176. How Close Are We To War With Iran? (Robert Malley)

15:15Alastair Campbell:First, they talked to the PLO before the United States did well before. And they actually had contact with Hamas. I remember meeting with Hamas members in Switzerland and elsewhere. But then they sort of fell in line, as Europe often does, and accepted the US position, except to the quartet conditions, the conditions that were put to Hamas before any kind of interaction could occur. How do they feel now when Trump is speaking to Hamas? I think Europe must be scratching its head. That's the kind of thing that I think the Europeans should be doing, even if America has more problems dealing with it.

15:50Rory Stewart:One of the striking things for me is the way in which Gaza has faded from the news. I wonder whether you could take us back and try to give us your sense of what we saw October 7th, Gaza, and what that whole period since October meant. What was that? How did you view that? How would you describe it if you were writing about it?

16:16Alastair Campbell:Well, so we did write about it. Hussein and I wrote about it in our book, Tamar's Yesterday. And I think it goes to almost the genesis of the book. What we were hearing at the time from people saying October 7th is this, it almost was presented as an anomaly in terms of Hamas being the Islamist extremist radicals who did something that they plotted in, you know, and it's true that it was plotted by a small group of people, but as if it was sort of at odds with sort of Palestinian tradition. And on the Israeli side, their response, the slaughter that followed was presented as the handiwork of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing acolytes, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir.

16:54Alastair Campbell:And what Hussein and I felt at the time was this is getting it entirely wrong. October 7th is Palestinian through and through in the sense that Palestinians have long felt, and this is where emotions come into play, that they've been captives. Now this was their chance to be the captors. Their land has been taken. Now they're going to invade what is, at that point, Israeli land. They had been frightened by Israel. Now they were going to take the fright and the terror on the Israeli side. But that's nothing new. I mean, if you look at the history of the Palestinian national movement, pre-Hamas in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and you know, you guys are old enough, I think, to remember it, terrorist acts, hijacking of buses, Munich, attacks against civilians.

17:35Alastair Campbell:That was a Palestinian attempt, again, to instill fear in the Israelis, to make them taste a taste of their own medicine, and to put the Palestinian question on the map to remind the world, you can't ignore us. And Israel's response was not Netanyahu's war, it was Israel's war. And the poll after poll shows that if anything, large parts, the majority of the Israeli public wanted harsher measures, not softer ones. And so again, our theory, a thesis, is that October 7th and what followed are not a rupture, they're not an aberration, they're not something that landed from Mars. They're very much the expression of their respective societies, which is why both societies sort of embraced the acts.

18:18Alastair Campbell:And when criticism began, so when the Palestinians start criticizing, some Palestinians criticize October 7th, it's not on moral grounds, it's on strategic grounds. Why did you not prepare us for Israel's counterattack? Look at the devastation, the horror. So the criticism is on sort of that ground. And on the Israeli side, when increasing number of Israelis criticize Netanyahu and the continuation of the war, It wasn't, look at what, you know, the slot of the Palestinians, what many international organizations called genocide. It's because what about the hostages? You know, what that tells us is that something deeply psychological, emotional, historical happened on October 7th and afterwards, but not because they were breaks, but because they were reenactments of the way Israelis and Palestinians have interacted with each other.

19:05Robert Malley:I completely understand what you're saying there about this almost being like a continuum of a long, long, long struggle. Was there something different on both sides about the response? And how much was that to do with the way that our media and our culture and our current politics have changed maybe from the time when you first started out on this journey with Bill Clinton?

19:24Alastair Campbell:I think there's some of that. No, there's something different. There are many Palestinian attempts to do things that were analogous to October 7th. They failed. In this case, it succeeded in quotation marks. It's a horrific success to a large extent because Israel was asleep. And again, I think everything that's coming out more and more from how the Israeli cabinet and the Israeli leadership looked at this, they just didn't believe it. They didn't believe that Hamas would do it. They believed that Hamas would be sort of placated by whatever they were given, and they didn't want to risk it all.

19:56Alastair Campbell:So yes, it was more intense, it did far more damage and horror than previous attempts. But what inspired it and what they were trying to do was not that different. And again, the Israeli response was also, it's of a piece with many things that Israel has done, but in an exaggerated, intensified form, partly because of what they had just suffered.

20:19Robert Malley:Rory made the point earlier that it's almost like Gaza has fallen out of the international news, when actually there are still quite a lot of people dying. The place is still in a state of total devastation. And the police plan, so-called, doesn't really seem to be driving with the momentum that was meant to be injected into it when Trump first came up with it. So I just wonder what you think that says about the way the world views this conflict as well.

20:47Alastair Campbell:Yeah, in some ways, there's also nothing new there, which is a new normal gets established. And when the new normal is slightly better than what had immediately preceded it, it becomes the new reality that people accept. So you just said it's a ceasefire that probably wouldn't be considered a ceasefire in most contexts. You still have about four or five Palestinians killed every day. Yeah. I mean, half of Gaza, more than half of Gaza is still under Israeli military control. But compared to the way it was three months ago, yeah, relatively speaking, it is more of a ceasefire than it was there. It's certainly not normal, as you just described, and people lack shelter.

21:23Alastair Campbell:They lack basic necessities. It's, you said, and I wrote this one saying, if the Trump plan were implemented, even partially, Palestinians in Gaza would transition from utter hell to a mere nightmare. And we're in the mere nightmare now. And so a nightmare compared to hell is improvement, but it's nowhere near normalcy. And the tempo, and partly this is, as you say, our new world, part of it is President Trump in particular, who has this capacity of creating news every hour, not even, it doesn't even need a full day to have a new newsflash. So today, people's attention has moved on because it's not what it once was.

22:00Alastair Campbell:The attention should also be on the West Bank. I mean, what's happening there is, and it's been for a while, de facto annexation. But there's other issues that people are going to deal with. And so, yeah, it's no longer in the headlines. Again, I don't know how new that is, but it has become all the more intense because of the pace of our social media and the pace of how people's attention span gets diverted to something else.

22:21Rory Stewart:One of the things that I struggle with is it's described as a peace plan, but it doesn't feel as though there's a clear Palestinian political path here. There's a real question about legitimacy. I mean, who are the elected Palestinian representatives who are supposed to be running Gaza, taking responsibility for it? And so how are you supposed to rebuild a society without having any form of legitimate representatives or government involved in that reconstruction? Right.

22:51Alastair Campbell:I mean, first of all, I don't think it ever really even was remotely a peace plan because at best, even if it was completely implemented, and I think a lot of it is just performative and it was never intended to be implemented. But putting that aside, even if it had been implemented, we're not talking about peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It's even some vague mention of maybe under some conditions they could consider Palestinian statehood. But this has nothing to do with peace. It had to do with calming the situation down in Gaza, which is no mean feat. And I certainly wouldn't begrudge it because for a Palestinian living in Gaza, it's infinitely better today than it was only a few months ago.

23:25So I think all that is true.

23:27Alastair Campbell:But it has nothing to do with peace. Your other point, which is true, I mean, again, I would say this is often an American habit of trying to pick among the entities that it's going to deal with, those that they're more comfortable with. So not only do you exclude Hamas, which they've done in the past, but you look for the Palestinians or the Iraqis or the Lebanese or whoever who look, speak, dress like we do. And they're the ones who then anoint and you say they're the moderate ones and they're the ones with whom we're going to make peace, notwithstanding that they may have no legitimacy, no credibility.

24:00Alastair Campbell:And today, as you say, so that the authority that the world deals with, the Palestinian Authority, probably has less support and legitimacy than the three of us do among Palestinians. And then the technocratic government, yes, there's a technocratic government or authority that's been, entity that's been named for Gaza. You know, these people were handpicked. They have no political representation. And I think, you know, if you look at what the Trump plan is, it's about many things. But one thing it is about is truly about depoliticizing the Palestinian question. It is purely reduced to a humanitarian question.

24:38Alastair Campbell:Can the situation in Gaza improve on a humanitarian scale? But the life that would be proposed to Gazans if they were to accept, you know, and you've seen the Jared Kushner plan and you saw it in Davos and whatever these skyscrapers, whatever these buildings that would be built in southern Gaza. The life is a very Orwellian life, devoid of politics, complete under the complete surveillance of Israelis and Americans, I suspect, where there'd be no organization, no civil society, no ability to organize. That is a vision, which again is superior to the nightmare that the Gazans were living. But I think it gives us a glimpse of what a future could look like in different places where there's no ability to organize, no ability to dissent outside the purview of, in this case, the occupier, in other cases, the governing authorities.

25:26Robert Malley:Where do you see this ending? How do you see this ending? Do we sort of stay in the nightmare stage for a very, very long time?

25:32Alastair Campbell:I fear so. I mean, again, with improvements, I think over time, people will get more medicine, more food, more shelter, but all that is going to take a long time. There'll be some milestones of success that President Trump and others will point to, how many trucks have come in, how many Palestinians are now living in homes as opposed to living under tents. Maybe there'll even be some security force, international security force. But at the same time, there'll be nothing that will be transformationally new. And I think Israeli de facto occupation of Gaza will continue without any prospect of anything resembling self-determination or peace for the Palestinians.

26:07Alastair Campbell:So I think, yeah, the most likely scenario is somewhere along the lines of where we are today with some improvement, a massive refugee camp in which Palestinians are being dealt with as a humanitarian problem that needs to be addressed. I really don't see how we go from here to something that I would call a political settlement, short of real changes in the US, in Israel and among Palestinians.

26:29Rory Stewart:How do we help people think clearly about the situation of Israel itself? So for many Israelis, they feel under immense threat. They feel very, very vulnerable. They're very conscious of history. They're very conscious of 6 million people being murdered during the Holocaust, of pogroms, of anti-Semitism, very, very conscious of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and of states that don't recognize the existence of the state of Israel, very much convinced that given half a chance, these people would wipe them off the face of the earth, very keen to make people understand they are a liberal democracy, they've brought development to this area.

27:17Rory Stewart:It was one narrative. And there's another narrative at the same time, which is, in another way, Israel can be seen in the region as becoming a regional hegemon, a sort of strong man, which is running its own illegal wars in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, in Yemen, that has nuclear weapons, that has probably the most powerful, aggressive military in the region. and from that point of view rather than being a sort of vulnerable state on the verge of being overrun it's in fact a state that's threatening its neighbors and expanding how do you how do you think this through how do you find a way to talk about this to people i mean i think both are true

28:05Alastair Campbell:and i think and you're absolutely right i think and again we try to do it in our book is to put ourselves in in israeli shoes i mean you know from their perspective they won wars against parties that refuse their existence. And then they've offered compromises which have either been rejected or grudgingly accepted. And then they get attacked. And every time they withdraw, they withdraw from the parts of the West Bank. They get the second Intifad in 2000. They withdraw from Southern Lebanon. They get Hezbollah rockets. They withdraw from Gaza. They get Hamas rockets. So it makes sense that they would feel that way.

28:35Alastair Campbell:Again, there's a whole context here that we could get into to explain all of that and why there could have been a different pathway. But that's their experience. And I get it. And therefore, the flip side of that sense of vulnerability is a desire to preempt threats, which we see in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and etc. So both of those are true. And what is striking is how in the wake of October 7th and what followed, Israel has rarely if ever been more powerful militarily. It could project its power almost anywhere at will and get away with it and preempt, prevent, whatever you want to call it, threats, whether they exist, whether they're genuine or not, whether they're imminent or far away.

29:17Alastair Campbell:So from a military perspective, more powerful than ever from a diplomatic political perspective, probably more isolated and more of a sort of pariah state than they've been in recent memory. And that gap, they haven't been able to translate the military strength into any form of political diplomatic asset. And the Palestinian, you have sort of a reverse discrepancy between a Palestinian movement that has seldom been weaker, more divided, fragmented. As you say, there's no representative leadership. But the Palestinian cause internationally has rarely, if ever, been as popular on the streets of London, the streets of throughout the globe.

29:55Alastair Campbell:But they haven't been able to translate that global support for the cause into power for the movement. So there's the disequilibrium on both sides, but both are realities and how you get out of it and how either side is going to be able to... Where's the bank where they're going to be able to translate and convert the strength they have into the strength that they lack?

30:19Rory Stewart:You teach this subject at Yale and elsewhere. It must be the most unbelievably difficult subject to teach. I mean, when I was with you last year, some of my students were demonstrating for Palestine. Some of them were demonstrating for Israel. There were demonstrations, counter-demonstrations. Five of my students were taken off to jail. There were people turning up with kafirs and stars of David. And Trump was shutting down funding and there were names being gathered. I mean, how do you think about how to talk and teach about this in the American political climate?

30:50Alastair Campbell:So I might surprise you and I'm going to invite you. Maybe we should teach it together. It's by far the best class I've ever experienced. I love it because it's one thing to be on a campus where you don't speak to the other side and you demonstrate. And I get that. I respect it. I was a student once. It's another thing when you have to be face-to-face in a class of about 20 students for 13 weeks. You could decide you're not going to listen to the other person, but it's going to make it a pretty unpleasant experience. Or you're going to listen. And I try to curate the class so that there's some balance.

31:20Alastair Campbell:And it's been really rewarding to me. I mean, I love listening to them engage with issues, trying even people who think they know the subject, they think they know the history, they then read more and then they hear another point of view. So yeah, I invite you to come join me because I love it.

31:37Robert Malley:You talked there about, you know, Trump did things, Trump does things that no previous president would have done. And you pointed to one where actually you could say that was a good thing to do. First of all, and try to be as objective about this as possible, you probably feel about Trump the way that I do. But how would you define his approach to foreign policy? And what would he say if he was sort of looking into his soul, not looking into a TV camera, not looking at his truth social posting and all his ranting and his raving? What would he say is the positive version of his strategy for the Middle East and his strategy for Iran?

32:11Alastair Campbell:That's a tough question to try to explain what his foreign policy is. I think it's a mix of instincts, impulses, narcissism, self-aggrandizement. and depending on the day and the issue, the sum total of those impulses produce a result. Now he also has outside voices that try to influence him. So I think every decision he makes makes sense in hindsight because you could try to look at it and say, you get what he was trying to do and maybe he failed, but you know what went through his brain to get there. But the real problem is that ahead of time, it's almost utterly unpredictable. Come to what he tries to do, what he think were the best case for him in the Middle East.

32:50Alastair Campbell:But I'd say one of the things that makes it so hard to try to figure out his policy is that he has this uncanny ability. When you, as former politicians, I'm sure, look at it with envy, is that he could present any outcome, any outcome as a success. So people now are saying in Iran, which we'll come to it, that he's painted himself in a corner. Maybe. He could paint himself out of the corner and And no matter where he lands, on Greenland, on Iran, on Gaza, he will make a case, which he will believe, and believing yourself is the first step towards being persuasive, that it's successful. And he is not encumbered by the logic.

33:29Alastair Campbell:Again, I'm thinking of President Obama, who thought, well, what about credibility? And what about, I'm going to get bogged down. People are going to say, if I bomb Assad, and he's still standing. He said this, if I bomb Assad after his famous red line, I bomb him after his use of chemical weapons, and then the next day he's still standing, I'll look like I lost. Do you think President Trump thinks in those terms at all? No, I'll bomb him, and then I'll say I bombed him, and I won. So for the Middle East, I think his vision is the same as it is for other places, very transactional. I will deal with leaders who care about what I care about, money, commerce, maybe power, and we'll do these deals with these countries.

34:07Alastair Campbell:And so, you know, that's how he deals with the Gulf. That's how he deals with, that's why he's dealing with Syria. Maybe how he wants to deal with Iran. We'll come to that. I think Israel-Palestine for him is, I don't think he focuses on it. He sees it as many presidents have. If I could make this ultimate deal, how great it would be. And for him to deal, and I think instinctively, and I think this is not that far from what Jared Kushner said when you saw him in Davos, let's just offer the Palestinians a slightly better life. And then all these political questions of refugees and Jerusalem and sovereignty, to hell with it.

34:40Alastair Campbell:Who cares? As long as they're living better, that's his vision. And so it is a vision that is really devoid in some sense of politics of what I was talking about earlier.

34:52Rory Stewart:Okay, Alistair, Rob, let's take a quick break and then maybe back for some more.

35:00Robert Malley:what you said there straight a corby i was talking to somebody recently who was is involved in all this and who said that when trump was putting forward his plan he got his people but cough and these guys to go and talk to israelis and talk to hamas and sort of you know see where they were and he just announced that hamas had said yes and then the hamas guys are sitting there saying, we didn't say anything. And before you know it, the whole world is saying that Habas has signed up for something. It is an extraordinary thing to deal with.

35:32Alastair Campbell:It is. No, not really. I mean, I look at it and I, again, just to pivot a little bit to Ron, he has said, for example, that thanks to his intervention, the execution of 800 protesters has been nullified. Does anyone really think that they were about to execute 800 people within a matter of days. He also has said recently, I don't know if you picked it up, that Iran is trying to build a new nuclear facility. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But whatever occurs, he will say, I prevented that probably non-existent effort from coming to fruition. And that's his victory. So, I mean, it does give him a freedom that I look at and I marvel about.

36:10Robert Malley:Keeping you jealous.

36:11Rory Stewart:A little bit, yeah. I suppose the obvious move then, Rob, is to try to talk about what you see as the possible scenarios which might take place with the US and Iran over the next few months, bearing in mind the fact that you just told us that predicting what's going on in Trump's head is impossible.

36:27Alastair Campbell:Yeah. And you mean just about the diplomacy between the two, not what's happening domestically in Iran. I know we could come to that.

36:33Rory Stewart:And also what he's going to do with planes and fleets and rockets and Israeli attacks.

36:38Alastair Campbell:I mean, so the way I look at it, the Iranian side to me in some ways, even though I'm not Iranian, I've only spent maybe 48 hours in Tehran years ago. It's more familiar, it's more predictable, it's more understandable whether one agrees with it or not. It's to make minimal concessions in a negotiation that's supposed to last as long as possible in order for them to maintain maximum assets at the end of the day.

36:59Rory Stewart:You said something very interesting there. You're the first policy official I've ever met who said, I spent 48 hours in Tehran some years ago. But the fact is, you were one of the key US linchpins on Iran policy. And I suppose what you're saying there is that one of the problems dealing with a regime like Iran is that even getting visas, getting access to get in on the ground is very difficult. And the type of expertise that you had to develop was reading a lot, talking to a lot of people, studying a lot. But it isn't the type of expertise that you would naturally develop about Boston or New Haven, in Connecticut by just being out on the ground, talking to people, being in the streets.

37:37Alastair Campbell:I mean, today it would be impossible to go to Iran. But even at the time, yeah, I mean, it is one of the costs of the estrangement between the two countries. And we could talk, I'm sure we will, about the benefits of isolation and sanctions and whether that actually helps or not. But yeah, I mean, you're dealing with a culture and the people that we have only very vague understanding of. But so whatever I'm saying now is based not on being in Iran, but being face-to-face with their negotiators, which is only a small glimpse because even the negotiators are only a piece of a much bigger puzzle and not the most important one because the decision makers sit in Tehran.

38:12Alastair Campbell:And so the fact that Foreign Minister Zarif or whoever is at the other end of the table doesn't mean that you're speaking to the soul of the system. I'm not surprised by how Iran is dealing with this. They're trying to set a stage where they will make some concessions, but limit them and try to drag this out and see what they can get and want to be able to, at the end of the day, have enough leverage, enough assets, enough deterrent power that they don't feel are going to be overly vulnerable. The American side is much, I mean, it really is harder with President Trump to figure out what he wants.

38:45Alastair Campbell:So you have somebody who is unpredictable, who's not just unpredictable because we can't predict where he's going, but day to day, We don't know what impulse he'll have. So he's impulsive. He's impatient. And it's hard for a system like Iran to deal with that. And maybe that's one of the strengths of Trump is that he really has them on their toes. They don't know what to expect. I would not be at all surprised if by the end of this podcast, you tell me, oh, we just have a news bulletin that a deal has been struck, a nuclear deal has been struck, and President Trump has announced that it's the best deal that's ever been negotiated with anyone anywhere for the last 4 ,000 years.

39:22Alastair Campbell:Or if you told me at the end of this, oh, we just got a news bulletin that President Trump has ordered strikes on Iran and strikes against military political targets. So I think there is a pathway to a deal precisely because Iran would want something coming out. They don't like the position they're in now. So they would like something that would stabilize it. And there's a part of President Trump who's the dealmaker who would like to say he's made a deal with this entity that it's so hard to deal with. So one of the big prizes he could achieve. and as long as he could claim that it's better than the JCPOA, he might take it.

39:56Alastair Campbell:So I find it very hard right now to try to predict, so I won't try.

40:01Robert Malley:I'm hearing in you, Rob, not just a fascination with Trump, but a sense that you actually think maybe there is quite often method in his madness. You wrote an article in Le Mans newspaper not long ago, and you went through what you saw as some of the, I think some of the failings of the policy under Obama and under Joe Biden. And you said it's hardly surprising that many Iranians so often feeling abandoned would place their hopes in Donald Trump. What did you mean by that?

40:30Alastair Campbell:I mean, this is I hear it from Iranian friends and others who either have been there. And I think you reported it on yourselves a few days ago. There are many Iranians today who would say there's nothing that could be worse than our current situation. And if President Trump were to bomb the regime, we would be happy, which is, I mean, it's kind of extraordinary. I suspect that's part of it out of desperation. They don't really have it. They don't really know what it would yield. Some of my Iranian students in class say that they think that it could lead to regime change. And when you try to press them on how do you get from bombing regime targets to regime change, they don't know.

41:03Alastair Campbell:Nobody knows. But, you know, yes, I don't want to, I really don't want to sound overly positive or to say that this method is madness. But I think his madness is a method in the sense that it does keep people guessing. People guessing is not always the worst thing to do. I think if you could marry his unconventionality, his lack of political constraints, which has hurt many presidents that I've served on Israel, Palestine, and on Iran, if you'd married that with a, I would call, a more forward-leaning strategic vision, you might have something really powerful. Unfortunately, you have. it's married to narcissism and self-indulgence and everything that I don't particularly admire.

41:41Rory Stewart:Yeah. Let's just for a second look at that question of the weaknesses. It's no secret, I think, that Alistair and I, great fans, or maybe overly idealize the worlds of Clinton's and rules-based international order and all the kind of good stuff that Francis Fukuyama was excited by in the 1990s. But I guess we also are able to recognize that in a sense, Trump doesn't come out of nowhere, that populism partly draws on the failures of that age. Looking back, having been in the foreign policy apparatus of Clinton, Obama, Biden, what would be your critique of what America got wrong during that period internationally?

42:22Alastair Campbell:I mean, I think there's two critiques which may end up in the same place, but they start from very different premises. And it's the right-wing critique, the MAGA critique, or the left-wing progressive Bernie Sanders AOC critique. And so you could look at it and say it was a foreign policy of globalization that ignored the industrial base, that ignored what globalization and free trade was doing to the working and middle class. That's not my expertise. And I'm not an economist, so I defer to others to say whether that's a genuine critique. But it certainly is a critique that has held. I mean, the whole Davos crowd, the whole notion that this was an elite that was dealing with each other and ignoring vast swaths of America.

43:01Alastair Campbell:I think there's something there. Again, I don't want to overstate it because that's not my expertise, but I think that's one critique. The other critique, which the left would take part of that, and I think the left in the US would say that some of these free trade agreements were done at the expense of the working class in the US and the middle class in the US. But the other critique is what it's done to the rest of the world. And that's a critique that I'm quite familiar with because of, as you said, my family background, which is a critique, again, that maybe Prime Minister Carney is making about Trump's policies today, but it's a critique that I'm sure you've heard from third world or global South countries for a long time, which is that it's a policy, that American policy of exceptionalism that considers itself able to make the rules for others.

43:49Alastair Campbell:And in the guise of exceptionalism and in the guise of claiming that the US was a power for good, was a hypocritical, duplicitous entity that would bend rules in its favor, bend rules in the favor of its allies, and trample the rights of those that were on the other side of the barrier. For me, one issue, again, I don't think this is what explains Trump at all, but the question of sanctions, it is quite extraordinary that you have a country that could decide because of genuine disagreements that another country is going to suffer in ways that are, I mean, look at the way Cuba is being dealt with today, or even the way Iran has been dealt with or other entities.

44:30Alastair Campbell:That's something that is, I mean, it is quite extraordinary to think of that that's the power that resides now in the hands of one country because of the role of the dollar. And the metric of success of a sanctions policy is almost never does it achieve the desired goal, because it almost never does. I mean, what mentioned the sanctions policy that actually led to the collapse of a regime and a positive transition? Very, very rare, if ever. The measure of the success of a sanctions policy is the harm it does to the economy. What happened to GDP growth? What happened to unemployment? What happened to inflation?

45:04Alastair Campbell:But that obviously hurts the people who you claim you're trying to help. And it really, I mean, it does untold damage. You've seen it in Iraq. We're seeing it now in other, whether it's Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. And that's not to exculpate the countries, the regimes or the governments that have also contributed mightily to corruption and mismanagement. But there's no doubt that sanctions have also played a role. But that's not really an answer to your question. I do think Trump domestically is an answer. And some people said it's the middle finger that he is giving or that the people who vote for him are giving to a system that they think has been overly preoccupied with the elite and with global trade and globalization and Davos.

45:46Alastair Campbell:but also on the part and we say this in you said and i say this in our book that much of at least the arab world when trump won had a kind of sigh of relief finally were done with the hypocrisy of the biden but also obama who they felt had all these great speeches but you know didn't really live up to their rhetoric and finally they had somebody who was devoid of any hypocrisy any duplicity who said what he believed or in which they thought was the genuine American policy of trying to dominate and trying to exercise their hegemony. So there was a little bit of sense of that, certainly on the part of Arab leaders who were tired of the paternalistic discourses about how great the international liberal order was and trying to dictate how others should govern themselves.

46:34Alastair Campbell:But even at the level of some ordinary citizens, there was a little bit of a sense of relief at having somebody who was adorned of any of that sense of duplicity that they had grown tired of.

46:47Robert Malley:You mean he doesn't even pretend to care about human rights? Yeah.

46:50Alastair Campbell:Exactly. I mean, could you imagine a president who says, no, no, no, no, no, this is not about democracy in Venezuela. It's about oil. I mean, that's kind of a breath of fresh air in a kind of polluted way.

47:00Robert Malley:You were part of the US team that got the deal that we had in relation to Iran's weapons program, which Trump then sort of tore up partly because it was done by Barack Obama. Give us an insight into how something like that happens. I don't want you to sort of give all the details, but I've been involved, I guess, particularly in things like the Northern Ireland peace process, and it's incredibly complicated and what have you. But on the Iranian, how did that process work? Who were the real powers? Who were the drivers? Who were providing most of the sticking points? and how did he get from a kind of idea to something that felt at the time like a really big breakthrough?

47:42Alastair Campbell:Yeah, so you're right. I'll try to be brief. But I often think about it, about why that negotiation succeeded. And then when President Biden came back into office, the effort failed. And I do think, I mean, there are many reasons why, but what happened in 2015 is you have an American president who believes that achieving a nuclear deal with Iran is a core national security interest. And he believed it because he thought the alternatives, whether he was right or wrong, were either Iran with a bomb or the US bombing Iran, and he didn't want either one of those. So he was prepared to overcome huge obstacles.

48:13Alastair Campbell:I mean, obviously, Israel was against. Almost every Gulf Arab country was against. The Republican Party was against. Most of the Democratic elected officials were also against. So he was prepared to say, you know what, I'm going to do this. And it proves that an American president who has that as a priority is able to overcome one obstacle after another. Again, as a footnote, contrast that with presidents who tried to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who stopped at the first domestic or Israeli obstacle, and you could see the difference. But I don't think you had in Iran a consensus that enough was enough, the sanctions were doing too much harm, and we could reach a deal.

48:51Alastair Campbell:They had built their nuclear program, in large part, as leverage to exchange against the lifting of sanctions. So I think you had, you know, minefields, domestic opposition on both sides, regional opposition, but a congruence of a core interest. I thought that that was going to be replicated, which is why I mistakenly took the job in 2021, thinking that we would have the same incentives. The U.S. wanted to prevent an Iran with a bomb and they wanted to not have to bomb Iran. And the sanctions were even doing more harm, I mean, more damage to Iran that they would want to get rid of them. I think I neglected many things, but two things in particular.

49:26Alastair Campbell:On the US side, for President Biden, this was far, far, far from being a priority. He thought this was a problem that could be managed, that could be dealt with by others, that Iran was, you know, it was a problem, but there were so many problems that were more important. And so, yeah, he was prepared to, if a deal came about, he was prepared to sign on, but he wasn't prepared to take on the large opposition domestically, particularly because, interestingly, the regional opposition had abated, at least in the Arab world. So there was never that kind of prioritization on the US side. And on the Iranian side, I think the experience of 2018, when President Trump left a very, very sour taste in their mouth, and it reinforced those in the system who always were very skeptical about dealing with the US.

50:10Alastair Campbell:And the argument, I suspect that at the end of the day, when the Supreme Leader had to say yes or no to a deal, somebody told him, how do you know that the next president is not going to tear it up? So why are we doing this again? And so that was a very hard argument to respond to. So I think that for me, the lesson of 2015 is it was really at all hands on deck on the American side. The whole, you know, President Obama made sure that everyone was rowing in the same direction. And he had on the Iranian side, at least a congruence in terms of their perception that this was important enough.

50:42Robert Malley:What's the international context within that? I think one of the things that Roy and I talk about a lot on the podcast is, particularly under Trump, but maybe this has always been a little bit like this. We talk about the international rules-based order. We talk about the United Nations as being this sort of hugely important body. But was this very much America-Iran? That was all that was going on. Just as now Trump would say, it's America-Iran, it's America-Israel, very much kind of bilateral view of the world.

51:10Alastair Campbell:You know, the key, the entity that had the main concession to make in terms of sanctions was the US. But I do think President Obama, and this was one of the guidance that he gave the team, was we cannot afford not to be fully aligned with the E3. This was Germany, the UK, and France. And there were, as I'm sure you know, real tensions between the US and one or the other country, mainly the French, not surprisingly. But he said, we are not going to make a deal. First of all, you couldn't because of the Security Council, because we needed to lift the sanctions there, but also his conception that, you know, they need to be with us all the way.

51:48Alastair Campbell:So that was a very, very important part of the negotiations, which was to keep the E3 on board despite the ups and downs. And that was successful. And that was very much part of the president's mindset.

51:59Robert Malley:Where do you see the UN today as an entity?

52:02Alastair Campbell:So the UN didn't play, it's not like the UN played a particular role, although they were the ones, as you know, they were the sort of the structure that invented the P5 plus 1. five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. So that was under their mandate. They didn't really play a role in the negotiations. But today, you know, I mentioned my father was a journalist. His first job in the U.S. was as a correspondent to the U.N. So I grew up with this notion of UTAN and all the greats, Secretary Generals. I mean, where is the U.N. today? Part of it is truly because the international system is not what it was.

52:34Alastair Campbell:And if the players in the Security Council in particular are not prepared to work together, then it doesn't matter what the UN can or cannot do. But I also think that there was a time when the UN Secretary General took their jobs extremely seriously and thought they were prepared to speak loudly and to take risks. That has changed over time. Ideally, I mean, this is what was maybe missing from Carney's speech is you're going to need to reinvent an international system that is more reflective of the power balances of the day, but also manages to overcome some of the blockages of the Security Council.

53:03Alastair Campbell:I mean, it's a strange creature that was born from the Second World War. It doesn't really reflect today's distribution of power, but it has ultimate veto power, and it's very hard to change it because they have the veto power over any changes. So we're left maybe with President Trump's Board of Peace, which is hardly a healthy alternative.

53:24Rory Stewart:Your career has been both deeply impressive, but also must be at some levels deeply depressing. I mean, you went through the Middle East peace process and all of that, and presumably you wouldn't think that the situation of Palestinians is better now than it was than when you started your career. You saw the JCPO collapse. You then found yourself in a brutal situation with the Biden administration towards the end of your career there. I mean, how do you think about the world achievements, failures, and what does it mean to be somebody invested in Palestine, Israel, Iran, the US government, and in a sense, often finding yourself let down or betrayed by all of them over a 30-year period?

54:14Alastair Campbell:Yeah, well, first of all, I'd say let down and betrayed. I also take my share of responsibility since I was part of the failures that you just mentioned. I'll give two answers. One, more pessimistic the other. I'll try to be more optimistic. I think, again, those of us who've been in government, you know that you have to swallow some bitter pill. Sometimes you have to be part of a policy that you don't fully agree with. You can't resign every time that there's something that you're not fully in line with. You know you're not going to always succeed, but you believe at the end of the day that you can make more good, marginal good, that at the end, it's better for you to be inside than outside, that you can make a difference, which is why a lot of people didn't resign in the US government after October 7th, despite their very, very, very strong distaste, to put it mildly, with the policy.

55:00Alastair Campbell:So you create a world for yourself in which you say, I'm making some difference. I think looking back, you have to look in a mirror and say, did I really? And that's a tough question to ask yourself. Was it really worth whatever compromises, concessions? As you mentioned, the controversies, I've had quite a few, but I guess that's part of any public life to some extent. So that's the negative side. I mean, you look back, I think everyone has to be honest and ask themselves, did I ultimately do this because I like doing it, because I was in the middle of these discussions in the situation room, or did I really make a difference?

55:33Alastair Campbell:And as I said, the answer is probably not as uplifting as I'd like it to be. I mean, the more optimistic sign is I do think, just from an American point of view. So I think I served at a time when, certainly in terms of Israel-Palestine, the weight of the consensus was very much lopsided. I mean, consensus in terms of policy, in terms of the no daylight policy towards Israel, the notion that no politician in America of note believed that they would pay a price for being too close to Israel. And every politician of note feared that they would pay a price for being viewed as too empathetic to the Palestinians.

56:10Alastair Campbell:So that was the world in which, and I maybe tried to change it a bit and unsuccessfully, but that was the world of the administrations in which I served. I think you saw towards the end of the Biden administration, after October 7th, and what followed, I think you see a change, a beginning of a change, at least in America, where an increasing number of American just voters, but also politicians, are now looking at the world slightly differently, particularly with regards to Israel-Palestine. And the students that I teach at Jackson, that you teach, are looking at Israel-Palestine with a different moral lens, asking very tough questions about the role that the U.S.

56:46Alastair Campbell:played, wondering whether the U.S. played any positive role and whether there's a different policy that would be more in tune with their moral sense, with their sense of what role the U.S. should play in the world. So I wonder whether that generation is not going to be a generation that could shift U.S. policy in a very, very different way. So, you know, yes, I look back and Hussein uses this word in the book where he says he was a loser. You know, that's a tough word. But yeah, you know, the things that I devoted my life to, Israel, Palestine, and then Iran, I can't say were crowned with success.

57:24Alastair Campbell:Iran briefly, and today not at all. So, you know, I can look at it through that lens, but I look at it through the longer lens of history. And I do think there are shifts in this country that give me at least a sliver of hope.

57:35Robert Malley:Yeah. Rob, it's been great to talk to you. And we should tell our listeners and viewers that the book has got a fantastic title, Tomorrow is Yesterday. I love that title. And this is about the whole sort of pursuit of peace in Israel-Palestine. And again, I was hoping to end on a more uplifted note. But one of your conclusions seems to me that we've, do we have to stop even thinking about the two-state solution? Because every time anything happens, we all just sort of parrot the line. I've done it. And now for most of my adult life, well, I really passionately believe in the two-state solution.

58:08Robert Malley:But you get the sense, you'd be much closer to this than I have. You get the sense that you're really, really pessimistic that what I and you conventionally, historically might have meant by that feels so remote as to be virtually impossible.

58:22Alastair Campbell:Well, yeah, that is one of the themes of the book. you know, that the whole two-state solution pursuit may have been off base from the beginning because it was not, two states was not really what resonated with the emotions, the fears, the yearnings of Israelis and Palestinians. Some of what Rory mentioned earlier and that I mentioned about the Palestinians, two states don't really, you can't fit what Israelis and Palestinians are fighting about in that construct. But today, I mean, you know, we didn't speak about it, but the recent decisions by the Israeli cabinet, which de facto, you know, once again, de facto show that Israel wants to treat the West Bank as sovereign Israeli territory.

58:55Alastair Campbell:I'm reading now. This is a death knell of the two-state solution yet again. Go back and look at how many times. I mean, Secretary Kerry in 2000 and what was it? 12-14 was saying we're two minutes to midnight on the two-state solution. And President Obama said, if we don't reverse the settlement enterprise, there's no two-state solution. When the Israelis announced that they were going to build the settlements in Mali Adumin, it's the end of the two-state solution. How many burials is a two-state solution going to get before people say, you know what, let's stop? And the problem with it is not simply that it's not going to happen, is that people are still saying this should be where our effort is.

59:33Alastair Campbell:And meanwhile, everything on the ground is moving in the other direction, and people are not taking the time to think, well, okay, if a two-state solution is not going to happen, what are we going to do? What kind of form of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians is possible? So my fear is five years, ten years from now, the same people who are saying two-state solution I'm going to say it's the only solution. It's what I still hear these days. And it will not have changed anything because they'll just be continuing to recite that dogma and not opening up their eyes to the fact, you know what, maybe it was never going to happen.

1:00:03Alastair Campbell:It certainly is not going to happen now. How could it happen now given where, as you just said, everything between Israelis and Palestinians is worse than it was in 2000 by far? There's not a scale on which you could say that there's been progress. and we failed back then. So now somehow just because we say it's the only solution, it is going to be the solution. I mean, certainly it's not the only solution. It's the only solution that's been tried and failed. And there are other ones that people are going to have to be, people more imaginative and creative than we've been. Israelis and Palestinians in particular are going to have to think of a different way of accommodating their respective aspirations.

1:00:40Alastair Campbell:I just, at some point, I think the world will, I think Israelis and Palestinians, by the way, their peoples have awoken to that. It's just the others who think that we need to give them hope, but they don't take any hope when they hear President Macron and somebody else say, there's only one solution, there's two state solutions. I don't know any Palestinian of a young generation or any Israeli who says, well, that gives me hope. No, they think they're just whistling past the graveyard.

1:01:05Robert Malley:Well, Rob, when the history of the single binational state is written, at least you'll be in the books.

1:01:12Alastair Campbell:I'm not sure that will be it, but whatever it is, and I probably won't be here to see it.

1:01:15Robert Malley:so okay all right well listen thank you very much for all your time and your wisdom and insight it's been fascinating thank you rob thank you really appreciate it

1:01:27Rory Stewart:so alistair my friend rob what was your sense of him in person i think i met rob mallee when he was

1:01:33Robert Malley:uh back in the day with with sandy burger gosh that's going back a long way well it is going back a long way we spent a lot of time with sandy burger sandy burger was a big gruff figure very very powerful and um i think and he used to get very very annoyed about the way that sometimes we we bypassed the official system to go straight to bill clinton on various things so uh and i've got a feeling i met rob how can i put this politely did he used to have a lot more hair he definitely had a lot more hair no doubt so but i thought i thought that was really really interesting partly because of his knowledge and the insight and also that amazing sort of story about his parents who must have been horrified when he became part of the Washington establishment but also I thought the discussion at the end was was actually quite sad really wasn't it that he you sort of forced him to confront the idea that maybe everything he'd done hadn't quite worked out but I just I still think that this because this is we are talking about two of the most difficult important complicated, seemingly intractable problems, that it's so, so important that people do understand the history, do keep focused on it, and do keep trying to get it all to a better place.

1:02:48Robert Malley:And he's devoted his whole life to that.

1:02:50Rory Stewart:Yeah. And I also think, although Rob was mounting the critique against those democratic presidents, their foreign policy, there was a lot that was good about it. I mean, let's not forget that during the period in which he was in office, every year from the time he started onwards, there are fewer civilians killed in conflict, fewer refugees, adult life expectancy is going up, infant mortality is dropping down. We will look back. I mean, I know it's for many good reasons. We rubbish the period up to Trump taking over. But I think Carney and he go too far. I think we're forgetting that so much positive actually happened in that post-89 period.

1:03:31Rory Stewart:And it was partly because American policy wasn't just hypocritical power. It wasn't that they were secretly just trying to steal the oil and pretending to talk about democracy, and Trump's the only person who's being honest about what they were doing. And I think one of the clues to that is Rob Malie himself. Rob is one of a group of many Americans I know who have a degree of knowledge, sophistication, integrity, diligence in that system who are extraordinary, really extraordinary. He was a childhood friend of Tony Blinken's. He knew President Obama well. I mean, it's an amazing generation that.

1:04:09Rory Stewart:And the people I was lucky enough to work with in the Middle East and then in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm afraid the best of the Americans were better than any of us. And you can see it partly with Rob because you can see he knows an unbelievable amount, but there's a lot of modesty and humility there. I mean, listen, this guy was the lead negotiator on Iran on the JCPOA. He was essentially Biden's Iran lead, and yet he's very quick to say, I don't really know very much about Iran. That's only possible from somebody who knows a hell of a lot about Iran and is very confident and prepared to be very open about the limits of the system.

1:04:44Rory Stewart:And he's been through a brutal time. And we didn't talk about it very much. But towards the end of his time in the Biden administration, his security clearance was suspended. And people said that he'd mishandled classified information. And there were statements that he'd followed meetings following his suspension and all this kind of thing. The investigation was only closed after nearly two years of him living in hell, in sort of limbo, where he was almost being accused of betraying secrets to the enemy and things. It's a horrible way to finish a distinguished career in public service. And yet he handles it with such kind of grace and resilience.

1:05:18Robert Malley:Yeah. No, that was great. I hope our listeners and viewers will really have enjoyed that because, of course, we've talked a lot about Israel-Palestine and less so maybe about Iran. But I think you, as you say, you had a real sense of expertise, born partly of knowledge, partly of interest, but also, you know, huge deep experience of having seen it at the coalface. So thank you very much indeed for that. Thank you, Alistair. See you soon. See you soon. Bye. you