How The U.S. Came To Fight Israel's War ft. Noah Kulwin

19:08Noah Kulwin:I mean, Christ, George W. Bush at least tried to get everybody on board with the idea of WMD. You know, they're not even they're not even bothering with that this time around.

19:18Carlo:I know. In some ways, I'm actually I've written this before, actually. and people have given me a lot of shit for it, but it's like part of me is kind of like, if we're going to do these, since we don't have any say in this, right? The voters don't, nobody gives a shit what the voters think. The voters don't ever want to go to war, and yet we still do it constantly, right? So it's like they don't, I don't know. But let me just bring it back to this idea of the justifications, right? So we've talked about the nuclear program, the imminent threat from the ballistic missiles. Next, we've got regime change, which some people in the administration have said is part of this.

19:51Carlo:I think Hegseth has said it's not supposed to be a regime change war, but the regime has in fact changed, which it hasn't actually. I mean, we got the big guy, but it doesn't, and they're obviously still launching missiles. So somebody in the regime is still around. Trump has also floated a couple sort of like random ones. You know, this is about naval supremacy in the Gulf, about, you know, sort of protecting shipping routes. It's about, you know, keeping defanging Iran's ability to launch terror attacks through its various proxies. And then, of course, there's the, you know, the one that I don't think they're even bothering with anymore, which is, you know, this is about liberating the Iranian people.

20:28Carlo:Right. It seems to me like the real the real one is just decapitate the regime and hope for the best. It's hard for me to understand what they want to do beyond that. But what do you is what is the justification, the actual justification, the mask off justification?

20:43Noah Kulwin:I think some of it is what I said before about racism and believing in like some very crude and essentialist stereotypes about the nature of Iranians and the nature of, you know, clerical political leadership. Like, yes, the Iranian government is extremist. Yes, it is religiously authoritarian. Yes, we see the brutality they meet out against their own citizens. None of that is really deniable. at the same time there is in all of that like okay we see all that but they're just not rational or trustworthy actors and the idea of them having a nuke oh my gosh and and so there is this again like a leap in logic that is like i said a kind of crude essentialist logic uh to me at least which is that the there that these people can't be trusted with nuclear weapons let alone or sorry these people can't be trusted with rational geopolitical whatever, let alone, you know, nukes.

21:39Noah Kulwin:There's no way we can trust them and so forth. And I think that that base assumption actually has a lot more explanatory power for why these people let themselves think that war is the option that's necessary here. And then I think the other option, which we reason, the other real reason, which we talked about earlier, or at least referenced is I think about Israel, Israel and Israeli leadership's aggressive desire, aggressive desire for, as you say, decapitating Iran or decapitating the regime. I don't believe decapitation is an accurate metaphor based on what we know about how the Iranian government has reorganized itself in the last decade, 20 years to accommodate essentially this reality.

22:22Noah Kulwin:I think in the last two years - But they've been expecting this to happen. Yeah. I mean, the last two years, Israel has has done this. And so is the U.S. I mean, the Maduro kidnapping in January is a kind of attempt at decapitation. The bomb, the bombs that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah are also a representative of a kind of decapitation. And so they've been preparing for this. And like what we're actually seeing right now, the kinds of attacks that are taking place, experts and I'm not talking about, you know, people who appraise the Iranian regime who are considered outre in the U.S.

22:53Noah Kulwin:political spectrum. I mean, Vali Nasser, who is he's affiliated with CSIS, one of the most, you know, like, frankly, one of the most Langley affiliated think tanks that we have. I mean, he's talking about how, yeah, this strategy that we've got of decapitation doesn't really seem like it's going to work because of the whole multinodal thing that the Iranian government has done, where they're, you know, the way that they've distributed command means that this is a force that is able of fighting a war for quite some time without the conventional, you know, command central command structure. Um, and so I think that there is also a way in which, because Israel has helped convince the United States through a number of different means that their, uh, political interests are our political interests and that Israeli, uh, security concerns are directly American security concerns.

23:41Noah Kulwin:And it's meant that we're willing to overlook some, you know, some facts that we know about this country and willing to pursue, you know, again, with the permission granted by the stereotypes we have about them. You know, we now are in a position where it's like, all right, well, we're willing to wage a war, even though the facts suggest to us that, like, it's not going to be nearly as easy as we think and that a strategy like decapitation may not work. you know it's it's this is an administration that is also at this particular moment in time looking for political victories domestically things are incredibly difficult for them the economy is not doing great politically they're very unpopular at home and you know this is not the first administration that in fine looking you know like in in rummaging around for solutions to its political problems has stumbled upon the idea of, well, why don't we start a war?

24:39Noah Kulwin:Why don't we start multiple wars? Why don't we try and find enemy leaders, popular villains in the American imagination and take them out? And, you know, I am not optimistic that that will be a I'm not optimistic that that like strategy will be disappeared from the American toolkit, even though this one doesn't seem to be going so well. But I do think that people recognize that it is quite obvious that this is what Trump is doing. It's not lost on anybody.

25:08Carlo:No, I mean, I think Trump correctly intuits through his sort of like, you know, lizard brain of being a TV guy his whole life that like America, it's not that Americans are anti-war. Americans are anti-losing wars. They're anti-long wars of attrition in which a lot of Americans come home in boxes. I think what he thought is that, you know, look, what you just said, right? We did it in, you know, the Israelis did it with the Hezbollah guy, Nasrallah, I'm sorry. We did it with Maduro. You can just sort of take these guys off the board. It's no big deal. It looks good in, you know, the American media.

25:46Carlo:And then whatever comes next, like, that's not really our problem, right? Right.

25:52Noah Kulwin:Yeah. Well, and also in their part, I mean, like this is an administration who's, you know, their their strategic intellectual backbone really does seem to have the attention span of a goldfish because, you know, Hezbollah still exists. They're now bombing Israel right now as we're having their back in the mix.

26:13Carlo:big time.

26:14Noah Kulwin:Exactly. You know, even if they're, by the way, like even if it's politically unpopular within Lebanon at this moment to do so in ways that it may not have been a couple of years ago, they're still doing it. And I think that there is a real, you know, it's to me evidence of the idea that decapitation is just a bad metaphor. It's just not like it's it's a it's very aspirational on the part of the people who most espouse it simply because as we see, they do these things. And then, you know, a year later, six months later, a week later, we've still got the thing that we supposedly decapitated more than twitching around, but instead doing a whole Washington Irving on us and, you know, headless horsemaning it up, you know, like all through all through Sleepy Hollow.

26:57Carlo:To say nothing of the, you know, again, the blowback of killing. I was looking at, I was just looking through pictures on the wires yesterday and there was this photo that stopped me in my tracks. It was an Iranian state media photo that they put out, but it was sort of this aerial shot of central Tehran on Sunday, or not Sunday. It was, I think it was yesterday. And it was a, you know, basically just a lot of mourners in the street. And they weren't mourning the Ayatollah. They were mourning the deaths of these schoolchildren that were killed by who knows, the Israelis, the Americans, the Iranians.

27:29Carlo:We don't know yet. I certainly have my suspicions, but, you know, whatever. And I was just thinking, like, it doesn't actually matter who, sadly, who killed those schoolchildren, because we did. You know, they will see it as us doing it, us being Israel, the United States, the West. And what the hell does that create, right? When the West comes in and dozens of young children are killed, how many, you know, terrorists, how many anti-Western people does that create in its wake? Right. Isn't that part of sort of the blowback story, too? On top.

28:08Noah Kulwin:I mean, and in this case, you know, what is what is the tour to, you know, how we open the conversation about like what is blowback? Right. And the idea that this this kind of system of conflict, this model of how to how we fight is self-sustaining, even if its participants don't conceive of it that way. But like, you know, this is this is how it operates in the world. In this case, it's like, all right, they want a civil war in Iran. You know, you want to set people up, you want to generate combatants for that. And we want to weak Iran and we want a conflict. In Israel's case, they want that because they perceive Iran as a threat.

28:41Noah Kulwin:And if Iraq is turned from a functioning country into, you know, this like desiccated state that it currently is in which militias wield enormous power and they want to do the same to Iran, you know, like that's how that goal works out for them. And that's where it's like, all right, you know, or at least in the in the United States conception of that conflict, how something like blowback figures in is that, well, if we share that goal and we want them to be weak and unable to function as a state, then actually it's good that we create the conditions for this kind of degenerated civil conflict.

29:16Noah Kulwin:And if there's a faction that's armed by the CIA and is viewed as pro-American, then we are also summoning into existence right now. You know, they're opposites, the people that are going to remember those dead schoolchildren and who are going to be motivated by it. And frankly, because the country as you know, we are setting it on a path for some kind of if not state collapse. I mean, vastly diminished qualities of quality of life for millions and millions and millions of people. You know, what else are they going to do if there's no right? If there's if the raw materials to run a bakery aren't there, but the men who would have staffed it are on and the men who staffed it are unemployed and angry and, you know, left without really much capacity to have political agency in their country that doesn't come from the barrel of a gun.

30:02Noah Kulwin:And I mean, you know, I don't think it takes I don't think it takes Einstein to to really deduce what flows from that. And the only people it really does seem to serve, again, are the people who have an interest in having a non-functioning Iran that is not able to be a stable country and thus project any power, even the softest of power outside its own borders. And obviously the country that has openly said that that is their interest and has gotten us to say it as well, based on what Marco Rubio says, is Israel. Right.

30:34Carlo:OK. So, again, I want to get to Israel and I will in two seconds. But first, I just want to ask you about the Kurds who you just alluded to. So this was the flash that came over the wire last night from ITV News. Thousands of U.S. and Israeli-backed Kurdish militants reportedly expected to begin ground operation in western Iran within days. This came after CNN reported that the CIA is arming the Kurds and they are hoping to foment an uprising in Iran. OK, well, putting aside the idea of us, you know, arming rebel groups and how could that possibly ever go wrong? You got a feel for the Kurds, right?

31:07Carlo:It's like they're they're always fighting our wars and they don't. What do they get in return? Right. They don't even have their own state.

31:15Noah Kulwin:no i mean the in this case it's also such a so the cia has historically the u.s has armed kurds uh both in previously against iran and also previously against iraq uh and in the more recent decade you know the u.s armed them as part of the fight against isis uh in the mid-2010s and that created a lot of tension between the united states and the second largest standing army and NATO, which is Turkey. And Turkey is now on the receiving end of drones and munitions and attacks from Iran and is bound up in this conflict. And Turkey is also, I mean, the political situation has changed somewhat in the last year with the diplomatic agreement they reached with the PKK.

32:00Noah Kulwin:But as I understand it, what is now, you know, or not as I understand it, I think what anybody could really understand, Turkey has a lot of anxiety about the CIA and about the United States and about the United States or other Western powers giving a ton of aid to Kurds in Iran and are very much afraid that that could spill over as a conflict into something that, you know, contests their rule. And so there's a you know, I think that this this latest development is actually a pretty compelling piece of evidence as to how waging this war with Iran is both just not thought it's clearly not. It was not thought through that hard by the people waging it.

32:41Noah Kulwin:But also it illustrates for us like why a conflict like this is never that simple. And it's because the countries that we can count on in a sort of crude, you know, like we're playing a game of risk sort of way is like, oh, this is our territory. This is our people and they're going to go to war against our enemies very simply because they've got these alliances. It's like, well, it turns out there are some non-state populations that, you know, whose interest against one government and interest against another government may end up, you know, creating tensions, you know, for us and the party that we need to be involved.

33:11Noah Kulwin:You know, Turkey, you know, the country that we need very badly, not just for this war against Iran, but for all of the other wars that we fight and for all of the other conflicts that we're currently engaged in.

33:23Carlo:To say nothing of like what I was just going to say, to say nothing of the idea that, you know, if we if we are fomenting some sort of civil war in Iran, you know, what are the knock on effects of that? Right. Is that going to create a new refugee crisis? You know, we've been J.D. Vance has been out there telling the Europeans, you know, how terrible they are. And we're just about to send millions more refugees into into Europe or into Turkey, at least.

33:48Noah Kulwin:What makes it so goofy to me is that the European leadership appears just as asleep at the wheel about what's happening as the United States. There's one large government. There's one large European countries government that is like really being outspoken right now about the fool. Yes, exactly. Pedro Sanchez in Spain. But the foolishness of the American war on Iran. Because you have, you know, MERS, the German chancellor, Friedrich MERS, who is sitting next to Trump and essentially agreeing with Trump that, you know, Spain should just, you know, like that essentially like the U.S. should be allowed to abrogate whatever its agreements are with Spain and continue to use its facilities there for military operations.

34:31Noah Kulwin:Even though Germany and Spain are both in the EU.

34:33Carlo:It's crazy.

34:34Noah Kulwin:And I think that there is a kind of some some non-ambulance that is characterized like a sort of their sleepwalking into their next continent continental disaster because they have been so blinded by or they've been their vision has been made so narrow in their hatred of Russia and in their in their in their, you know, real fear that the Russian threat is the only one worth considering. Right now that as we saw, you know, they then realized they got some wake up call with Greenland. But evidently a month later when it became clear that Trump isn't going to go through with that, I guess they've now decided to crawl back in bed with Trump.

35:16Noah Kulwin:And we're in this bizarre position of seeing them walk into another disaster without realizing it where they're going to. Yes, as you point out, they may have millions of refugees to deal with. And even if they don't let in refugees in the same way that they did in the previous cycle of war and violence during the Syrian civil war, we may now see humanitarian disasters that are going to be European responsibilities all across the Mediterranean, for example, or an Eastern border. Or, you know, it's a very it is a difficult situation to imagine. I mean, sorry, let me rephrase that. It is difficult for me to imagine the like the full ignorance that really seems to be on display in Europe.

35:53Noah Kulwin:It's just the extent of it, because they're the they are as a force. They should be the ones most pressuring the United States to back off right now, given how much is at stake for them with this, particularly with the energy crisis that may result as as a that may come as a result of all this.

36:09Carlo:Which already is. I mean, I think Qatar today said they're taking at least 20 percent or more, I think, of their liquefied natural gas, which a lot of which goes to Western Europe. They have to take it offline because it's just it's too dangerous to ship it. I guess. I mean, I think it's the way when they take that offline.

36:25Noah Kulwin:That takes at least two weeks to restart production on. So we're now talking about, by the way, like, you know, we're now at a phase of the conflict already where let's say there were some sudden diplomatic breakthrough. The lingering economic costs of this would be substantial and would not, you know, would not go away hardly overnight, if at all.

36:43Carlo:Yeah. And you're going to see it here, too. I mean, gas already up like 20 cents just this week. So, I mean, that's a whole nother question why he's doing this now before the midterms when this, you know, the Republicans are fighting tooth and nail on this affordability issue. I mean, actually, I know the answer. Trump doesn't give a shit. He doesn't care about the Republicans. He knows he's got he knows they're going to lose the midterms.

37:02Noah Kulwin:It is kind of cool to me how he somebody must have told him or at least the political logic of the people around him has gotten to the point of like, well, we're going to get washed anyway. So this is a house money turn. And that to me is like truly I you know, it's it's on the one hand, if I were in on their team, like if I were in their corner, if that were my political affiliation, I'd actually might be kind of jazzed about that, you know, because that's like, you know, we're throwing caution to the wind. But as the person with a brain and immense sympathy for the people are currently experiencing the unconscionable amount of devastation that we're wreaking right now, that's not my feeling.

37:42Carlo:Right. No, of course. All right. So let's talk Israel. I noted this quote. This is a quote from Benjamin Netanyahu in 2001. I think sometimes people forget how long this this this maniac has been around and calling the shots. This is Bibi in 2001. Quote, America is a thing you can move very easily. You can move it in the right direction. They won't get in our way. End quote. Well, he was certainly right about that. Is this Israel's war or is this our war? No.

38:12Noah Kulwin:Well, I hate to break it to you, but because we're in it, it is now also our war quite fundamentally. But the spirit behind your question, I totally understand, which is, you know, yes, this is Israel's war. We are fighting a war for Israel, you know, more more than any other single cause that we can identify. There's so many reasons why we are able to go to war in this room, as we talked about before. The racism, the legacy of antagonism towards Iran. But in this particular moment, like why now? Why are we doing this? The answer is Israel. And I think in the case of Israel, it's because since October 7th, the Israeli government has kind of backed itself into.

38:55Noah Kulwin:You could argue that they've either backed themselves into a corner or the people within Israel. They would say that they have been liberated to pursue goals that they have been held back from for a variety of reasons in the last few years.

39:08Carlo:And Bibi found its deal in Trump. I mean, I would say the biggest single thing that has changed, though, especially in the last six months, at least to me, has been that the current Israeli government has

39:27Noah Kulwin:not found any kind of consistent political stability. and the current political leadership of Israel, somebody like Netanyahu, as he has had to work harder and harder as time goes on to consolidate political control, the factions within his government that are most desirous of the most extreme outcomes, whether it's the Palestinian policy in the West Bank or it's the resettlement of Gaza with Jews or it's a population resettlement plan for Palestinians in Gaza or its war with Iran, there have had to be constant compromises made to the, you know, to the, you know, to reckon with the political reality that you just can't do all that.

40:11Noah Kulwin:And even though the people are baying for blood rather constantly among both the Israeli public and its political leadership. And so now that the United States has been, you know, again, increasingly put in the position of unpopular domestic politics, an increasing willingness on the part of the Oval Office to try these grand foreign policy gestures in what the American press seems to report is this new legacy-making mood from Washington, the desire for Trump to leave his mark on the world. We've arrived at sort of the perfect circumstance where Israel was able to get the U.S. on board with this.

40:50Noah Kulwin:And also, as we saw, I think Israel was able to convince the United States leadership that this would be quick. And I don't think I do not think Israeli leaders and I do not think the Israeli military and intelligence establishment has any such illusions and nor frankly does the American one. But they know and that it's politically advantageous for Israel to have a weak Iran. And so they went as hard as ever to make sure that the Americans would back them up on some kind of military aggression. And they managed that political jujitsu such that, as Marco Rubio announced this week, Israel in, you know, by by credibly convincing America that it was going to pursue unilateral military action against Iran, you know, not just bombing nuclear targets, but going for something wider that well, because Iran might retaliate against the U.S., the U.S.

41:48Noah Kulwin:thus had to back up Israel.

41:49Carlo:And that aside the fact that they're our client state and we don't they we call the shots. The Israelis don't call the shots.

41:58Noah Kulwin:So this is where I think ideology is a really important factor. The ideology of the American political leadership and the ideology, you know, like what is it? You know, what does it mean to have an Israel lobby is, you know, like, yes, there is a group of organizations. And yes, there is a a political surrogacy for Israel within the United States that is more well organized, you know, than, you know, for example, the pro Chiang Kai-shek China lobby of the 1940s and early 50s. You know, this is it's a it's more powerful and well organized and effective than even the Cuban-American lobby. You know, this is and I bring these other examples up because I really don't want to make I don't want to exceptionalize, historically speaking, what the Israel lobby does.

42:41Noah Kulwin:However, I think that the United States, part of what has made the Israel lobby so effective is that we are ideologically sympathetic and conditioned to back them up in ways that we aren't with our other, if not client states, because that quite isn't prescribed to those other relationships, but with these other causes. I think that we are willing to do more for Israel because we are bought in as a country on the idea that doing this stuff for them matters. And I think that as a public, that is clearly a fact that is less and less commonly accepted as time goes on. But as a truth that is embodied and lived by our political establishment and, you know, the ruling class, for lack of a better term, because it is something that goes far beyond politics.

43:28Noah Kulwin:It's in corporate life as well. This, you know, again, this this this this ideological sympathy is incredibly widespread. And this sort of, I think, helps explain a lot of why it is exactly that we would go, you know, we would pursue something like this war right now that is so reckless and so damaging.

43:48Carlo:I mean, so you mentioned the public opinion. I mean, it's fascinating that this is coming. Literally, a couple of days ago, Gallup put out this poll for the first time in their polling. Israel is no longer ahead in the Americans' view of sort of like sympathies within the Middle East. The Palestinian cause is now ahead of the Israeli cause, according to Gallup, in the U.S. It's hard to imagine that line is not going to go even further down after this. But also, you mentioned, I want to bring back to something you just said, which is that, you know, Israel wants Iran destabilized, which is obviously true.

44:21Carlo:I would go a step further and check me on this. Tell me if I'm wrong. But Israel wants the region destabilized, right? Because destabilization gives them freedom of action. That gives them an opportunity to, to your point, do whatever they want to do in the West Bank, do whatever they want to do in Lebanon and Syria and Gaza, because the more it's destabilized, the more American public says, we want to get out of this. We don't want any part of this. The more the Israelis have freedom to operate. Is that a sort of fair assessment or am I getting into sort of like conspiracy land here?

44:55Noah Kulwin:No, I think it's a fair assessment, but I think the way to view it is that when what you describe right as freedom of action, another way to conceive of it is as leverage. You know, ever since the creation of Israel, there was originally, you know, there was there was some discussion in the late in 49 and the early 50s about the idea of negotiating a final political settlement. But in reality, what, you know, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and others at the time in the 50s particularly recognized, and this became sort of an implicit policy until we get to the era of, frankly, Oslo and kind of the 80s, I guess, is that it would instead be a de facto agreement.

45:32Noah Kulwin:And that essentially Israel would have to demonstrate that its Arab neighbors and Muslim neighbors, because not all of its neighbors are Arab, would have to learn to live with it. And I think that this is sort of how Israel still sees the world, that Israel has to essentially make everybody copacetic with the reality of Israel. And the way you do that, I mean, the model for them is Syria, which is you, you know, like like Syria, like Syria, when Syria did not fall into civil war just because Israel. But the Syrian civil war was, you know, at the beginning of it, there was a state, Israel, you know, there was a country that Israel had an incredible political rivalry with.

46:15Noah Kulwin:There was incredible antagonism. There was something of a, you know, both like a more of a peace than on the Lebanese border directly. But at the end of the Syrian civil war, Syria is now a non-factor. Israel has freedom of movement. Israel can take territory as much as it wants, frankly. There is no Syrian military to speak of that could ever challenge, you know, any Israeli military action. And so, yes, to your point, that gives them freedom of action. But it also means that, you know, as far as the diplomatic arrangements longer term, they can leverage that. But I mean, now we're hitting upon what does seem to be the actual longer term strategy of Israel here, which, you know, beyond religious fanaticism and hoping to claim as much territory for themselves.

46:57Noah Kulwin:But it is this idea that, well, if everybody else is weak, then they will have to respect our strength. And this may not result in a final agreement with the Palestinians through, you know, some weird American process like Camp David or Oslo. But instead will be the result of us having been the last people standing, you know, with with smoking, with, you know, with with with guns. and obviously just the last thing I would say obviously what has counteracted that so far at least in the past couple decades has been the uneasy quiet peace sort of formalized by the Abraham Accords that has developed between Israel and its wealthier Gulf Arab neighbors like the UAE and Saudi Arabia and I think they are now and what happens to them and their economies may end up being part of what is is, you know, so go them, as go them, so goes Israel to some extent.

47:55Carlo:Well, and that's a whole other ball of wax is, you know, the destabilization within the Gulf. I mean, the deal with these Gulf countries, with the Emiratis and the others, was always that, you know, the Americans will put their bases on your soil. Your people might not like it, but even so, you know, you're going to get under our security umbrella. And because of that, you're going to be able to build these glitzy sort of like cities of the future that are essentially just tax havens for Westerners to either live in or at least spend their money. That whole thing, that illusion has been totally stripped away, right?

48:27Carlo:I mean, the fact that probably one of the more important things that happened in the last week is that an Iranian drone hit the main terminal of the Dubai airport, the busiest airport in the world. So I don't understand where the Israelis, because the Israelis need these Gulf countries to be on their side, don't they?

48:45Noah Kulwin:Yes. I mean, this is where Israel, I think, in an earlier stage of its life was able to live without them in in the sense that these were less developed countries. And frankly, until the 1970s, I mean, you know, that was when we that was when we essentially began the process. Part of how we stabilized the part of how we got ourselves out of the trouble of the Arab oil embargo in 74 and by 79 was that we just began selling these countries huge amounts of armaments. And, you know, 40, 50 years later, you can look at Yemen to see what that's bought us. But I think the the the reality as it is now is that these countries occupy a place in the global economy that is far more indispensable on an aggregate level than what Israel provides, which is still, to be clear, quite valuable considering how many meaningful trading partners Israel has and how, despite committing a genocide, you know, countries as diverse as China and the United States consider them, you know, important trading partners.

49:45Noah Kulwin:um and i i don't quite understand frankly uh how israel you know sees this through other than betting the house that it will be able to just be the strongest kid on the block um right because it does seem that we're in this weird reality right now where the you know the you know if again you know if a few desalination plants because that's by the way how most of these countries including Israel, by the way, rely on stable supplies of drinking water are tons and tons of fossil fuel powered desalination plants that could very easily be targeted. It's no surprise that hasn't happened yet. Well, and it's, you know, it's it's it's I mean, I think I think we can see why it hasn't happened yet.

50:28Noah Kulwin:But it's definitely scary to think about, you know, as things snowball, could we get to the situation where those things do start to get hit? And I and again, I don't think a lot of the security guarantees that Israel relies upon long term are really worth all that much from the United States. If our interest in the region, you know, protecting stable oil and energy supplies above all else, of course, is all of a sudden jeopardized. You know, I think one of the things Israel especially doesn't count on or has discounted quite dramatically is the fact that the largest, most populous Arab country in the world, Egypt, which is just to its south, you know, has been pretty well bottled up by the brutal military dictatorship that has ruled there since the Arab Spring.

51:12Noah Kulwin:And it's easy to imagine that, again, you know, like jeopardizing not just the wealth of the Gulf Arab states, but, you know, upsetting this whole regional Middle East. I mean, we've seen riots in Bahrain for the first time since the Arab Spring, a country where every single video pretty much shows the local residents cheering the missiles falling from Iran because they hate their government so much. I think that there's a real possibility that Israel ends up igniting something that like reveals that a lot of the security that they've thought they've had for the last 15 years is actually a little bit more rickety than they've thought.

51:46Noah Kulwin:The Gulf era state question to me is one of the more vital ones right now.

51:53Carlo:Okay. I want to ask if you've seen this just before we move on. And I also want to get to the show you guys are working on. But this is a clip. This is a video of the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. I want to be very clear. Turkey and Qatar have gained influence in Syria, are seeking influence elsewhere and everywhere throughout the region. And from here, I warn Turkey is the new Iran. Sorry, what? Turkey is the new Iran? Turkey is in NATO. Some of these people, they just won't ever stop.

52:29Noah Kulwin:I mean, listen, man, it's I don't know if you know this about Islamism, but it's whack-a-mole. I mean, that's at least the Israeli doctrine. Look, Naftali Bennett is in part. He is not part of the Netanyahu camp. He was the prime minister. That's a good point.

52:44Carlo:Yeah, he's not. He's not briefly.

52:46Noah Kulwin:He needs. I think that there's always like a measure of outflanking within Israeli politics and rhetoric that should always be accounted for when you hear people say stuff like like that in particular. Right. That said, Israel has held a lot of animus for Turkey over many, many years. In 2010, the Mavi Marmara flotilla that was sent with aid to Gaza was intercepted by Israeli military. And Erdogan for many years was kind of able to, you know, whatever credibility he lost for being this, you know, important leader within NATO and for making in for further integrating Turkey in the NATO firmament, he would rhetorically lean very, very hard or lean on symbolic shows of support for Palestinians and the Palestinian cause.

53:30Noah Kulwin:And I think that a lot of Israelis are kind of fooled by that and that they look at Turkey as this kind of eternal enemy rather than as like the actual, frankly, kind of ideal partner or shadow partner, you could argue, because they would never actually directly partner with Israel. But they're never directly threatening Israel. And frankly, I'm not a fanatic. no and well moreover it's like turkey enables nato and western powers to do a lot of things in the middle east that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do that serve israel's benefit in terms of how they counter iran and iraq so it's like when avtali bennett mouths off like that you know i think he understands the the situation well enough to know that like he's pretty much biting the hand that feeds by talking like that but on the other hand i do think he's smart enough also to get that like hey nobody will scold me from america for talking like this or if they do who gives a fuck but in israel i am appealing to people to say like listen you know bb he's attacking this one threat at the expense of leaving another wide open um right and i wouldn't be surprised by the way if we see more and more of that the worse this situation goes on and as missiles or bombs and sirens continue to rain in israel um because you know a war can get on you know there may be mass support for what Israel's doing or for this conflict right now in Israel.

54:50Noah Kulwin:There may be some really stable and durable amount of support for it. But that could get diminished the longer this thing goes on, and particularly as the economic damage of being in wartime continues to pile up.

55:02Carlo:So the reason why I wanted to bring you on, Noah, is because you and your co-host, Brendan, are working on a new miniseries. It happens to, I mean, kiss me out, I guess, because it's pretty well-timed. It's called No Daylight, and it's all about the special relationship between the United States and Israel. So I guess what I want to ask you is, you know, have have you locked the show yet? And because presumably recent events in the region might change something in the show now.

55:29Noah Kulwin:Well, I will say one of the benefits of making a history podcast is that we only ever really stand to benefit from current events getting worse all the time in our narrative sense. and it doesn't really change what we say in the show in a in a in in the substance of what we're the story that we're telling but i think it absolutely gives us opportunities to frame it in more accessible ways for people who are tuning in um and this show is this series we're doing so the way we ordinarily do our show is every year we release a 10 episode narrative story our first season is about the iraq war and we've since done you know seasons about the cuban revolution korean War, Afghanistan Wars, Rise of the Khmer Rouge, and most recently about Angola, the Angolan Civil War and the fight against apartheid and the Cuban intervention there.

56:17Noah Kulwin:And we're doing for the first time a miniseries, which will be just three episodes, and it'll come out the end of April or early May. And this miniseries, the idea that we had was we wanted to tell a story about the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship that focuses on moments of tension between the United States and Israel. Because the, you know, the length of our relationship over almost 80 years at this point has been one of close collaboration. It has been a quote-unquote special relationship, you know, language that we also use for talking about the U.S.-U.K. relationship, for example. But there are actually these moments of tension that I think are very revealing and that speak to kinds of conflicts, kinds of frustrations that even though we bury them and put them aside at the time, end up becoming very prescient for understanding the political problems that persist years and decades later.

57:20Noah Kulwin:So these moments of tension, you know, they include in the mid 50s, the Suez crisis in the 80s. There was actually some serious tension between Israel and the U.S. and the Reagan administration, which entered the White House as an extraordinarily pro-Israel force. And, you know, Bush one is another figure who had a lot of serious issues with Israel. And so I think that, you know, again, by focusing on these moments where there in fact was daylight, we can see what it is exactly, you know, what are both paths that we didn't take or pursue. But also, I think it gives us a bit of an insight into just how repetitious some of this shit is.

58:06Noah Kulwin:You know, it's it's much of the many of the complaints that we lodge against Israel today, frankly, have their roots in earlier tensions between the U.S. and Israel. Many of the same complaints that leaders of our government, when they are brave enough to say something critical of Israel, you know, they are just even if they don't know it, especially, you know, and surely they don't know it. They are repeating almost verbatim quite often some of the complaints that earlier generations of politicians had. and then it's also of course a bit revealing why it is then we go back to just acquiescing or working with Israel and you know that also has an interesting explanation in the form of both the Israel lobby and Cold War strategy on the part of the United States and so this miniseries I think it's it is I'm not going to say that it's well timed but I will say that it is timed I think that it is.

59:00Noah Kulwin:I think that it definitely, I don't want to be so bold as to say that it fits the moment really well, but I do think it will be very relevant and that I hope it'll be able to teach people some stuff about the history of the region and our relationship as a country to it.

59:15Carlo:Well, I'm very excited for it. You guys can check that out when it comes out later this spring at blowback.show. That's your correct web address, right? Yeah. And it'll be behind you all.

59:26Noah Kulwin:So You got to go there to get it.

59:28Carlo:Gotcha. Okay. And we'll put that in the description. And while you're waiting for that, check out some of the past blowback seasons. Noah and Brendan are some of the smartest minds in this stuff. And I want to bring you back, Noah, when we invade Cuba, which presumably is the next thing that I guess is happening.

59:46Noah Kulwin:I sure hope not. But thanks for having me.

59:50Carlo:I really appreciate it. Noah Colwin, everybody. Thank you, guys.