to diplomacy with Iran. So what I want to ask is, do you see any kinetic path that would make Iran think twice about its policies in the region? Nobody mentioned Israel bombing missile factories, drone factories. What impact would that have? And to get to the big enchilada, excuse my metaphor, if there was a bombing of nuclear facilities, which would have to involve the U.S. so it probably won’t happen, but what do you think would be the consequences of that? So basically, what I’m asking is military action against Iran, where would big strikes like that likely lead? And do you see any way Iran would be dissuaded from continuing to support its proxies?

MALONEY: I’ll jump in very quickly. And, thanks, Trudy. Those are great questions. I think what you suggest Israeli strikes against Iran’s missile production facilities would not just be a wise step, but it would be a twofer, because anything that would set back Iran’s ability not just to supply its proxies around the region, but also to send missiles and drones to Russia for the war in Ukraine, would be a net benefit to international security. I do think any kind of action against the nuclear program would, first of all, not likely set back Iran’s program very sufficiently. We’ve done studies over many years that show that even a very successful and costly set of strikes would probably set the program back a couple of years, but it would be impossible to eradicate the knowledge and the technical capability that’s been built. And I think it would set the region aflame and have catastrophic impact on oil prices.

Is there a way to persuade Iran to stand down—not fully, not without a different regime in power in Tehran. But I do think that ultimately the Islamic Republic’s leadership are survivors. They’re not a suicidal state. They will fight to the last Lebanese and Palestinian. But they can be made to be more pragmatic if, in fact, they see that there are serious costs to the actions that they’re pursuing. Thus far, however, over forty-five years, it has still proven cost effective for them to support groups like Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and Shia militias across Iraq and the wider Middle East and South Asia. And I think that that is, unfortunately, part of a reality of this regime. And the focus should be on thinking about what are the conditions in which we might see some sort of change in the regime.

SALAMA: Thank you. Operator, next question, please.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Mark Traub (sp). Please accept the unmute now prompt. Apologies for the technical difficulties.

We will take the next question from Heidi Lane, professor at the U.S. Naval War College: Could you please address how you believe the positions of the Arab states have changed during this crisis, if at all, on any of the issues you have described?

COOK: I guess I can take a stab at that. Look, I think there hasn’t been as much change as some might like there to be. Of course, the Jordanians have been, as Shibley suggested, quite outspoken throughout this conflict. They have a series of problems and dilemmas of their own with regard to this conflict. And that’s one of the reasons why they have been so outspoken. And obviously, in response to the humanitarian tragedy that has unfolded in the Gaza Strip and as well as in the West Bank. I think the Gulf states remain committed to the idea of normalization. The Emiratis have made no—have indicated that they would continue their relationship. Trade with Israel is up since October 7. I got to Israel only because Emirates and its subsidiary flydubai fly there. I couldn’t get there on United, or American, or Delta. And the seats on Israel’s national airline were sold out.

And the Saudis through it all have said that they remain committed to the broad idea of normalization. The price has gone up. There remains a question whether this is—the price has gone up because the Saudis felt that the price had to go up or because that was some encouragement on the part of the Biden administration to increase the price as a way to encourage the Israelis to change their approach to the conflict. But by and large, through this all, Israel’s diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors has remained largely stable. It is somewhat estranged from Jordan and Egypt, although it has new commercial relations with those countries. Since the Turks have ratcheted down its trade with Israel, Israel is now sourcing concrete from Jordan and Egypt. Something it had not done before.

So there’s obviously a lot of anger among the publics in these places. You see some of this reflected in the statements of leaders in Jordan and Egypt. But nevertheless, Israel’s, as I said, diplomatic relations with these countries remains largely stable, even if there aren’t ambassadors in Tel Aviv.

SALAMA: Thanks for that.

Operator, let’s go for another.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Nancy Roman.

SALAMA: Welcome, Nancy.

OPERATOR: Please accept—

Q: Hi. Sorry about that. Steven. I wanted to ask you—this is Nancy Roman, here in North Carolina with Roman Leadership now.

I wanted to ask you, based on your point that we don’t have leverage because we don’t use our leverage, and because we don’t use our leverage we don’t have leverage—which I think is a superb point. But if that is the case, then—

COOK: You can stop there.

Q: (Laughs.) But if that is the case, then what? You know, I mean, then what? If we have no leverage to use, and hence we’re not using our leverage, I mean, it’s a very interesting point. But then what?

COOK: Well, I wish I had the answer to it. And I think that’s what I was getting at when I said that this conflict raises a whole host of questions and assumptions that the United States has brought to the Middle East over many, many years, that now are ripe for discussion and debate and conversation. We, in theory, have a lot of leverage. We account for 15 percent of the Israeli defense budget. We should be willing to use it, at least condition our aid, while remaining true to, if it is genuinely in our interest, to helping to ensure Israeli security. But we should not be willing to assist, however indirectly, in the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip or the annexation of the West Bank.

Now, this is really not a foreign policy problem. It’s actually a domestic policy problem. And that is—and there’s where Shibley was getting at the polls, where there are a younger cohort of people who don’t look at this conflict in the same way as people my age might have looked at the conflict, or people older than me have looked at the conflict.

TELHAMI: People Biden’s age look at it.

COOK: (Laughs.) Or people Biden’s age, right? It’s clear that in time the politics of U.S.-Israel relationship is changing. And it’s already changing. The question is, in what direction? And what room for maneuver the next president, but also the president after that, has to do it? And perhaps over time there is an opportunity to use leverage. But what we don’t have—we don’t have a normal relationship with Israel. We have this super special, unbroken bonds kind of thing that hems us in to do things that we might not otherwise think is wise for us to do.

TELHAMI: If I may add to this. I want to add, if you don’t mind, because I think that I agree with Steve about the domestic constraints and the dilemmas that I put there, about the offense and defense, and all of that. But I think that Biden’s failure in this particular case has been spectacularly personal. I want to go there, because I think that you can say any president would have done the same thing. I don’t think all presidents are the same, honestly. Of course, there are constraints that are enormous. And everybody has—is confined and constrained. But not everybody does the same thing. I do not believe if Bernie Sanders had been president, he’d have done the same thing. I do not believe that if Obama had been president, he would have done the same thing. I think would have been able to get a ceasefire much earlier, despite what Netanyahu wanted.

And so I think it is—we need to really focus a little bit more on the personal decisions that this president had made that went against many of his advisors, that were unique, that has history. And that’s why I think, whatever we think about Kamala Harris, she’ll be constrained too. And, yes, these constraints may be overwhelming. But she wouldn’t be the same, because this president has spectacularly failed. I mean, on this issue. I supported him on Ukraine, by the way. I don’t—it’s not like I’m not saying—and many of the domestic issues. So I’m not saying, he’s—I’m talking about on this—the way he handled this particular crisis. It was predictable from day one that if he adopted the posture that Netanyahu took on from the beginning, it was going to create a path of escalation, step by step, all the way to facing the possibility of war with Iran. And that’s been predictable. And many of us predicted and said so very early on.

SALAMA: Linda, please.

ROBINSON: Thank you. I would just like to say I think we should not presume that Kamala Harris will follow Joe Biden’s policy. She is looking to the future. She has a different background. And if this war engulfing the region threatens to take down her entire administration and her ability to conduct foreign policy successfully, I believe that she will, for the statements that I mentioned and other reasons, step forward much more proactively, in tandem with some allies who are willing to do the same. And I do just differ with you, Steven. I know you made an eloquent argument. But I don’t think there was a real test of our leverage. Very minimal efforts, public efforts, on the part of the Biden administration to exercise the leverage that we manifestly have.

It’s just wrong to conclude we therefore have no leverage. It would break a lot of china in the domestic political scene to do it. But I think that—and I’m coming here from—I’ve covered the long wars and the battlefield for twenty years as a researcher, a journalist. The thought that we are going back into another in-depth, bloody war engulfing this region is not something this country is going to do. So I think we should hold our fire a little bit on saying Kamala is going to follow Joe Biden’s plan. And I think it’s good that we give an opportunity for diplomacy and for building a coalition to avert this utter disaster that we are really engulfed in with no way out. And the Israeli government cannot dictate policy to the U.S. government.

SALAMA: Please, both of you, Steven and Suzanne, chime in.

MALONEY: Could I—

COOK: Suzanne—

MALONEY: Yeah, let me just jump in.

COOK: Please.

MALONEY: I’ll do one minute, really quickly, because I think we’ve talked about leveraging constraints. But we’ve talked about them as though the Middle East is an entity unto itself and there’s no wider world. And I think the leverage and constraints that are going to necessarily push any next administration to use its leverage more assertively are going to be the fact that we have other priorities, other interests, other adversaries, and other conflicts in the world. And the amount of senior leadership attention, the amount of military materiel, simply the interceptors that we have been expending to try to defend Israel in this current conflict, obviously we need to be doing that, but we have other needs for those—for the time, for the equipment, and for the troops that we are deploying to the region. And I think that we are going to have to see a shift, simply because we face other challenges, particularly Ukraine and China.

SALAMA: I mean, Steven, I wanted to—we only have about a minute and a half left, so I’m just going to follow up on this whole issue, especially since you brought it up, Steven. Is that the Trump—Donald Trump has made clear that he views foreign policy from a very transactional lens. You give us something, we give you something in return. Is Israel then the exception, in your view? Does he see Israel as being different? Or is there—because that’s, by definition—

COOK: His track record on Israel suggests that it is an exception. What did he get for moving the embassy to Jerusalem? What did he get from recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights? He clearly sees it as an exception. He wasn’t getting anything from the Israelis. He was getting something from his evangelical base.

Let me just say, nothing makes me happier than to drop the dime on people so that we can discuss something that I said. I mean, that’s, after all, what we’re here for. Let me say, I’m right behind Shibley on this. I think that President Biden, from the get-go, made a major miscalculation in believing that if he hugged the Israeli government, that he would have some influence on the way the military operations were going to unfold. But it was abundantly clear that the Israelis saw it in a totally different light, and saw it as a green light to escalate across—not only in Gaza, but across a number of fronts.

But I do go back to this question of leverage. And unless you use it, you don’t have it. And you can say it till you’re blue in the face. You can say, we have leverage. We have leverage. We have leverage. But until you actually pardon, the pun here, pull that trigger, you don’t have any. And right now, the politics align in a way that Kamala Harris may be very, very different rhetorically from President Biden. I expect that she will be. And I expect that at the margins she’ll want to do the things that push the Israeli government in certain ways. But now that the Israelis have framed these struggles in existential ways, she’s going to get—she’s not going to get very well—get very far. So, once again, leaving us without a lot of leverage, unless she’s willing to really take that huge, huge step and convince Congress to try to cut the military aid.

SALAMA: And, unfortunately, we have to leave it on that very daunting note. But you could see just—there were 2,700 people registered for this event, just to underscore the enormous interest. I want to thank Steven, Suzanne, Linda, and Shibley for this very interesting conversation. Thank you all for participating. And thanks to—this will be available on CFR.org/election2024. If you want more information—additional nonpartisan information and analysis on the election, you can go there for that as well. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good evening.