1177: Iran vs. Israel 2025 | Out of the Loop

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26:03Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course, again, all free, no shenanigans, over at 6minutenetworking.com. Now, back to Out of the Loop on Iran and Israel with Jason Pack. It just seems to me like, isn't Iran going to go, all right, we're still going to try and come out with a bomb here. Why would we stop? Especially if you set us back a couple of months or maybe a few years. that just proves to us that we need a bomb because you never would have hit us if we had one. 100%. We're speaking on June 25th. Yes, of 2025. And this morning, the Iranians said, guess what?

26:39We're going to go immediately for a bomb because we understand that if we had the bomb, we'd never been able to get attacked like this. And you invoke the North Korea lesson. It's sometimes called in the Middle East, the Libya lesson because Gaddafi decided to give up his program as well as his anthrax and other biological weapons. And what do you know? Then the West could support a popular uprising against them and he got killed in a ditch. So what's called the Libya lesson is that if you nuclearize, you're in power forever and your sons get to inherit the throne. Just look at North Korea as opposed to Libya.

27:14The Iranians, of course, are thinking that. But if we have the whole region on board. In other words, if we could actually get the major European countries and Trump's America and our regional allies in the Sunni Gulf plus Turkey, it won't matter if China and Russia support the regime. They could really put the screws on the Iranians economically, and they could have a system whereby it would be very, very unlikely that the Iranians could nuclearize. And we could give security guarantees to Israel, which is that if the Israelis end the war in Gaza, commit to a Palestinian state, they could get a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia, something like the Abraham Accords 2.0, which Biden worked on and Trump and Jared Kushner worked on.

28:00And we would give them a commitment if the Iranians were getting close to a breakout in the nuclear program. Oh, we will support you in a military option. So it would be essentially a multilateral approach to the denuclearization of Iran as part of achieving many regional objectives. I see. So you think Iran will eventually just be exposed as kind of this militarily defeated, morally bankrupt nation? I mean, their whole thing is, hey, we're against imperialist aggression, even though they're throwing proxies all over the Middle East and doing the exact same thing. It seems like they've always calculated the West is going to back down.

28:38Do we think they can learn that that's a mistake? Because it's their whole we're going to go straight to the bomb doesn't really sound like they've learned that lesson. I love how you put that, Jordan. they calculated that Trump always chickens out and they calculated it because Biden and Obama didn't exactly push maximally to get the best deal with the JCPOA. And I love the Iran deal, but it had some bad provisions. And I don't want to get into the details, but maybe now we're in a position of greater strength and unity and we could negotiate a better deal. And that's exactly what deterrence is.

29:17So I want to make an analogy with Russia and Ukraine. I will blame Obama in 2014 for not enforcing the Budapest Memorandum when Putin annexed Crimea. And that's what allowed Putin to miscalculate in 2022. Oh, I can invade the rest of Ukraine and I'll get away with it. No one will do anything because in 2014, the sanctions were not tough enough. However, However, if we defeated them in a war and then we're negotiating again, they know that we mean business because we've spent all these billions. We've developed this drone army. We did this. We did that. NATO countries upped their defense spending to five percent.

29:56And now if we look at the Middle East, the Iranians were shown as completely incompetent, not even able to keep their kind of signal messages private. it. And then their entire leadership, think of how funny this is, they knew that the Israelis wanted to attack at a certain time, but their leadership was blown up in their own beds. They weren't even sleeping underground the night of the attack. It's mind blowing. Yeah. Interesting. They kind of just thought, oh, this isn't going to happen. This is ridiculous. They're just bluffing. Oops. But even if it isn't going to happen, you live in the Middle East, you're an Iranian nuclear scientist, you sleep underground.

30:31Yeah, every night, not just on nights where Israel says they're going to attack, but every night. Exactly. OK, so who needs to be in the room for this to be real? You said the major European leaders. Who else needs to be in the room to get this deal signed? Obviously, the Ayatollahs and the Israelis and the Americans, Germany, France. I think that the Qataris are the key here, right? So if we look at regional diplomacy in the last five years, everything happens in Doha. When you need to get Israeli hostages released, you go to Doha. When you need to get the Russians to give back Ukrainian children that they kidnapped, you go to Doha.

31:07when we were making a deal with the Taliban, which was a disgraceful deal. Where did we do it? In Doha. I want to point out that when we got the ceasefire that Trump announced, the only people that could get the Iranians to honor the ceasefire were the Qataris. So if we can make a deal where the Qataris want to mediate this and then the Europeans want to actually do the economic bits, we are in business. Okay. How do we cut the chain between Iran and these proxies, though, right? Because they've got Hezbollah, they got the Houthis, they got Hamas. You're going to be shocked to hear the answer.

31:43Doha. That's the answer. Doha. Because all of the money for Hamas to build the tunnels in the period 2006, after they won that election, till October 7th, that money was sitting in bank accounts in Doha. And it wasn't that it was money that the Qataris paid for terrorism. And I hate when people to my right, the kind of FDD crowd and we're talking the real Republican Zionist neocons say the Qataris funded terror. And that's not true. It's that the Qataris were told you need to pony up money to rebuild houses in Gaza and rebuild education there. And Hamas happens to use that money to build tunnels and stockpile weapons.

32:28So we can do things with the Qataris to have more anti-money laundering and to have pressure on certain Hamas leaderships and certain Houthi and Hezbollah leaderships. The reason why it's all in Doha is Turkey doesn't have exactly the financial heft that the Qataris have. And in Iran, you're disconnected from the financial system. So, yes, there are Hamas leaders who are in Iran, but they can't transact multi-billion dollar business to resuscitate their empire. Okay. What about Netanyahu? I mean, someone's got to tell him, okay, time to end the war, even though your whole brand is strength and survival.

33:09Good luck with that, because isn't he maybe a little worried that he's going to get prosecuted for things? And he staked it all on this. It's not only that he's worried, Jordan. He has carved out a position for himself that so long as the war continues, he can stay in power. And if he's not in power, as you alluded there, he may face corruption charges or there could be an election and he'll lose because he's unpopular. That said, he achieved his life ambition and will go down as a hero for most Israelis. Not a hero for me because the corruption, the warmongering, some of the hatred against Arabs, which was completely unnecessary, even while trying to achieve strategic goals.

33:50His dalliances with Putin. That stuff, I think, for many Israelis is loathsome and they loathe him. They just want to see the back of him. But guarantees can be carved out here. Netanyahu is not a dictator, but I'm going to refer to something called the dictator's dilemma, Jordan. The dictator's dilemma is so long as you're in power, you're not going to die in a ditch. But as soon as you are not in power, your enemies are going to use the secret services or, you know, the courts, and they're going to prosecute you and you're going to either end up in jail or die in a ditch. I think a political solution can be made with Israel and its allies, whereby Netanyahu rides off into the sunset.

34:32He gets some kind of prize for what he's achieved. And it's not that the corruption cases are dropped, but he's an old man and his wife is very old. She's the one who's at the kind of linchpin, Sarah Netanyahu, of these corruption cases. And if they do the right thing, what do you know? America makes a place for them in Florida or something is worked out here because we can't let one man's personal motives hijack a whole region. There's something that I either missed or didn't understand. So we're calling for Iran's full denuclearization, no civilian program, decades of inspections. What gets them to say yes?

35:09Cash, security. Aren't they going to look at, again, the Libya lesson, the Ukraine lesson and say, no thanks. People who give up nukes, they get wrecked. That is the paradox in the conundrum. They have their feet to the fire, or as some people might say, they have their balls in the vice. They are really prostrate now. And what I would say is, guess what? We're not going to stomach regime change if you do X and Y and Z. Or if you ever block the inspectors from coming in, the war restarts and the sanctions restart. There's a term here called snapback sanctions. These existed prior to the JCPOA and prior to some of the parts of the Obama-Iran deal, which I think were in error.

35:53We can create a legal regime where it incentivizes the Iranians, not only the leadership, but the people and the scientists to want to comply with the inspectors. And you may say it's impossible, but a lot of things have happened in the last 10 years in the Middle East, which are quote unquote impossible. I think that solving this is actually among the more possible things. And the Iranians, the Qataris and the Saudis in the plan that I put forward can equally take a victory lap. We ended the war in Gaza and saved these babies from dying. We got the Israelis to commit to a Palestinian state. And yes, of course, the Israelis are going to get bribed with American investments into their high tech sector.

36:36And the Israelis are going to get bribed with more student visas for people to go to Silicon Valley. But Gazans and Iranians are going to get bribed with visas to study in Europe and with billions and billions to regrow their economy. So, I mean, there's an ability to bribe all these peoples. And I want to say the thing that the peoples of this region share is human capital. Iran is not only a rich civilization culturally, it's amazing the technical and human capital skill that exists in that place relative to how oppressive the government is. It's in Europe's interest to want to open up and create these programs.

37:13And the Gulfies understand this. They know that so long as Iranians or Palestinians are not a security threat for them, they're very happy to work with them and have them staff their economies. Yeah, it's very interesting. I've gotten a lot of messages on Instagram and an email from Iranians in the past week or two. And I was just like, oh, sorry for what's going on. And they were like, we're so mad. And I was like, yeah, it's a really complicated situation. And they're like, one guy said something. I'm so angry. And I was like, I'm sure you are. And he goes, we really want them to keep bombing.

37:42And I was like, wait, where are you? And he's Iran. And I was like, you want Israel to keep bombing? And he's like, yes. And I did a double take because I was like, wait a minute, what? I want to point out that I have a girl I dated in New York, Shia elite Iranian woman. She wants the Israelis to keep bombing. I know people in the Shah orbit in LA, in Sweden, elsewhere. They'd like the job to be finished. It's mostly a social class thing. If you're elite in the level that did well under the Shah, you've been suppressed by the Ayatollahs and they think that if the regime collapses, there will be an inversion and the old elites will come back and it'll be good for them.

38:23If you're more a lower middle class person, particularly from a rural background, the Shah was quite impressive. Not that the Ayatollahs are great, but you don't want the Israelis to finish the job because you're going to lose your social standing. And I don't think that we can impose regime change. It didn't really work very well in Iraq or Afghanistan. And therefore, if the Iranian people want to do that, they can do that actually much better when we've stopped bombing. That's right. I agree with that. I just thought that was an interesting sort of counterintuitive thing to see in my Instagram inbox, which is that the people in Iran are like, keep it going.

39:00And I'm like, wait, what? Let's talk about Gaza. The Saudis, are they potentially willing to bankroll Gaza's reconstruction? I mean, I think it would take a multinational effort here. But first of all, somebody's got to pay for this. Who's going to do that? And who is administering the hospitals? Who's doing the police thing in Gaza and the border patrol and all this stuff? Because when I was in Gaza, this is like 25 years ago, the police that I talked to because they were friends who were Hamas supporters actually turned out and they worked for the Palestinian Authority, reconcile that one. But we went and talked to their police friends and they were joking about torturing people and like chasing women and putting bottles up people's butts and stuff like that.

39:42These are not good police officers. These are not people that treat citizens with respect. These are people that are also working with Hamas and things like that. Like the whole thing is rotten to the core and the people who live there are just dealing with this crap on a daily basis. You can't just have somebody in a government office that says this is how it works. You got to replace the police and the border patrol and all the security officials and possibly all the other civil servants too. I love how you've brought it down to the level of corruption. Gaza is a very corrupt place and corruption undermines people's morals.

40:17No one trusts anyone. And hence there is a reversion to an almost primordial clan-like structure. If he's not my brother's friend, I can't trust the guy. And it's very difficult, even with all the ideological and Islamist and anti-Semitic layers on top, when trust is so broken down. But to go back to your question of who bankrolls it, the answer is that it's going to be who's always bankrolled the rebuilding of Gaza, the Europeans and the Gulfies. The Qataris, after the 2006 Gaza War, they rebuilt all the hospitals and the roads. The Europeans send billions there pretty much every year. They send billions, even though they know that a lot of those billions end up in the corrupt pockets of some police official who has a brother in Switzerland who's laundering the money for him.

41:03That's why my plan, which I'm the first to say it may not work. It has some pie in the sky elements. But all I want to say is you show me a better one, because we're in something I would call the Enduring Disorder, where all solutions look bad and there's every reason why people with the same interests don't coordinate together. So I want to create a situation where we have mutual incentives, and that's to get Gulfy Arabs, regional states, Israelis, diaspora Jews, and the West, as well as Russia and China, to have similar interests. They're never going to be the same. But if our interests can be 80 % the same, we can work together.

42:09us. We are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Out of the Loop. Do you think it'll have to start off as a police state to keep Hamas from infiltrating through all the structures that are being rebuilt? I'm going to say something which is unpopular. It has to start off as a neocolonial state. The key point here is that administration that I call for, and I've been calling for this since October 7th. I've briefed U.S. congressmen. I've written pieces in the Boston Globe and foreign policy about a Qatari-led quartet of Arab states to administer Gaza.

42:49Administer means police, borders, hospitals, scholarships. It has to be neocolonial because there is no authority in Gaza which is neutral. The Palestinian Authority is rotten through the core. Hamas is going to try to reconstitute itself. And then you have either the clans or the militias that the Israelis have funded, which are like rival gangs, right? They have drug wars, they smuggle aid. And does a neocolonial solution sound good to me? No. However, it might be the best of the alternatives. And it's going to be a solution which prepares for elections in five or 10 years to hand off first at the local level, to train, to have scholarships, to really create a best practices transparency system.

43:34And it's not Trumpian pie in the sky that it's going to be a Riviera. It isn't. It's going to be a tough slog and it may have aspects not of a police state, but of a neocolonial juggernaut, which is not necessarily going to be fair, but it's going to be the way that things worked in the 19th century, which is order was imposed and there were carrots at the end of the line so that people's living standards could improve. And then if you have the hope that your kids are not going to be living in this shithole, I think people are going to want to take the steps to get there. I hope so. I feel bad for everybody in this situation.

44:14Let's say China or Russia spoils the deal or aims to. What are the pressure points that the West still holds? Because I know with Iran, China wants Iranian oil, right? So they're not clamoring to screw up any deals. They want the Strait of Hormuz open. They want Iranian oil. They don't want it being bombed all the time. They might be in on this. But what if they're trying to spoil the deal with Gaza and other things like that? What are the levers the West has that we might need to pull? Jordan, allow me some more flattery here because I learned from Trump flattery always works. You are asking excellent questions because my theory of the enduring disorder is that some powers in the 21st century simply want to disorder the world without having an alternative order.

45:00And that makes Russia today different than Stalinist Russia or Khrushchev's Russia. I might not have loved communism, but it was an order. Here's the economic textbook, read your marks, do this, translate this book from Russian. It was an order. What Putin wants is that Gaza and Libya are just completely disordered and the Iranians have a batshit crazy economy and they can sell their oil at a discounted price. So he may actually want to spoil something which is working in Gaza just to spoil it so that the West can't be on the same page. The reason that Putin loves for the Sahel countries, and those are the ones just south of the Sahara Desert to be completely basket cases is then they emit migrants who go to Europe and that drives European populaces to the anti-migrant neopopulist right.

45:56And then they are disordered because they don't want to be a part of the EU and they don't want to do this with NATO. And that driving to neopopulism just disorders things. He doesn't have any other reason for there to be these crazy migrant flows. So the reason that he will be against a genius solution, like getting the Saudis to want to rebuild Gaza and making a deal with Israel and having the Iranians get a lot of rebuilding assistance for giving up their nukes, would begin to order the Middle East. And then it would be unleashing a region that has human capital, oil wealth, and a great geostrategic location.

46:36And the Russians would be like, oh, no, all of a sudden, there's all this economic growth and oil is being produced and we're not a part of that. So he very much might want to spoil that. My solution there is Putin isn't going to be there forever. We need to defeat him. And this may sound very controversial. How can you defeat the leader who sits atop the world's largest nuclear arsenal, I think that we will defeat him. We may not win immediately, but if we make sure that the Ukrainians don't lose the war, eventually Putin will either die or collapse. And the new Russian regime may look more like the Yeltsin regime, which was willing to do business with the West or corrupt, but not so ideologically bent on disordering.

47:23And then we could be in a world where we can actually work together. God, I don't know. That seems like it might be hinging a little too much on idealism that the next guy who comes in isn't going to be as bad as Vladimir Putin or just another flavor of that same thing. But I'm no Russia expert, and I know that's a little bit of a tangent. How much runway do we have to lock down this sort of Gaza-Iran deal? Is this something that you think, hey, we better do this in 2025? What sort of event would you be looking to that says, oh, it's too late? Would it be another Israeli attack on Iran? Would it be another kind of breach of the ceasefire?

47:59What are we looking for? Let's go back to these three levels again, because the ceasefire is very tenuous. Trump has not spelled out what the punishment is for violating it. He will drop a few F-bombs on live TV if you violate it. But what else is he going to do? I would like him to spell out some carrots and sticks. And it may be that he's done that behind the scenes. And if so, good on him and Whitcoff, that they've thought that through. But I don't see that America or Trump is going to broker this kind of deal of the century. Trump says that he does deals of the century. But if you look at what he did in North Korea, he's only willing to go and have the meeting.

48:43He's not really willing to do the sacrifices to say, get a deal with North Korea over the line. This is where experts come in. And who has the experts? It's the Europeans and the UN and the Gulfy allies who've been working on this stuff and have the top academic and diplomatic expertise. That's not how Trump does this transactionalism. So I think that we have only a few number of weeks. I wish it wasn't the case, but the deal will break down if the underlying root causes which led for there being this war are not treated, right? I like to use a divorce analogy here, Jordan. I do think that a lot of diplomacy and a lot of things that are going on in the Middle East are like human relationships.

49:29And I want to quote Robert Kaplan here. Politics is all about interests until it's all about Shakespeare. And in The Enduring Disorder, everything is about Shakespeare, meaning the human relationships, the jealousies, the flattery, the revenge. And in a marriage, if you and the wife love each other, but you can't stand when she calls her mom and uses her mom's advice and not yours, and then you guys have an argument and you make up and then you make love and you're happy, but you didn't deal with, it's not okay when you call your mom and then she convinces you to buy something with my credit card.

50:08That's the unallowed behavior. And you're just like, oh, I'm sorry, I love you. Let's go out for a romantic date. And it's solved. And we're in a situation now where Trump has excellently figured out a way to get the Israelis and Iranians to fear his hegemonic power and to make nice publicly. But he hasn't dealt with any of the underlying issue. And I almost feel that he can't. And that's why we need Starmer and Macron and maybe specifically Merz. Germany has traditionally been loath to put itself forward in foreign policy. It usually follows the EU, follows what France does. But I see that there's an opportunity with this new German chancellor for a range of historic reasons that he could work together with others to actually initiate.

50:59I see. So you think Europe's in a key position here? It'd be great to see some leadership from them, maybe something that Washington can't or won't provide. Here's a key thing here, which everyone knows, but usually you can't articulate. America is biased towards Israel. It's just the truth. It's not anti-Semitic to say this. It is. That said, there are many European countries which are biased towards the Palestinians. Ireland, Spain, Norway. We know it. It's not just in how they recognize the Palestinian state. It's where their donations go. It's where their protests go. It's how their diplomats are trained.

51:36This is not a bug. This is a feature. We can have the Europeans put forward a pro-Palestinian approach and counterbalance with where we know the Americans are at. And that's what went wrong with all the rounds of Oslo and the JCPOA. These things have tended to be done in an America first framework. And that's probably not what we can deal with in today's enduring disorder, where so many polls are pulling in opposite directions. We need to coordinate together. Yep. That makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. Jason, I hope that people seize this opportunity right now because pardon me for not being super hopeful about peace in the Middle East in my lifetime.

52:21But yeah, I would love to see something actually work out for once. And talk about some of the great things that unite personal development with diplomacy. Okay. So I talked about ordering the disorder and ordering the disorder is bringing my interests and my adversary's interests into some sort of alignment. And when you talk about personal growth, you're frequently talking about understanding certain things psychologically and then changing my behavior pattern. And I love the way that you frame that. The disorder that I want to order is to get Iranians and Israelis, Gazans and Lebanese and Europeans and Americans and Saudis and Qataris to realize, I may disagree with you on this, but 80 % of our interests are the same.

53:13We want our kids to go to university. We want to have a better livelihood. We don't want the planet to be blown up by nukes or to have so much climate change. And in that region, it's a little bit different than with Russia. The Russians do have a genuine interest in spoiling at the global level because they're a declining power. They're constantly going to be weaker because of where their economy is at. This is different in the Middle East. I think that we have so many rising powers and people who are going to say the future is ours. Hey, we can actually put aside some of these grievances. So the role here for diplomats is actually like the role of the marriage counselor to get people to see these shared interests.

53:57Put aside all that BS. It's been weighing you down, buddy. Yeah. Look, man, from your lips to God's ears, I suppose, with this Middle Eastern peace deal potentially happening. I mean, it would be absolutely mind blowing if something like this would actually work out for once. I think all of us share that. Hey, Steve Whitcoff, you can call me. I'm willing to go to Doha for you. Starmer, I live only eight miles from you. See you at Westminster. Knock on his door, man. See how that goes. That might get his attention. Man, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I know this is short notice.

54:29I know it's like the middle of the night where you are. No, this was really great, Jordan. Thank you. man i hope the europeans pick up the ball on this one the next few weeks will really be a good indicator of how serious we are about solving this issue i'm not going to hold my breath but man would it be nice to see some change in this world all things jason pack will be in the show notes on the website advertisers deals discount codes and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals please consider supporting those who make the show possible also our newsletter we bit wiser this is a hit with all y 'all you guys write back all the time i love writing it you love reading it.

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56:02Thank you.