Global Affairs Expert Webinar: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Steven A. Cook, CFR's Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars, leads the conversation on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

 

Speaker
Steven A. Cook
Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies and Director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars
Council on Foreign Relations

Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations

 

Transcript

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2024 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for joining us.

Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org if you would like to share the materials with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We are delighted to have Steven Cook with us today to talk about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Dr. Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at CFR. He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics, as well as U.S. Middle East policy. Dr. Cook is the author of False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East; The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square, which won the 2012 Gold Medal from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; as well as Ruling but Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey. And his most recent book, which was just published, is The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, published by Oxford University Press. I encourage you all to pick up a copy.

So, Steven, we are really delighted to have you with us today, given your deep expertise. And, obviously, we are watching what is happening in the Middle East, having just passed the one-year mark of October 7. So I thought you could talk about what the United States’ current foreign policy priorities are in the Middle East, give us context, and look ahead for us.

COOK: Well, thanks, Irina. It’s a great pleasure to be with you and with all of you out there, whether it’s morning, afternoon, or evening for you. Thank you so much for taking the time this day to talk about this very important topic.

I’m almost tempted to answer your question, Irina, about U.S. foreign policy by saying, what U.S. foreign policy? I think in—for the most part, the United States has been brought along by this conflict rather than managing it, no less bringing it—this terrible war to an end. And I think that the—I think that the—you can go back to President Biden’s visit to Israel on October 18 and 19 of 2023 as sort of the beginning of the end of Washington’s ability to shape the conflict. I think there was just a complete and total breakdown and disconnect in what President Biden was trying to do and how the Israelis were receiving it, and what they interpreted what he was doing.

I think it’s pretty clear that the president, who feels very, very strongly about his connection to Israel and helping to ensure Israeli security, felt that if he went to Israel and expressed solidarity with the Israeli people during very trying moments that he would gain some influence over the way Israel’s military operations would subsequently unfold. The Israelis, however, saw the expressions of solidarity from the president as essentially a green light to prosecute the conflict how they saw fit in what they defined as an existential struggle for their survival. And we see how that moment has subsequently created tension at particular moments throughout this conflict, going back to December 2023 when the first kind of issues about humanitarian aid surfaced and the real tension between the two countries began. And then you go back to the spring of 2024, after the World Central Kitchen incident in which seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen were killed by the Israelis in an accident, but nevertheless a tragic one; and that subsequent to that and as the Israelis were preparing an assault on Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, the United States decided to pause—quote/unquote, “pause”—the delivery of 2,000-pound—2,000-pound bombs to the IDF.

And so throughout all of this, the United States has tried to regain some influence with the Israelis, but with each incident it’s become clear that the United States really doesn’t have any influence over the way in which the Israelis conducted their military operations. And the political alignment in the United States did not allow the president of the United States to do anything about the kind of defying the United States here. Which leads me to believe that the United States really doesn’t have a lot of leverage with the Israelis, particularly given the fact that it’s an existential conflict and because, as I said, the political alignment in the United States doesn’t really allow for it.

And this pattern has played itself out over and over again. We saw it play out more recently in Lebanon, where the United States believed that it could get a ceasefire not long after the Israelis began going after Hezbollah in mid-September. It’s culminated with the land invasion of southern Lebanon. And the Israelis ran right over what the United States thought they had in terms of a—in terms of ceasefire, at least a pause in the fighting. More recently, meaning yesterday, the Israelis leaked a letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to counterparts in Israel expressing concern over the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza, and threatening Israel with suspending arms transfers if the humanitarian situation does not improve over the course of thirty days.

Now that is actually something that the Congress has forced the administration to do, through something called the National Security Memorandum. It is widely believed—maybe not widely believed. I believe it. That the letter was, one, intended actually to prevent the Israelis from implementing what’s known in Israel as the General’s Plan. The General’s Plan is a plan that was put together by a number of senior generals who were in the IDF reserves who—which essentially calls for laying siege to the northern Gaza Strip. The northern Gaza Strip, of course, being important because that is the place from which rockets can be launched most easily into Israeli population centers. And that to give the residents of northern Gaza one week to leave, and then everything thereafter would be a target for the IDF, and to deny the provision of humanitarian assistance into the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

A week or so ago, the Israelis, despite having said that they would focus their attention on Lebanon, began a very significant military operation in Jabalia, which is in the northern Gaza Strip, which has raised concerns that, in fact, the Israelis are implementing the General’s Plan but just not calling it that. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that he was studying it. There’s been some support for it, given the fact that the Israelis have gone back into Gaza—a number of towns and cities within Gaza—a number of times, because they have no one to hand off to after they clear an area of Hamas. And the United States has been opposed to this General’s Plan.

So it’s believed, or I believe, that this letter was sent to stave off the General’s Plan. It was leaked by the Israelis. This was a private communication between the two governments. But it was leaked by the Israelis because we are three weeks away from a presidential election campaign—presidential election. It is the campaign. And the Israelis were making mischief for the Biden administration ahead—and the Harris campaign—ahead of these elections. So that’s essentially where we are right now, in terms of U.S. foreign policy. Despite being, you know, this extraordinary superpower, the United States finds itself in a position where it has actually far less influence than one would believe in shaping how the Israelis approach the conflict.

One last thing. While this was going on, which the—you know, Secretary Blinken and Secretary Austin are sending this letter—United States deployed a THAAD anti-missile system to Israel. There’s only nine of these things in the world. And it is intended to bolster Israeli defenses when the Israelis respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel, which happened almost exactly two weeks ago, and in the event that the Iranians respond to the Israeli response. It is part and parcel of a long historical policy of the United States to help ensure Israeli security. So there is tension between the two governments over a variety of things, but the Biden administration has stayed true to what the president’s original intention has been, which is to help support Israel in its conflict with Hamas, and now Hezbollah, and now, obviously, Iran.

Despite tension, this has been—what the United States has undertaken in this conflict is the longest and most unprecedented resupply effort to Israel—over 500 flights with military equipment destined for the IDF, over 150 port calls by American supply ships for materiel for the IDF. So overall, despite these tensions, the Biden administration has remained fully supportive of Israel’s efforts. The way in which the administration talks about it is Israel’s right to defend itself. Of course, in the crossfire—or directly, you know, targeted, have been Palestinians and Lebanese, who have suffered tremendously as a result of this policy.

Again, there’s really no—you know, that is where we stand. There is no good news to report. I think that there is no real end game for the Israelis here. I think that they are likely to end up being in Gaza, good to their word. I think we’ve done—I think in Washington we’ve done less listening to exactly what the Israelis are saying, preferring to interpret things rather than taking it at face value. And the Israelis have said that they will stay in Gaza, they will maintain overall security in Gaza, without any timeline on it. And that they will return their residents to northern Israel. And although that they waited six months for the United States to produce a diplomatic agreement, which they said that they were open to as long as they had an enforcement mechanism, they have now taken it upon themselves to secure their border using force.

And the conflict continues. After, you know, pushing Hezbollah back on its heels after a number of rather movie-like intelligence operations against the Hezbollah leadership, Hezbollah seems to be able to have a lot of fight in it, and has continued to lob rockets at a very significant rate towards Israel. That is—that is where we are. It’s all very unfortunate.

Irina, I believe you’re muted.

FASKIANOS: Yes, I am. How long have we been doing this?

COOK: I know, exactly.

FASKIANOS: So—it’s that kind of day. Thank you very much for that analysis.

We’re going to go to all of you now for your questions.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

I’m going to go first to Stefano Cavalleri, who has a raised hand.

Q: Can you hear me?

COOK: Yes, we can.

FASKIANOS: Yeah.

Q: OK. Good evening, Mr. Cook. So my question is—on my affiliation, I just completed an executive master’s degree at Syracuse University, Maxwell College at CSIS in Washington, DC. And I completed the program in May, and now I’m in Italy. I’m in Milan.

COOK: Lucky you.

Q: So my question—lucky me? Oh—(laughs)—thank you. OK.

So my question is, I think everybody wants to ask this question, don’t you think that the current policy, Israeli policy, will push Iran to get the bomb? I mean, what’s the purpose? What’s the strategy? You said that the end state for Israel is Gaza—to occupy Gaza, and to replace sort of the people in northern Israel, in a safe manner. But at the end, I mean, if you—if Israel doesn’t neutralize Iran, which is very unlikely, right, what do—can we assume that that Iran, for sure, will research more actively the atomic bomb?

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

COOK: Well, thanks for the question, Stefano. You know, Irina was nice enough to mention my new book, The End of Ambition. And I’m not here to hawk it, but what I say in the book is essentially that we have to accept the fact that Iran is already a nuclear capable state. And I think that Israeli politicians, for a variety of political reasons are not likely to admit that publicly, but privately are probably willing to admit that. And that they have to manage this. I think that the—what they are doing in northern Israel and southern Lebanon is trying to deny the Iranians a strategic victory by shrinking sovereign Israel. That’s something that the Israelis cannot abide by. And therefore, they need to push Hezbollah back away from the border and to destroy its ability to threaten Israel and shrink sovereign Israel. That, I think, is independent of Iran’s forty-year effort to develop a nuclear technology and a nuclear weapon, which I think is well along and unlikely to ever—to stop until the Iranians reach that ultimate goal.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from Adham Fattah, graduate student at Georgetown: Why doesn’t the political alignment in the U.S. allow for more substantive pressure on Israel? Is it the power of lobbies, like Mearsheimer and Walt suggest, or something else?

COOK: You know, in part it’s a function of politics, certainly. And the function of pro-Israel groups in the United States. But I think that the Walt and Mearsheimer argument is essentially monocausal. And as a graduate student, you should understand that monocausal explanations aren’t really the best explanations. I think that the U.S.-Israel relationship is bound up in history, a particular reading of the Bible by Evangelical Christians, certainly by politics, by geopolitics, and historical memory, and the tragedy of the Holocaust in Europe after World War II. And so all of those things are bound up together, that make for a solid majority of about—not a solid majority, but more than half the American people who are generally supportive of Israel. And Israel remains—being pro-Israel remains largely good politics, for most politicians.

So it’s all of these things that are bound up—that are bound up together. I think that just picking on—not picking on—but picking out the Israel lobby is—I think it doesn’t really work. And, again, I have a—I have a piece on this in the book. It’s not to diminish the fact that pro-Israel groups have been very successful on Capitol Hill. But they’re not as all-powerful as their opponents make them out to be. And I just point to a recent congressional primary. And let me—let me be clear. I don’t do politics. I do policy. And everything that I say in the answer to your question from here on out is, you know, objective analysis.

Now, let’s take the race in Westchester County, New York, between Jamaal Bowman and George Latimer. The newspapers and publications of record made this out to be as if, you know, AIPAC made the difference in these races. When, in fact, Jamaal Bowman, on October 6, 2023, was already down seven points against an unnamed Democratic primary opponent. And then, when the very popular Westchester County executive decided to challenge him a few months later, it increased his lead. It was only after that it was clear that George Latimer could beat Jamaal Bowman that pro-Israel groups decided to donate money to the Latimer campaign.

But I think this erases, I think, a very strong grassroots effort on the part of people in Westchester County. Bowman lost by seventeen points. That is—across the board, that is a drubbing. And he even lost within the African American community in Yonkers, New York. So, you know, again, Mearsheimer and Walt are well known, accomplished scholars. But I think that, again, they would advise their graduate students against monocausal explanations for things, for political phenomena. I would do the same thing to them.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to raised hand from Ghassan El-Eid. You need to unmute yourself.

Q: Can you hear me now?

COOK: Yes, we can hear you just fine. Thank you.

FASKIANOS: We can.

Q: Thank you, Dr Cook, for your very interesting analysis.

FASKIANOS: And you’re at Central Connecticut State University?

Q: I’m at Central Connecticut State University, where I teach courses on Middle East politics and international terrorism. And I’m originally from Lebanon, so I have, you know, obviously, an interest in this both as a scholar and as a Lebanese American.

It seems to me that this is—this is going to be a long, protracted, nasty, bloody war with no end in sight.

COOK: Agreed.

Q: So in all of this, what is the fate of the Palestinians? I mean, we’re talking about war with Hamas, war with Hezbollah. And people seem to be, like, ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. Because to me, the Palestinians are the core issue, OK? After the dust settles here, hopefully sooner, we don’t know when, what, in your view, sir, is the best scenario to end this conflict? Because it seems to me that Netanyahu has killed this two-state solution that people talk about. What’s your analysis of this?

COOK: Yeah. You know, look, I agree with you. I think that the—this is a long and nasty conflict. I don’t think that there’s an end in sight. And I do think, as the Israelis have turned their attention to Lebanon and then Iran, sort of the core issue here of what about the Palestinians has been kind of lost in lots of the discussion. No one talks about a ceasefire in Gaza any longer. I think that it’s—there is no end game, or no solution to the problem. This is something that I’ve been saying for quite some time. As a result of—first, Israeli society has moved to the right over the course of the last two decades, as a result of the Second Intifada, et cetera, et cetera. Then you add to it the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, which were deeply shocking to the Israeli public. And you have even less enthusiasm for a negotiated solution to the Palestinian problem.

There is—two-thirds of the Israeli republic are opposed to a two-state solution. Two thirds of the Israeli republic are opposed to revitalization of the Palestinian Authority, which were the two ideas that the Biden administration had about finding some sort of end game for the Palestinians. So, unfortunately, it strikes me that what’s more likely to happen than a two-state solution or revitalized Palestinian Authority administering the Gaza Strip as it reconstructs with Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari funds, is that you’re going to have something closer to the status quo. Which is the Israelis in the Gaza Strip and, true to their word, maintaining overall security control of the Gaza Strip. And in the West Bank, the settler community using the opportunity to continue to strengthen their grip on territory, thereby foreclosing the possibility of a two-state solution. I’m not saying that that’s the best outcome. I’m saying that’s the most likely outcome.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Fordham IPED.

Given what we have seen with World Food Kitchen workers and emergency response workers of other organizations in Gaza, what kind of international policies or frameworks do you see for the future of how we administer emergency aid to areas of violent conflict?

COOK: Yeah. I have to be honest with you. I am an expert on Middle Eastern politics, Arab politics, Turkish politics. I really don’t know about international regimes and the provision of humanitarian aid. What I do know is that Gazans are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. And they’re not getting it. And they’re not getting it in sufficient quantities. And there is actually a debate about how to go about doing this, and whether—and a debate in Israel whether they’re actually responsible for the humanitarian aid. But I’ll leave it to my friends and colleagues who are experts on international organizations and international regimes and international law to figure that one out.

FASKIANOS: Yeah. It’s a good topic for another call.

COOK: Exactly.

FASKIANOS: So we’ll file it away.

I’m going to take the next question from Binar Faeq Karim. And please correct my pronunciation.

Q: Thank you very much. Thanks, Dr. Cook. My name is Binar. I’m a master’s of global affairs student at University of Notre Dame.

And my question is if the—if the U.S. key ally in Middle East is not regarding the advice of a sitting U.S. president who has repeatedly supported and shown support to Israel, how would—how would other stakeholders within this conflict would take U.S. policies any seriously? And how does this affect the U.S. Middle East policy for future administrations, but also to contain the war and to—and to find a resolution for this? Thank you so much.

COOK: Thank you. It’s a great question, Binar. I appreciate it.

And it’s an important one because clearly the Saudis, the Emiratis, and others are watching this and seeing how the Israelis are able to defy U.S. policy, and learning their lessons. Now, I think that they understand to some extent that the Israelis—and this goes back to the previous question in which, you know, politics is part of the U.S.-Israel relationship, that Israel has resources available to it that those countries do not. But nevertheless, I think they’re learning from it.

Look, I think if you spoke to senior policymakers, they would tell you that they have a hard time getting our partners—U.S. partners in the region and other partners around the world to see things eye to eye with the United States and, actually, to follow American advice. This is something that you hear over and over and over again. The Saudis don’t always fall into line. The Emiratis don’t always fall into line. The Jordanians, Egyptians, and so on and so forth. And the Israelis have demonstrated their ability to defy it.

We do not have perfect partners in the region, and certainly not allies. You know, consider, you know, that the United States actually has few allies. Look—and even among our allies, Turkey is a treaty ally of the United States but has consistently worked to undermine American policy in Syria, American policy with regard to Russia, American policy with regard to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, et cetera, et cetera. So you have a pattern of this among major partners of the United States. And the United States, like with Israel, has never wanted to use our notional leverage in order to, for lack of a better term, bring those partners into line.

One policymaker—just last point on this, because it’s such a good question—one policymaker once said to me that being an American official and dealing with countries particularly in the Middle East is like the—he had little kids at the time—the daycare version of foreign policy: You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.

FASKIANOS: All right.

Q: Thank you so much.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next written question from Gaspare Genna, chair of political science and public administration, and professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso: What are your thoughts on U.S. military deployments—boots on the ground—increasing in Israel? Are we entering a stage where the U.S. will directly participate in the ongoing conflict?

COOK: Yeah. I’ve gotten that question a couple times since the announcement of the THAAD deployment.

This isn’t the first time that American troops have been dispatched to Israel to help with its air defense systems. I’d bring you back to the winter of 1991, when the Bush administration—George H.W. Bush administration deployed the first generation of Patriot missile batteries to Israel to help protect Israel against Scud missile attacks from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

It’s a relatively small contingent; about a hundred—a hundred soldiers to run the THAAD system. The Israelis have no competency on this system. There’s only nine of them in the world.

There’s always that danger that the United States is going to get pulled in. And that’s, I think, one of the things that’s weighing on the minds of Biden administration officials, that, you know, Israel responds in a very significant way and the Iranians respond, but the Iranians do not limit their response to Israel but they respond in the Persian Gulf in some way, shape, or form that would require the United States to come to the defense of other partners in the region or to open up the Strait of Hormuz, which, you know, significant amounts of oil flow on a daily basis. So that’s—I think that’s—it’s a very real concern.

But in terms of the deployment of THAAD, right now I think the United States—I think U.S. government officials think it will be—it will be limited.

But again, there’s a lot of variables here that are outside of the control of the United States, which is, one, how the Israelis actually do respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel; and how the Iranians view that attack—whether the Israelis go up the escalation ladder to intimidate the Iranians, or the Iranians are unimpressed and then respond in kind. And that’s when sort of the nightmare scenario that people have been fearing about—between Israel and Iran really kicks off.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next for a raised hand from Kiki Edozie, who’s at the University of Massachusetts Boston. If you can accept the—

COOK: Yay, Boston.

Q: (Laughs.) Hi.

FASKIANOS: Yes.

Q: Hi there, Dr. Cook. Hi, Irina.

COOK: That’s not a Boston accent.

Q: (Laughs.) No, it is not. It’s a cosmopolitan Boston accent.

COOK: OK. Excellent.

Q: You know, thank you. I’m going to sort of leverage, you know, some of the things you said last week on the panel regarding—

COOK: I don’t even remember what I said last week. But OK. Please.

Q: Well, I know you forgot, but I mean, sort of debating Biden—I’m sorry, Biden-Harris versus, you know, Trump—

COOK: Vance.

Q: —Vance on a foreign policy solution to this crisis. And I’m going to try to be bipartisan as well. I do think that, you know, a Trump sort of solution would be, yeah, continuing of an unending war because he will align with Netanyahu’s preferences, and you know, that’s what’s going to happen. But I think that with a Harris possibility there is still hope, and I wanted to sort of ask a question about the parameters of that hope.

I know that, you know, we all agree that Biden really has failed, you know—you know, around—I mean, as both of them look at Michigan currently, they know that it’s not Black men that are going to do them in but it is the uncommitted in Michigan. But if Harris does, you know, pull through and win this election, we as Americans have—we’ve had Camp David. We’ve had the Oslo, you know, process. What do you recommend, you know, a Harris-Walz ticket—how will they address this question once and for all, you know, using our historical—(inaudible)?

COOK: Yeah. It’s a—it’s a good question. And let me just say, you know, I don’t know whether I mentioned this the last time you heard me talk on these issues, but you know, I’m not entirely convinced that President Trump is aligned with Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s wishes. I think the president is aligned with his base, which supports a maximum policy on Israel.

In fact, if you read Jared Kushner’s memoir, which I have so you don’t have to, he had a very difficult—actually a difficult relationship with Netanyahu and was rooting for Benny Gantz in those elections. But it’s not like Gantz is, you know, some great hope. He has run to the right of Netanyahu, particularly on the Gaza Strip.

With Harris, you know, you say that there’s still hope. I think that that’s based on hope. She has moved considerably. She has spoken out every now and again to create a little bit of daylight between herself and Biden. She said there should be a ceasefire now in Selma and a number of other times where she has moved somewhat incrementally away from the president, but more recently she’s been very, very strong and I point you to the 60 Minutes interview in which she talks about Iran as being a unique threat to the security in the United States and our partners in the region.

But more to the thrust of your question, which I think is, you know, given Camp David and Oslo and other things, couldn’t the United States, you know, push a process that finally brings this horrible conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to an end?

We’ve been trying that for thirty years. But let me clarify a couple things. Camp David happened not because necessarily of Jimmy Carter but almost despite him. If you go back to 1978, at the beginning of 1978, President Carter and his advisors wanted to convene an international peace conference in Geneva.

That was the last thing that Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin wanted, and instead they wanted an actual bilateral negotiation over peace. The Oslo Accords were something that were hammered out by Palestinian officials and Israeli academics in farmhouses in Norway, not necessarily in Oslo, and the United States only discovered that these negotiations were going on after they were concluded. And the United States as a sponsor of the Madrid process, took it up, and mine and Irina’s late colleague Martin Indyk was a leading effort to push the Oslo process, which didn’t produce anything. Martin wrote a book about this called Innocent Abroad. Around the—in the same era, the Jordan-Israel peace treaty was something that King Hussein and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin did entirely on their own.

So it’s easy to overstate how much of a role the United States has played in pushing for peace in the region when in fact the record is that the United States comes in in the end as a guarantor of that peace, often with the promise of debt relief, weaponry, and a variety of other things.

But it’s something that the parties do themselves. Even the much ballyhooed Abraham Accords was not—you know, I think all of the parties, fearing that President Trump would be reelected, gave him a lot of credit for something that the parties did entirely on their own.

I wish we had the influence to make this happen. But as I lay out very clearly in my new book—and, again, I’m not hawking it—American efforts to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians have failed for thirty years.

We just have not been able to alter the incentives and constraints on Israeli and Palestinian politicians to make the concessions required to bring the conflict to an end.

FASKIANOS: Great.

I’m going to go next to Ashton Lauren, undergraduate student at Arizona State University, where we just held our Election 2024 campus forum last week.

COOK: OK.

Q: Hi. How are—

COOK: ASU. Sun Devils, right?

Q: Yes, exactly. So if you—(off mic)—Israel but we have a lot of people that—

COOK: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the first part of what you were saying.

Q: There’s a—I mean, I hear a lot of Israel and I understand that, but there is a lot of university talk about being pro the opposite side. So if you’re going to defend them, what would you say?

COOK: Defend—I’m not exactly sure what the question is. There’s—there is a lot of people in the United States who are supportive of Israel and there are also people—a lot of people in the United States, particularly on university campuses, who support the Palestinian cause.

Q: Right.

COOK: And my view is that as long as these—this advocacy is peaceful and respectful everybody should be able to have their say, even on such an emotionally fraught issue.

Q: Yes. I think—yes, I completely agree and I think that we agree on that.

So the U.S. typically has a short term, which we call a four term—a four-year term policy which we feel, or when I say we as in globally, might feel that that’s a little short, and do you feel that we should extend our thought process to be longer than that?

COOK: Well, the reason why American politicians think in two- and four- and six-year terms is because that’s when they are—that’s the electoral cycle. It’s very, very hard having now spent, you know, almost twenty years of my career in Washington, DC, to get politicians to think over a longer period of time than that, and it’s just a function of our system and no one sees a real political incentive to think over the long term.

That is an unfortunate drawback of our system but it’s one that I’m willing to live with because we live in an open political—with an open political system.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to—sorry, I have too many windows open. Go next to Akshaya Mohan I believe at Tufts University.

COOK: All right. Go Jumbos.

Q: Hello. Yeah. Go Jumbos, indeed. Dr. Cook, you know, thank you for—

COOK: There’s a lot at Tufts.

Q: Yeah. I’m actually not from Tufts. I’m from the Fletcher School but still go Jumbos.

COOK: OK.

Q: I just—I’m a recent graduate from the Fletcher School.

I think my question is regarding the—it’s something—it’s a foreign policy question, I guess, that’s coming from the pre-reading. I just—I remember reading at least two of these articles that are talking about how the Middle Eastern citizens and how Middle Eastern citizens in many countries, maybe Jordan, across five different countries I believe it said perceive the U.S. now post-October 7 and how U.S. approval ratings have dropped in these countries, and it’s something that we’re also seeing across the world.

We probably don’t have stats for it. We are seeing it—but we are seeing it across the world. I think in light of this my question is, one, if we ever get to that post-war phase what do you foresee the Middle Eastern policy in terms of, say, normalization or any of these—do you foresee these conversations coming back?

And on the American side of things I guess it is how does the U.S. shape its foreign policy in light of what’s about to change in Middle Eastern foreign policy? Just how does U.S. retain its legitimacy, I guess, in this international forum?

COOK: Yeah. So what I’m detecting are two questions, one about U.S. approval ratings. The other question is about, you know, does normalization proceed even after this terrible conflict.

Let me start with the second one, the normalization piece, and then I’ll talk about the public opinion one for a moment or two.

You know, normalization is something that it seems clear to me that the Emiratis, the Bahrainis, and others view as a strategic decision. What’s been surprising through this conflict with so much depth and destruction in Gaza Strip, particularly among civilians, is that Israel’s diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors have remained stable and that Saudi Arabia continues to indicate that it wants to normalize relations with Israel.

Now, that price has gone up but nevertheless the Saudis continue to talk about normalization, and I suspect that if the conflict were to come to an end in a number of years the price that the Saudis have recently articulated, which is a credible, time-limited path towards a two-state solution, I suspect that price will go down, knowing what I know about the Saudis and their ideas about regional integration, that—their own development goal which includes Israel.

Now, this question of U.S. popularity, you know, I have a somewhat—I have a somewhat odd take on this that I think, you know, makes people unhappy but I don’t necessarily, you know, say these things because I’m a bad person, but I wonder if it really matters that America’s approval rating has gone from, like, 12 percent to 8 percent in Jordan, or from, you know, 9 percent to 7 percent in Egypt.

I mean, it was so low to begin with because of our policy. Now, that’s not to say that that’s a good thing. I mean, of course we would like the—for the United States, you know, to be—to have the kind of international legitimacy. But even with the decline in public opinion for the United States in the region all the regional governments are waiting for American diplomacy. They’re waiting for American leadership. They’re looking to the United States to settle this problem.

They’re not looking to the Chinese. They’re not looking to the Russians. They’re not looking to the Brazilians, the Turks, or anybody else.

Maybe at some point in the future they’ll decide that that’s the case but they’re still looking for the secretary of state, the CIA director, the president, the vice president, and others to lead the region out of this terrible conflict, which sort of undermines something that leaders in the region have said over and over again which is that, you know, they have the ability and the power to shape the region on their own. Yet, again, they are waiting for the United States.

Even outside. You mentioned outside. So take Europe where there’s been, you know, a tremendous amount of pro-Palestinian activism both at an official and unofficial level, and none of the European governments, even the ones who are quite critical of Israel—Spain, Ireland, whatever—wants the United States to leave Europe, given the threat of Russia—that Russia now represents to peace and stability and prosperity in Europe.

So I think it’s—obviously, we would like—America and American officials would like for the United States to be more popular. There may be a time in the future and we see glimpses of this in the changing nature of the politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship, particularly in the Democratic Party, where there may be more of an opportunity for the United States to be more—(inaudible)—European governments.

But, again, in the—in the short run I don’t see, despite the fact that it’s—you know, it’s kind of a bummer and I don’t see how it has a significant impact on American policy or its relations with countries in the region or beyond.

FASKIANOS: Great.

I’m going to take a written question from Ibtissam Klait, an online adjunct instructor at the University of the People: I’m Lebanese, residing in Lebanon amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. How can Lebanese civilians, particularly those who oppose Hezbollah’s actions, be effectively protected?

COOK: It’s a great question. I think it’s a question that people who know people in Lebanon, have friends, have family in Lebanon, have been wracking their brains trying to think of ways to help people who are caught in the crossfire.

I think that the—to bring it around to U.S. foreign policy I think that the U.S.—the Biden administration believes that the best way to protect Lebanese caught in the crossfire is for a ceasefire. But then that kind of runs counter to part of your question, which is that you’re opposed to Hezbollah and so a ceasefire allows Hezbollah to regather and marshal its resources to continue to fight and dominate Lebanese—the Lebanese state.

So it’s a real conundrum and, you know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the Lebanese who are caught in this terrible situation in part a function of their own dysfunctional politics and in part a function of the geopolitics of the region that has prevailed over the last twenty-five years that has basically allowed Hezbollah to become a state within a state and in fact become part of the Lebanese state.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next spoken question from Ali Hechemi Raddaoui. Please correct my pronunciation.

Q: Hi. Can you hear me?

FASKIANOS: Yes.

COOK: Yes, can hear you.

Q: OK. My name is Ali Hechemi Raddaoui.

COOK: You were close, Irina.

FASKIANOS: I was close. At the University of Wyoming, correct?

Q: Yes, the School of Politics, Public Administration, and International Studies.

My question is general and it refers to the current goings on between Israel, Hamas, Lebanon, and—but also related to the question just asked about U.S. popularity.

I want to go back a few years, and in the 1980s and 1990s there was a there was a lot of talk about—in the U.S. about winning the hearts and minds of Arabs, Muslims, and people in the area and people all over the world, and now it seems to me that over the past few years this talk has subsided a lot, and has the U.S. relinquished the goal of winning the hearts and minds and what can be done to align rhetoric with action in the U.S.?

COOK: Yeah. Thanks for the question.

I think the high point of winning hearts and minds was really in the post-9/11 environment where the United States rejuvenated its public diplomacy in order to win hearts and minds, and I think the return on the investment of that effort was close to zero.

Of course—and here’s the rub, is that it’s hard to win hearts and minds even if you’re telling, you know, wonderful stories about the United States, even if you’re telling wonderful stories about, you know, the American political system and so on and so forth.

What I have found in my, you know, now twenty-five years working, living in the region and thinking about it is that there are many, many people in the region who have tremendous amount of respect for the institutions—the democratic institutions of the United States, the principles by which we live, the ideals by which we strive to live even if we don’t always achieve them.

But they’re outraged by America’s conduct in the world, particularly in the Middle East. So we could, you know, devote tremendous amount of resources to winning hearts and minds in the 2000s but then we invaded Iraq and that—you know, that was I think a very clear example of how our own policies undermine this idea of winning hearts and minds and the through line through all of this has been American support for—American support for Israel.

So, I mean, the way in which to align—and it’s a constant discussion in Washington is how do we align our values with our foreign policy and I’ve said, to be perfectly honest with you, we’re never really going to be able to do that. There’s always going to be some sort of double standard that’s associated with it and so we should actually probably stop talking about it.

I don’t know why we haven’t talked about hearts and minds for a long time. I think that this probably has to do with the fact that the way Washington works the State Department had to show the Congress certain metrics for winning hearts and minds and they couldn’t, and Congress said, well, we don’t want to devote resources to that.

But I really—I don’t know for sure, but the problem is the alignment of our values and our actual conduct in the world. They’ve never actually lined up and that’s really what the problem is. I don’t mean to sound unapologetic about it. I’m just telling you what the objective reality is.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Heidi Lane.

Q: Hi. Good afternoon. I had put down my hand but I’ll go ahead and ask the question anyway.

COOK: Please do.

Q: Heidi Lane, U.S. Naval War College.

The question I have is whether or not you—turning back to the sort of dynamics between Israel and Iran how do you think the recent attacks between the two will affect Iran’s relationship future or current with its proxies? Do they—does that strengthen their relationship or does it weaken it or is it just purely transactional?

COOK: No, I don’t—I actually—I don’t think that it is—there’s a reason why the Israelis are going after the proxies and Iran and I think that, you know, the Iranians have said that they have no red lines and so that an Israeli response to Iran’s—(inaudible)—will result in an Iranian response, and I think that that response may include ballistic missile attack on Israel but it’ll also include continuing to try to assist their proxies in a multi-front conflict with Israel.

This is, you know, part of the strategy. I always tell the story how in very early January of 2024 I was in a very odd place with nothing to do so I watched Hassan Nasrallah’s big speech commemorating Qassem Soleimani’s—a Quds Force commander’s killing at the hands of the United States in which he basically laid out Qassem Soleimani’s strategy, which was to build up those proxies in a way, supply them with weaponry but also give them the ability to fabricate their own abilities to sow chaos and so if one of them was impaired the others could continue the fight, and I think we’re seeing that.

So I don’t think that there’s a moment when the Israelis go after Iran and Iran—and the Iranians pull back on their proxies. The proxies are extremely important and, after all, Hezbollah is basically an expeditionary force of the IRGC.

Not only have they been, obviously, in Lebanon but they have helped to support the regime in Syria—Bashar al-Assad, the murderous regime in Syria. They have helped the Houthis, who now have leverage over shipping in the Red Sea and who have overthrown the, you know, internationally recognized government of Yemen, targeted Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

So there’s nothing to suggest that the Iranians will pull back from those proxies even if they—Israelis—(off mic)—really damage the Iranians.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to Holley Hansen, who has a written question from a group at Oklahoma State University: Given that foreign—

COOK: I was just in Oklahoma.

FASKIANOS: I know. Given that foreign policy typically ranks low for American voters is there a real electoral threat to Harris if she comes out more forcefully against Israeli actions?

COOK: Well, it’s a really—it’s a really good question and I would normally say probably not. But you do have an election which is razor, razor, razor thin, right? And so if you just move, you know, thousands of votes—a few thousand votes in one direction or another it could make a difference.

Pennsylvania has a significant American-Jewish population which you can extrapolate is largely pro-Israel. So some sort of policy of the Biden administration that is perceived to be anti-Israel could move voters out of the Harris/Walz category and move them into the Trump, or not vote at all.

I think, you know, the press has made a very, very—has examined Michigan and the uncommitted vote in the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities but there are significant numbers of American Jews in some very important places that also, like Michigan, that vote—(off mic)—that could in one of—(off mic)—where the administration takes a very strong stance that, as I said, is perceived to be anti-Israel. That could—that could change the outcome of the race just like the uncommitted vote can change the outcome of the race.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Morton Holbrook.

Q: Hi, Dr. Cook. I just unmuted myself.

I’m at Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Could you comment further on the extraordinary situation of the Israeli government literally on the eve or just after receiving the THAAD missile system leaking a letter designed to provoke this administration, as you just described it? Do you think that will backfire should Harris win the election—give her political leeway and motive to suspend U.S. arms sales?

COOK: Look, I think the—I think it’s clear that the Israelis leaked the letter to make mischief ahead of the election. I have no idea what the vice president is going to do as a result.

She neither has, like Biden, you know, forty-five years of people who have worked for her and who would likely work for her. So it’s very, very hard to glean exactly what she’s going to do, particularly from her public statements which have been mostly anodyne and largely supportive of what the Biden administration largely support—(off mic)—pointed out earlier in the call there have been a few moments—bless you, Irina.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

COOK: There have been a few moments where Harris has distanced herself ever so slightly, rhetorically, from the president. But certainly, you know, there are supporters of the former president and others who are trying to paint Harris as less supportive of Israel’s security for political—for political gain and this letter could be used that way as well.

FASKIANOS: Great. I think we are basically at the end of our time. So, Steven Cook—

COOK: I was just getting warmed up but—

FASKIANOS: I know. I know you were and you had—

COOK: I got to get on a train to Washington, though.

FASKIANOS: I know. And we had so many more questions that we could not get to so I apologize to all of you for that. I do commend to you Steven’s book The End of Ambition.

COOK: Thank you all for the questions.

FASKIANOS: Yes. Steven, what is the name of your blog on CFR.org?

COOK: Actually, my blog no longer exists on CFR.org but—

FASKIANOS: Oh, OK.

COOK: —all of my articles from my column at Foreign Policy magazine are posted on the website at my expert page and sometimes they’re even on the front page of CFR.org.

FASKIANOS: OK, and you can follow Steven on X at @stevenacook. The next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, October 30, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Steve Sestanovich, CFR’s George Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies, will talk about the war in Ukraine and U.S.—

COOK: That’ll be a treat since he was just in Ukraine.

FASKIANOS: —yeah—U.S.-Russian relations. And just to let all of you know, as I mentioned we were in Arizona last week for a U.S. foreign policy forum that we cosponsored with the Arizona State University.

We will be at Georgia Tech tomorrow evening and then at Grand Valley State University on Monday in Michigan and on Tuesday at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. If you are interested in watching those events via live stream you can email [email protected] for more details or you can go just to the—the live stream bar will be available on CFR.org and on our Election 2024 hub we have a detailed listing of the events, the times, as well as trackers on the two candidates—on Trump and Harris and their foreign policy positions.

So I encourage you to go to that election site for nonpartisan information and analysis.

Final thing, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers, one of them which Steven administers. It’s part of the second part of his very long title. (Laughs.)

And you can follow us at @CFR_Education on X and, of course, visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research analysis on other global issues.

So, again, thank you all and thank you, Steven Cook.

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