Iran, Israel, and the Middle East in Tumult

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Phil, thank you for joining me.

PHILIP GORDON

Great to be here, Dan.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Given how much could change in a matter of days or even hours or minutes, I should note that we’re speaking in the morning, east coast time, on Tuesday, June 17. It’s a few days past the initial Israeli attacks on Iran that started late last week. We’re still seeing rounds of missile and drone and other strikes going in both directions, and what it will add up to is still of course far from clear. But with those caveats, Phil, I’m eager to hear from you as someone who has both observed the Middle East for a long time, and also as a policymaker who had an important role in managing and responding to and preparing for crises in the region, how a couple of scenarios could unfold. First, what would a major escalation from here look like? And then second, what would the path to de-escalation evolve if you consider those two broad paths?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, I mean, there’ are so many different directions this could go, Dan. Israel took an enormous gamble with this intervention. Obviously, it’s talking about it now as if it had little choice and Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon. But I just don’t think that was the case. I mean, I think they actually short-circuited a real opportunity to get the diplomatic deal that the Trump administration wanted that would have blocked Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. We will now never know, and we’ll have debates for years and decades about this. But it forced [U.S. President Donald Trump’s] hand, and he’s now going along and following it.

So far, so pretty good, you could say, because I think you have to be impressed with the intelligence and military capability that the Israelis have demonstrated. To take out the top leadership of the IRGC and nuclear scientists and the air force and other commanders—unbelievably impressive to know where they were and be able to target them. The ability to defeat most of Iran’s incoming missiles—we’re all very much concerned about Iran’s ballistic missile force—Israelis have done an unbelievable technological job in defeating most of that. Some has gotten through. And to set back the nuclear program. . . I’m sure we’ll get into the degree to which it’s set back.

You do have to acknowledge that they have accomplished a significant amount and done so in a very impressive way. And yet it still raises all sorts of questions and risks. One of the reasons to be concerned about a unilateral Israeli intervention in Iran to deal with the nuclear program was the risk that it would produce the very thing they were worried about, which is an Iranian dash for a bomb. I think it’s the case Iran wasn’t dashing for a bomb, but it might be now. And Iran still has enrichment capability. They had a stockpile of low-enriched and highly-enriched uranium. So they could actually be producing the scenario that they didn’t want.

And then there are all sorts of other sort of quagmire possibilities that you can get into, where they seek to escalate—Iran escalates against Israel or the United States. So, enormous gamble. Again, so far, so kind of good, but a few days into this is way too soon to really make an assessment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you see regime change in Tehran as the likely outcome of Israeli actions? I mean, whether or not that’s the explicit objective of the Israeli government, and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] has of course kind of not come out and said explicitly that that’s what they’re aiming for, but he has kind of hinted that that might be what the actions produced.

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely one of the objectives. And as always, when you have a conflict, a war, war aims fluctuate, and there’s not a single one. You go back to the Iraq War, we’ve been debating ever since then, was it about weapons of mass destruction or freedom and democracy or terrorism? And I think the same is true about this Israeli intervention. The narrowest goal was the nuclear one. I mean, clearly Israel didn’t want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, and they’ve gone after the nuclear sites, so for sure. Another certain goal was just setting back Iranian military capabilities, sort of what they did to Hezbollah—just decapitate, take care of missiles. Iran’s been a threat to Israel for a long time, and this was an opportunity, even aside from the nuclear thing, to decimate and weaken Iran’s military forces, which have been used especially through proxies against Israel.

But it’s also pretty clear that another Israeli goal is regime change. And Netanyahu has hinted as much. You don’t have to choose between these things. I think they did the mission for nukes and for military capabilities, and it’s like, if that happens to lead to regime change, fine with us. But I don’t think it dramatically changes what Israel is doing in Iran as part of that goal. I would also note, and warn—and I’ve written this in Foreign Affairs as well as a whole book about it—t’s easy to, in the early days, think, “Mission accomplished.” First of all, it’s hard to do regime change, and regimes can be more resilient than we’ve seen. As we saw in Syria, we tried to do a regime change, and a decade later Bashar al-Assad was still in power. But even when you get it done, like with the Taliban or Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, there is often a moment of, “It worked, mission accomplished, we got rid of the terrible regime.”And that’s when the problems begin, because you create a vacuum.

And I would caution in this case, for all of those who have a goal of regime change in mind or think Israel’s already well on its way to victory, be careful what you wish for. Because I would say in this case, as in all previous cases, the most likely result of a regime change in Iran would not be a liberal pro-Western democracy that doesn’t want nuclear weapons. At best it would be a version of the Iranian military, which would also have nationalist hardline goals. At worst, it would be a vacuum that divides people ethnically, branches of the military, conflict pulls in neighbors. And we’ve seen that so often before. So I would say where the goal of regime change is concerned, be careful what you wish for.

Important point: no one would miss the Iranian regime—first and foremost the Iranians. It’s a horrible regime. It’s a threat to its neighbors, it interferes with its neighbors, it represses human rights. It would be a wonderful thing if that regime were gone. But there’s no guarantee that—especially if it’s gone at the hands of the Israeli military—it gets replaced by something much better.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I did go back and read the piece you wrote for Foreign Affairs, I believe just before going back into government and the Biden administration. It was called the “False Promise of Regime Change.” And a line that jumped out at me as you summed up the lessons of all these cases you’d looked at for your fantastic book that came out around that time, you saw “A pattern of self-delusion and misjudgment that of time and again made regime change so tempting and ultimately so disastrous,” which captured the warning pretty well.

But I’m curious, if you were back in government, if you were a senior member of the White House national security team as you were six or so months ago, would you be actively trying to prevent that outcome? Are there other ways you’d be preparing for the risks here? You kind of have looked at these cases as closely as anyone. What would you be doing if you were an American policymaker at this point?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, so I mean, like I said, what Israel is doing now, you can’t tell the difference—are they going after regime change or not going after regime change. That’s kind of a hypothetical thing. I mean, the real issue is how long this goes on. And what I would be doing—again, because I was skeptical that this was necessary to deal with the nuclear program; I tried to stop it in the first place. I think Trump actually didn’t want it to happen. All the signs are that he wanted to focus on diplomacy, get this deal. But then Netanyahu again forced his hand, just decided he was going to do this. And there, Trump wasn’t willing to stand in the way, which I understand. Dan, there’s a real moral hazard problem in all of this, and I don’t have the answer to it, which is that the United States is committed to Israel’s security. The last thing we want to see is in Israel overrun or casualties in Israel. And so the United States provides support, political support, military and so on. Great.

The problem is, that is a guarantee to Israel that virtually whatever it does, the United States and its amazingly powerful military will be there to back it. And you mentioned my service in the White House; we saw this over and over again. There were times we would have liked to see Israel go in a different direction, whether vis-à-vis Gaza or Hezbollah or Iran. But Israel knew that whatever it did, we would be there to back it, including with guided missile destroyers and air defenses and a THAAD system that we had to pull out of the United States that might have been for other contingencies.

And I think the same thing happened to Trump. Trump was like, “We want to do diplomacy, don’t initiate a conflict.” And Bibi was like, “Well, sorry, I’m going to.” And then guess what? Now the United States is in. And I think you’re talking about Israel’s goal of regime change. Another goal of Israel, I think, is to bring the United States directly into the conflict. And they might succeed, because they go in, they accomplish a lot, but it’s not fully done. And then they come back to Trump and say, “Well, there’s still this Fordow underground nuclear site, and we can’t really get it but you’ve backed this far and you’re kind of implicated already, and do you want this to succeed or not?" And then that’s a dilemma, because what is Trump going to do? Pull the plug on Israel? Or if Netanyahu and the Israelis go in a direction the United States doesn’t want, including regime change—let’s say they mostly accomplish nuclear goals, they decide they’re going to keep up the bombing, try to get [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] and really change the regime, and the United States is worried about that. How do you stop them? Do you then say, “If you continue the war and you do go after leadership or regime change and Iran fires ballistic missiles at you, we’re not going to help you.”? That’s something that American presidents just haven’t been prepared to do.

So I think that’s getting at the issue of—the United States has a lot of agency here, but it’s not easy. And I think Bibi maneuvered Trump into supporting him so far. He’s trying to maneuver him to support even more. But to answer your specific question, if I was in the White House and that seemed to be the goal, I would try to rein Israel in, because I don’t want to see the United States dragged into this conflict.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you assess the Trump administration’s response over the last few days? I mean, leaving aside Trump’s face-saving efforts to insist that this wasn’t something that was done behind his back.

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, I mean, face-saving is right, because he did pivot. I mean, as recently as the night of the attack, [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] came out with that statement that seemed to distance the United States from the attack. We know that for weeks and months, Trump was focused on a deal. And he even said, publicly and privately, that he was pressing Netanyahu not to unilaterally use force. He warned him. I think Bibi forced his hand. Rubio initially came out and said, we had nothing to do with this,it was unilateral Israeli action, and he even said he warned Iran not to go after U.S. troops. He didn’t even say anything about responding against Israel, which almost left an out for the United States. Then I think Trump, for the reasons I’ve said—moral hazard, and plus it seemed to go really well, right, I mean, they killed all the top commanders—then Trump comes out and acts as if this was his call, you know, “they had 60 days to do it, time ran out, and you don’t mess with me.”

I think there’s a possibility he was influenced by all of that “taco” talk, right—“Trump always chickens out”—and decided he was going to make it look like he was the one who decided. He ran out of patience and he was going to enforce this. And that’s where he’s been so far. But like on so many things, he wavers back and forth. And actually, I think there’s a consequence of the taco analysis in foreign policy, the idea that he just blusters and bloviates and doesn’t do something, which could actually be very costly in this situation, in that Iran had no reason to believe that the 60-day deadline was actually a deadline, right? Trump has so often made wild threats, given people deadlines—I mean look at how he’s handled tariffs and trade. Iran had good reason to believe this was just one more thing.And now, I mean, if it’s actually the case that Trump was planning to support military intervention after 60 days, but Iran didn’t know that, that’s a consequence of making all these threats that you never follow up on.

The same is true now. Now we’re moving additional military forces to the region. Trump is telling the people of Tehran to get out of Tehran. He says, “You should have done a deal.” If Trump were generally consistent on this sort of thing, Iran might draw their conclusion and come and negotiate a deal. But given that he’s just always thrown things around and you never know which ones are serious, they could miscalculate again. So I think it’s a consequence of the general approach, Trump approach, to these things.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And it’s why people look at the [National Security Council] and say, “Why do you need all these staffers there?” And it’s this kind of process and clarity that is the reason—we won’t go down that rabbit hole, but that’s why you have process.

PHILIP GORDON

Well, we should go down that rabbit hole, because it’s important. You said, “Look at the NSC.” There’s nothing to look at because it’s almost not there. And that is also wild to me—the notion that we’re trying to manage a war without a National Security Council staff, or without a national security adviser. You can say, oh, Marco Rubio is the national security adviser. You can’t be Secretary of State and national security adviser at the same time. Now, he can forgo all of his Secretary of State duties—traveling to the Caribbean and dealing with China and all of that—and manage this crisis. But he’s not doing that. And there’s a cost to that too.

A good NSC process is not a guarantee—it’s not a sufficient condition to manage a crisis well, but it’s a necessary one. And the idea that Trump is deciding these things without carefully planned options, people thinking it through. If we do that or if we do support this, what if Iran responds against our bases—who’s thinking that through? Or do we have the right military defensive equipment in place? What about the diplomatic pieces? Can we get British bases? Who’s talking to them? I mean, there’s an enormous amount of work that would have to be done by an NSC, but he fired most of the NSC, got rid of the experts. There’s a lot of unqualified political appointees; he doesn’t have a national security adviser. That is really a nuts way to go about managing a crisis where American lives are at stake, and a lot more.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

People occasionally cite Henry Kissinger as the one other person who has done both those jobs. But when you go back and read that history and read Kissinger’s memoirs, it’s just such a different system that it’s not really a model that holds, I think.

As you look at Iran’s options right now, how much space for compromise does Tehran have? Can the supreme leader pivot on a dime and rush toward a deal? Do you see it as logical for Iran to rush to break out to a nuclear weapons capability now? I mean, how do you think they’re thinking of potential paths? They’re clearly under a lot of pressure right now and sending signals that they want to talk to the United States, but it’s not totally clear to me what their options are and how they think of those.

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, it’s important you brought that up because Iran’s options right now are terrible. And that’s why I actually don’t exclude getting back to some sort of nuclear deal. And you asked me what I would do in the White House, I would still be focused on what sort of deal we could get. You can say, “That’s silly, and why is Trump still even talking about deals? It’s nonsense. The time for deals has passed. They missed that window.” But the reason you can still talk or think about deals is that Iran’s alternative to deals are terrible. Its military capabilities are severely weakened. We’ve seen that it’s firing an awful lot of ballistic missiles. Most of them have been intercepted and at a certain point they’ll run out. Its proxies—Hezbollah and Hamas, primarily Hezbollah—have been decimated by previous Israeli military activity. That was one of the other things that they used in the past: the threat of unleashing Hezbollah—if you mess with us or if you unilaterally attack like Israel did. Well, they can’t threaten that anymore.

They could go after U.S. troops and bases, which they’ve done before, with strikes through proxies. But if that brought the United States into the conflict, which is a real possibility now, that wouldn’t be in Iran’s interest. They could go after their neighbors or shipping like they did in the first Trump administration, go after Emirati or Saudi oil production facilities or tankers, but that would interfere with their better relations with their neighbors and possibly bring more in. So if you’re sitting in Tehran now, and I watched this in the White House in 2024 in the two cases where Israel struck Iran in April and October; Iran fired Israel, Israel responded. We watched the Iranians try to think about their responses then, and they were already bad then. And in late October, Israel responded and took out more Iranian air defenses. The Iranians never responded because they just thought about it; well, they could respond and Israel would hit them again. It’s obviously even worse now after this last week of intensive bombardment.

So Iran is really in a pickle. Now, you flagged one option for Iran, which could be the “dash for a bomb.” Another option is to develop nuclear weapons. Possible. They might be doing it as we speak. We know they had a big stockpile of [highly enriched uranium] that they could use. They have centrifuges in Fordow, and they have centrifuges elsewhere. But one, can they really succeed in a short amount of time to enrich uranium to sufficient quantities and weapons grade? And even more importantly, weaponize it? Because as far as we know they didn’t have the capacity to weaponize it.

So I don’t even know that they can do it. But trying could be a mistake as well, because if we did get intelligence that they were using Fordow to develop a nuclear weapon, that’s the one thing that actually could bring the Trump administration in. I don’t think it wants to be involved, but Trump has said Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Previous presidents said that too, and the United States would probably use force to stop it. So I say all of that because if you’re sitting in Tehran now trying to think, “All right, how do we respond to this aggression?” All of those options are bad, which is why I don’t exclude that Iran could come back to the table. It knows Trump wants a deal. It knows Trump wants to avoid escalation, maybe do it that way.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just how much can Israel set back the nuclear program on its own? I mean, people often point out that Israel does not have the whatever, 30,000 pound bombs, the bunker busters that could destroy Fordow. But it does have a lot of capabilities and has surprised all observers with what it can do.

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, no, it already has, I think, significantly set it back. We don’t know exactly how much, and you’re right, Fordow is the main thing because it’s deep underground, probably impenetrable to the Israelis, and they have advanced centrifuges there that they could use to enrich. But as you know, that’s not the entire process to develop a nuclear weapon.

So we know Israel’s already set back Iran’s enrichment program by striking the pilot enrichment plant at Natanz. And even by denying power seems to have affected the centrifuges buried in Natanz. They’ve hit centrifuge manufacturing capability. They’ve hit a lot of the scientists that would be necessary. And again, even without Israeli strikes, there were questions about how long it would take Iran to figure out how to weaponize the material once they had it. So I think they’ve already set back the program a significant amount, and that’s why Fordow becomes the big outstanding question. But I think without that, there are still very much open questions about whether Iran could successfully dash to a bomb even if it wanted to.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There have been cases in the past, relatively distant past at this point, I think of Pakistan or North Korea, where the United States did not have a great grasp of the extent of a nuclear program. Do you have confidence that we would know if Iran were rushing to break out at Fordow as well?

PHILIP GORDON

No, I don’t. And obviously another consequence of this is that there aren’t going to be [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors working in Iran. Iran announced the other day in the wake of the strikes that it was not going to cooperate with the IAEA and share what it’s doing. In the past, mostly there was a lot of transparency in centrifuge production and uranium enrichment, and now we’re flying blind. They could have moved nuclear material out. We don’t know where the 60 percent is; it could have been moved out to other parts of Iran.

If you’re Iran and you’re trying to build a nuclear weapon, you would ideally want to do that at a place like Fordow, not just because it’s deep underground, but because you would have a lot of advanced centrifuge cascades to do it with. But you don’t have to do it that way. If they were preparing for this and had even some older centrifuges and fewer of them at some other site—and you know, Iran’s a big place. Our intelligence is amazing, and Israeli intelligence is amazing, but it’s a big place. So if you could get some of that already enriched nuclear material to even a small number of cascades somewhere else, in a small place that we didn’t know about, you could turn it into weapons grade. Again, still huge being that how do you get it from there to the weaponization people? Can they actually detonate it? Even if they could detonate it, how would you marry it to a missile or something to use it? So I think we’re still a long way from that, but that’s what they could and would do if they were trying to weaponize now.

The reason the Obama administration in 2015, when we did the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] nuclear deal, focused on enrichment in fissile material is that it’s much more observable than weaponization. You can see, even though I just said you can do small centrifuges, if you really want to enrich a large amount of uranium to weapons grade, you want a large number of centrifuges spinning. And that’s easier to find than the things you would do if you were trying to weaponize, which could be much more easily hidden.

So, to your question about, “Do we know?” It’s harder to know on the weaponization thing, it could be some university somewhere in some building where people are working on this, which is much harder to see from a satellite than an industrial enrichment plant.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to try to pull us back a bit from the immediate crisis and focus on the region more broadly by going back to a piece you wrote in February about America’s opportunities in the Middle East and the relatively good position that, going into the Trump administration, you argued, the United States was in, to come up with a regional balance and regional order that would prevent the recurrence of the kinds of problems that have been one of the perhaps distractions for U.S. foreign policy or thorniest problems for U.S. foreign policy for the last couple of decades.

A new Iran deal was one of those opportunities, but that was just part of it. And I think it’s just worth stressing that you were writing this piece a month or so after you’d left government as a senior member of the White House National Security team and as national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, which is to say in some ways, this cut against what we might’ve expected from someone who’d just been on the losing side of an election against Donald Trump.

But you did write that along with the strategic landscape he inherited, Trump’s unpredictable nature could give him leverage with Iran, Israel, and the Gulf states. How did you see the regional situation then? Or put differently, why did you see Trump as having an opportunity in a region that has not offered a lot of them over the past few decades? And how do you see the regional situation now, both before we started this immediate crisis and as you see it developing in these past few days?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, that was the very first piece I wrote after leaving government. And so as I looked back after four years in the White House, working on all these things, and a history before that of working in the Middle East, I tried to step back and think like, “Where are we now, and what are we leaving?” And it did strike me a bit to my own surprise, because as I said at the time, I’m not used to writing pieces with the words Middle East and opportunity both in the headline. Because as you say, and as I wrote in the piece, president after president has had their moment of hope, going back to [U.S. President Bill Clinton] and Camp David, but [U.S. President George W. Bush] after the Iraq war, [U.S. President Barack Obama] and the Arab Spring. There always seems to be a moment where now we finally have an opportunity, we can make the best of this, and alas, for a whole bunch of complicated reasons, it usually doesn’t work out very well.

So I was surprised to find myself concluding, but I was just trying to be honest thinking about it, like what are we leaving and what is Trump inheriting? And it did strike me that he was actually inheriting some real opportunities. And you maybe implied you were surprised to hear that coming from me, because I’m not exactly a huge fan of Trump’s foreign policy in general, but I had to acknowledge that there was a chance at least that certain particular aspects of Trump and his administration might make it even easier for them to take advantage of these. So on the strategic opportunity part, Trump was inheriting a dramatically changed strategic landscape. One of the reasons everything was so hard in the Middle East for previous presidents is that you had this Iran determined to thwart stability and American aims, and it had the means to do so.

But by the time Trump took office, Iran was weaker and more vulnerable than it had been since the Iranian Revolution. And I’m not even talking about the last week of Israeli strikes—even before that. Again, the decimation, especially of Hezbollah, which was always the biggest Iranian threat. We compromised with Iran on the nuclear thing in 2015; one of the reasons is we didn’t want to go to war because the war would unleash Hezbollah in Israel and it’d be a big mess. That problem was significantly solved with what Israel did to Hezbollah. And Hamas decimated as well.

Iranian missile capability was another reason we were really reluctant to confront Iran too much because they would fire ballistic missiles. Well, in April and October we showed that Israel together with us could largely defeat them. It didn’t mean the problem went away, but it gave you a lot more confidence that you could stand up to Iran and not have to worry about that threat.

So that was an enormous opportunity that Trump was inheriting. And then on top of that, it so happened that we finally got the Gaza hostage cease-fire deal in the waning days of the administration. So after a terrible, terrible period in Gaza with options all bad, Trump was inheriting a cease-fire that he could maybe take advantage of to finally get that terrible war over. The government in Lebanon changed. Lebanon was—enormous headaches, such a terrible government dominated by Hezbollah. With Hezbollah’s defeat, or at least setback, you had a new president, a new prime minister that you could work with.

And then finally, Syria; of all things we expected in the final months of the Biden administration—so much was going on in the region. The rapid fall of Assad and the replacement with a government that was at least nominally committed to stability and ethnic integration was stunning. And no one wants to be naive or—Syria is always going to be hard. But that certainly counts as an opportunity as well. Iran and Russia had bailed on Assad, he fell, and there was a lot to work with there.

So that’s why I concluded, “Wow, he could really make something of this.” And then as I said, I even acknowledged that Trump might be in a particularly good position to take advantage of all this, even aiming off for what I describe the threats and the history of bad deal making and the lack of knowledge about the region and the lack of process, all of that. His unpredictability could be an asset in dealing with, for example, Iran. Also at great contrast to us, he had total control of his party in Congress, so that whatever he chose to do, he didn’t have to worry about the politics like we did. And an Iran nuclear deal is a great example of that.

I mean, various reasons we could get into about why President Biden never managed to resume the nuclear deal that we wanted with Iran, but one of them was that just Congress would never have accepted it, including Democrats. But Trump could get through Congress apparently—you know, now he has a Republican majority, and they do whatever he says. He can get through virtually anything he wants. And he even had maybe more leverage over Israel. So you put all that together, and I actually did think that Trump was inheriting an unusually positive set of circumstances in the Middle East.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Lingering on the Syria part of that for a moment, I’m just fascinated what it was like for you to witness the sudden fall of Assad sitting where you were last November, December? You’d been, I believe, in the White House and the Obama administration as the senior Middle East person when the civil war was really escalating. Did you have any suspicion Assad’s fall was coming? I mean, to the extent that it surprised, I think everyone, people reading classified intelligence and not, what were we all missing that caused that to be such a surprise?

PHILIP GORDON

No, it’s a great question, and I will acknowledge that we didn’t see that coming. When you do the Middle East for a long time, you always have to be prepared for surprises. Anything can happen. Usually they’re bad surprises rather than positive surprises. This one, like I said, so much was going on, the reason—Gaza, Iran, Iraq, the Houthis—that we didn’t imagine that the biggest news in that period could come from Syria. I said before on regime change, you never know. Regimes can be brittle, and they can last a long time until they don’t. People who predicted the Mubarak regime in Egypt would fall were wrong 29 years in a row before they were right. You just don’t know. And in Syria, yes, I was working on this in the Obama White House. That was after the Arab Spring, people thought, well, [Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali] fell in Tunisia, Qaddafi fell in Libya, [Hosni Mubarak] fell in Egypt. Assad will be next.

And it turned out to be a lot harder than that because he was more deeply entrenched. He had Russian and Hezbollah and Iranian backing. And so for all of our efforts to accelerate that process of getting rid of him, it didn’t work. And I reached that conclusion fairly early on in the White House that that was just not going to happen. And an irony about Syria is sort of that it took many people a good decade to finally conclude that Assad wasn’t going anywhere just in time for him to finally fall. Because as you know, even the regional partners who had been determined to get rid of him or were funding the opposition trying to overthrow him, by 2024, were like, look, he’s there. Some of them wanted to let him back in the Arab League, do trade and business: “If he’s going to be there, we might as well work with him and try to pull him away from Iran.”

So people kind of had given up largely on that goal of getting rid of Assad, and then he fell. Looking back, it’s not that surprising. He was always unpopular. The opposition was still there. And the biggest variables—when people tried to overthrow him in 2015, Russia, with actual military force, deployed to Syria to stop it. And Hezbollah came and fought with Assad. And the United States wanted to push him aside but wasn’t prepared to go to war with Russia and Iran and Hezbollah to do it. This time, the opposition, which Turkey was supporting while everyone else’s eye was on some other ball, was getting ready to advance. And then Assad calls Iran and they’re like, “We got our hands full. Hezbollah’s already been wiped out and we’re dealing with Israel. Good luck.” And Russia, all of its deployed forces in Ukraine and missiles and airplanes, they weren’t going to go to war for Assad. And guess what, without them, he was done.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Syria was one of the opportunities, as you noted, that you highlighted in that piece. Trump on, I guess his first major trip as president to the Middle East, one of the notable parts of that trip was his meeting with President [Ahmed al-Shara] of Syria, and a commitment to lifting sanctions—I haven’t fully tracked what’s happening with that in Congress, but he did at least declare that as a goal.

Did you see that as the right first step? And as you look at Syria over the coming months and years, what will it take to really get it on the right path? And as you look at development so far, do you see encouraging signs, worrying ones? How do you kind of assess the state of that opportunity now?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, I do think that was the right movem though, as you say, and typically with Trump, there are no details. He probably doesn’t really know what sanctions, of which authorities the sanctions are under, what kind of sanctions we have, and what it takes to lift them. But the political signal of Trump saying, yeah, we want this guy to succeed and we should work with him, I think was right. And it’s another example of—again, there are so many things to criticize with the Trump administration, but this willingness to sometimes do things regardless of what critics might say. And there were some congressional critics, people in his own administration didn’t want to lift sanctions on Syria and even sit down with them. I think it’s possible a Democratic president might have worried about sitting down with this—you know a terrible record on human rights and former terrorists.

And there I’ll say, Trump’s willingness to do that I think was right: just look, let’s cut through all that, we want this guy to succeed. Obviously there are things we need to see from him in terms of governance and human rights and minorities, but we should do that. So I do think that was the right political signal to send—give that regime reason to align with us rather than with Iran or Russia. As you say, [there’s] still a lot of work to be done. The last couple of months have been a bit disappointing; al-Shara came in surprising people with his willingness to say multiethnic society, deal with the Kurds, not repress minorities, even though we shouldn’t forget, he was a sort of poster child for Islamist extremism at the time, and running Idlib. But he was saying and mostly doing the right things, which I think made it right for us to want to support him. Since then, there’s been again, some of his people repressing minorities doing the de-Baathification mistake that was made in Iraq after 2003.

So it’s a bumpy road, but that was to be expected. I still think on balance, it remains an opportunity. And I don’t really criticize the way the Trump administration has been handling this to the extent that they are. And again, I make that point that it’s hard to do this without an NSC and qualified people, and they’ve been changing their Middle East team constantly. I mean it’s hard to really have a sustained and consistent policy. But given that, I don’t really have a major critique of what they’ve done. I think that’s an opportunity that we kind of are following up on in the right way.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m curious how you saw the Gulf part of that trip and the two things that stuck out were first, this speech that Trump gave on no longer giving countries lectures, how to live, in the country that was responsible for killing Jamal Khashoggi and lots of other things that go against liberal democratic values at least. And then of course, the kind of big [artificial intelligence] deals, which, I think people have different views on these, but it was just striking that you’re handing—people say, data is the new oil, and the Gulf is going to control the new oil just as it controlled the old oil. And I wonder if that’ll be a long-term cost for us. As you saw that part of the trip, did you see upside there, opportunity? Or do you worry about the long-term consequences of both of those?

PHILIP GORDON

Both. I mean, there’s been many things. There are upsides, and then you also worry about the long-term consequences. Look, I get the strategic case for investing in the region and having the AI partnerships and data centers and keeping them in our orbit. And we in the Biden administration tried to strike that balance too, and also made arrangements to work with those countries on AI and chips and data. So, it’s not as if that was a real departure. At the same time, the Biden administration was focused on making sure that the most advanced chips or AI models couldn’t slip into the hands of China.

But the goal is the same: keep these countries that are really well-placed to do AI—I mean to do AI and data centers you need land, you need a bunch of energy, you need a bunch of capital, and then you get political commitment to do it. There aren’t a whole lot of countries in the world ready to do that. So I think the bet on keeping them in our ecosystem and not China’s was the same. Trump pushed it even further, and they have yet to come up or explain what they plan to do to ensure that the technology doesn’t get in China’s hands. So there, it’s like TBD. The basic principle of investing and working in these countries is a good one, but now we need to see the specific details of the arrangements about how to do that.

And again, going back to my process point—in the Biden administration, I can’t tell you how many meetings we’re in the situation room with the national security advisor and the commerce secretary and the defense secretary and the technology teams really trying to figure out the way to do this. I don’t get the impression that the Trump administration’s focused on that, which means the other part of my thing—do you also worry even as you support it? Yes, I worry about their ability to get that right.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What about the speech that Trump gave? The “no more lectures how to live.”

PHILIP GORDON

I mean, that is unexpected from him. That’s always been his view, and that’s why a lot of our partners in the Gulf are happy with him. They don’t get the lectures on human rights and democracy that they used to get from previous presidents. He’s entirely comfortable with the oil industry. He’s entirely comfortable with families being involved in business. So that was consistent. What’s not consistent is marrying that with the very lectures that they keep making in Europe about how to live. It was odd.

So Trump gives that speech—and by the way, you’re focusing on the values intervention part, but another part of it was, “We don’t get dragged into wars in the Middle East.” And that’s—put a pin in that as we deploy massive military forces into the Middle East for possible use in a conflict. So that’s the other part of that speech and traditional Trump foreign policy to focus on.

And we haven’t really talked about it, but I think Trump has always been divided between his “America first,” don’t get involved in foreign wars instincts, which are represented manifestly in this administration by some of his top people who served in Iraq, and turned against it—[Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth], [former National Security Adviser Michael Waltz], [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard]. But then the other part of Trump, which is “world leader, we’re the strongest country in the world, don’t mess with us.” Sometimes those two things are in tension, and they’re certainly in tension right now. That’s why he’s clearly struggling with what to do in Iran and Israel, because you can’t do both. Fine if you want to be the great power and dictate who has nuclear weapons and who’s ruling different countries. But it’s hard to do that while also staying out of costly engagements in the region. Fascinating to see that play out.

But to go back to the point I was making about inconsistency. In the Middle East, Trump makes a speech: “We don’t tell you what to do. You live lives the way you want.” Hegseth goes to Singapore, makes a similar speech: national sovereignty, “we’re not lecturing you or imposing our views.” But then [Vice President JD Vance] goes to Europe and basically says, we’re looking for civilizational allies, and you’re interfering with our cultural relations and we don’t like the way you practice free speech, and we support—you know, Vance and Trump and [Elon] Musk supporting extremist parties in Germany and having close relations with the autocrats in Hungary. There they somehow seem really interested in the way people live and values and so on. So that’s another big inconsistency at the heart of the Trump administration.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You talked earlier about the moral hazard at the heart of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, and this kind of question of U.S. leverage over Israel has been, I think, a really problematic one for U.S. policy over the last, certainly since the war in Gaza started, but also going back long before that. I think you’ve said that the United States did too little to press Israel on humanitarian assistance and limiting civilian casualties.

But just to look at that question of leverage a little bit more generally, why has that been so challenging? I think people who have not worked on this in government look at it and say, this shouldn’t be that hard given the amount of support the United States gives Israel. I think the Iranian foreign minister even said that a couple of days ago when he said that Trump can make one phone call and end this if he wants to.

What is more challenging about that than people appreciate? And as you look back on American policy, at least during the Biden administration, since October 7, are there moments where you thought the United States had more ability to shape Israeli action, that if you could go back and run it again, you would handle somewhat differently?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah. You say what is more challenging about that than people think? Everything. It’s really challenging. And we had criticism from both ends of that. I think it’s just simply not true that Trump could pick up the phone, make a call—people said the same about Biden—the war ends. It’s not that simple. If Trump wanted to have a major and massive confrontation with Israel and cut off arms and leave Israel alone in its confrontation with Iran, no doubt that would influence the Israeli thinking. How much? I don’t know. Maybe it would still run the risk of doing this and dare Trump not to defend them as ballistic missiles are raining down. And you have a huge domestic debate. Congress gets involved. You’re seen as responsible for abandoning Israel. And that’s the moral hazard piece that I was talking about before. So it’s not at all easy.

The strategic piece is hard too. And this is what the Biden administration confronted in Gaza. Because it’s a legitimate point on the arms support, right? Political support is one thing, but we provide Israel with a lot of weapons, and people usually point to that as the leverage that we had. Fair enough, and there’s some leverage in that. But then you have to be willing to live with the consequences of your decisions. And the problem was, Israel was doing things in Gaza that we didn’t want them to do, but cutting off weapons when they faced genuine and actual threats from Hezbollah, and Iran and the Houthis. And these were not hypotheticals. Iran was firing ballistic missiles at Israel, fueling them, loading them up.

And to say in that moment—you got Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran determined to really go after Israel—to say, well, to get you to change your policy on Gaza, we’re going to cut off the weapons. You’d have to then accept that Israel would be vulnerable to all of these missile threats raining down on Tel Aviv and elsewhere. And you could say, oh no, but just make the threat, and then Israel would comply in Gaza and you don’t have to worry about it, then you can keep supporting them. Maybe. But what if Israel, which was traumatized by October 7 and saw its national interest at stake and has a lot of weapons of its own, said, respectfully, we’re just doing this anyway. And then the Iranian missiles start to fly. So that’s why it’s not easy.

Now, you can still come down and say, Gaza is so important, and what Israel was doing there is so objectionable. Let’s just do it anyway. We cut them off, and we see what happens. But don’t pretend that you wouldn’t have to face real consequences of that decision. You also asked about looking back, and you said I’ve said that we didn’t succeed in getting Israel to do enough. I think that’s obvious. I mean, you can have the policy debate about what else we might have done, but results-wise, it was a humanitarian catastrophe.

And we pushed all along for Israel to do more, to do better on civilian casualties and allow humanitarian assistance in. And I would note that it had an impact. The overall result was catastrophic and terrible, but the United States made a difference. And I think it’s worth comparison of the Biden administration with the Trump administration. At the beginning of the conflict in October 2023, the Israeli defense minister said, that’s it. No food, no water, no fuel, we’re cutting them off. And we said, no, you can’t do that. We understand you have to respond militarily. You’re going to go in, but you have to provide humanitarian assistance. And then all along, Israel ended up permitting significant amounts and including hundreds of millions of dollars worth from the United States and a million tons of aid that saved a lot of lives.

Now again, was it nearly enough? No, it wasn’t. And I’ll only be able to look back with regret on the situation in Gaza, which is an unspeakable tragedy. But did it make a difference? Yes. And is it different from the Trump administration, which then came in and gave Israel a green light to do the very things that we said no to two years before. And then Israel did impose—broke the ceasefire that Trump had inherited. Started using military force again, started implementing and talking about occupation, smashing buildings. Did it, in complete blockade for over two months of no food and fuel at all, and just made clear that that was almost a case of collective punishment until Hamas would give in—that’s a real difference. So no, Biden didn’t manage to do nearly enough, but you see the difference with what Trump has done.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I mean, it strikes me that there was so much focus on ceasefire negotiations, and that’s incredibly complex. There are multiple parties involved that the humanitarian piece was always a bit more, was more perplexing. And why you didn’t have [USAID Administrator Samantha Power] just standing on the outside of Gaza saying, we’re going to wave through trucks, and instead you had the kind of embarrassing spectacle of the pier that didn’t work. It just seemed like a bigger policy failure than the ceasefire, which got so much attention.

PHILIP GORDON

Look, as I said, it was a policy failure. You can’t conclude anything else. Not enough food and humanitarian assistance got to people. I mean, we actually did have Samantha Power leaning on them all the time, as well as everybody else. And we can look back and try to see what else we might have done. I think we should have done more because it was even in Israel’s strategic interest to allow in more.

And the pier, I don’t know, people mock the pier. And yes, it’s pathetic that we had to resort to a pier when there were land crossings that could have been open. And that’s an enormous frustration and highly unfortunate. But that doesn’t mean you don’t do the pier. And as we were briefed, the pier’s costly, doesn’t get in nearly enough. Same with air drops—nowhere near what you can get in trucks. But I think the view of the people around the table was, if it can feed some people, then let’s just do it while we work on the other things. So I don’t really accept all the critiques of the air drops in the pier.

And again, it’s embarrassingly pathetic, because it’s nowhere near enough. But are you going to really argue that we shouldn’t get the additional stuff in? But yes, I mean, to your other point, I think we, as much as we did and tried to do, could and should have done more because the situation and the outcome in Gaza was unacceptable and is even more unacceptable now.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you assess Israeli objectives in Gaza now—obviously the ceasefire that you could focus on in the February piece is long gone, and things continue to be incredibly grim and awful on the ground in Gaza. As you look at Israeli objectives though, I mean, do you go to the, what looks like the kind of Occam’s razor assessment of this, which is that they’re aiming for reoccupation of at least part of Gaza, forcing at least some Palestinians to leave. I mean, how do you read those objectives?

PHILIP GORDON

Well, one point is there are different Israelis with different objectives. And certainly there are those in Israel who want to conquer the whole place, drive all Palestinians out, and occupy. That was completely fantastical under the Biden administration. I think they couldn’t have imagined we’d ever go along with that. But Trump has kind of endorsed it and even led the way, saying the Palestinians should leave and we’ll rebuild the place. So that’s unfortunate because it is actually giving hope to those who want to decimate the place.

I also think Israel, aside from the nuances or differences among the Israelis, has an unattainable strategy. And that’s been the problem from the start. They, for understandable reasons that we share, want to get rid of Hamas and make sure Hamas has no part in governance. Understandable. How could you expect them to live with that after what Hamas did? But at the same time, they refuse to accept, for example, any role for the Palestinian Authority. Which, as flawed and corrupt and ineffective as it is, exists, has trained security forces, recognizes Israel, works with Israeli security forces.

So if you rule out Hamas and you rule out anything related to the PA, who’s going to run Gaza? Then you actually do either have to occupy it, and Israeli forces run the place, or you have to chase out two million Palestinians or kill them. And those last two options are totally unacceptable. So that’s the problem and one reason this has gone on so far is that Israel has unattainable objectives. Had the objective been to decimate Hamas, or at least get it to the point where it couldn’t rule Gaza, and then to work and genuinely find Palestinians who could take on governance and security, maybe backed by Arabs, that’s still hard, but at least it’s realistic.

But now, given the way Israel has constructed this, they’re leaving themselves only the option of displacement of people and Israeli occupation, which is a terrible outcome. And you see this now, going back to the humanitarian point—by not working with any of the UN agencies or [nongovernmental organizations] in setting up this foundation, it’s been a complete catastrophe. And until they accept a more realistic goal for the future of Gaza, that’s what we’re going to be living with. And again, the Trump administration has given them a complete pass.

Trump has shown himself willing to stand up to Israel on a lot of other things, pursuing a nuclear deal that Iran didn’t like. Talking directly to Hamas about releasing an American hostage. Ending a ceasefire with the Houthis without a pledge that the Houthis wouldn’t attack. Sitting down with the Syrian new leadership that Israel is bombing as we speak. I mean, Trump has hardly shied away from telling Israel when we have a difference. But on the question of Gaza, he’s just like, yeah, do whatever you want. And the result of that has been catastrophic.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you worry about various West Bank scenarios which could involve re-annexation, could involve the collapse of the PA?

PHILIP GORDON

Yes, that’s the thing. There’s so much going on. Even the Gaza thing, people were rightly focused on all these people trying to get food and being killed. And now—we only have so much bandwidth to be talking about these things, and already Gaza was overshadowing the West Bank, and then the Houthis was overshadowing Gaza, and now Iran-Israel is overshadowing everything. But it’s overshadowing, like I said—I mean, people are being killed in Iran and Israel right now, and it’s terrible. But I think 45 Palestinians were killed yesterday just trying to get food. I mean, it’s a horrific, horrific situation that is not getting the attention it deserves.

And the West Bank, similarly—and there again, the Trump administration deserves some of the blame. Israel’s taking advantage of this situation to expand settlements almost unconstrained. Trump lifted the penalties and sanctions that the Biden administration had put on settlers for extremist activities. Now, you can say, that wasn’t enough, and I think we should have done more to curb settlement expansions and settler violence even under the Biden administration. But at least there was that. Trump has basically said—he’s got an ambassador to Israel that publicly says he doesn’t believe in the two state solution and sees the West Bank as part of Israel. So yeah, there’s plenty to worry about in the West Bank. I mean Israel has a lot—going back to the very place we started, with regime change and how it can go wrong—Israel’s got a lot on its plate right now and only so many munitions. And you can’t exclude another uprising, intifada in the West Bank. On top of what’s going on in Gaza, you’ve got the Houthis still attacking in Iran. So all of that calls for real diplomatic efforts to try to bring some of these things to a close rather than to escalate them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m struck by how often I hear from the people in the region and people who spend a lot of time there about the potential instability of Jordan, of the Jordanian government. Is that an acute worry as these dynamics in the West Bank and Gaza get worse and worse?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, I mean, it’s funny you use the word acute. This is kind of what I’m getting at, you only have—only so many things get to be acute, right? It’s not as acute as Iran-Israel right now, or even the Houthis or Gaza or maybe even the West Bank. But if those things were in a normal place, it would be acute. And it also—just as I said about Mubarak, people were predicting Egyptian instability and following Mubarak for ages, and it didn’t happen for decades until it did. It’s easy to say that we’ve heard that all before and it’s okay. But sure, fortunately now some of the Syrians may be able to go back to Syria, but you get a million displaced Syrians pouring into Jordan with no jobs and raising ethnic tensions, and then Palestinians spill over from the West Bank and or Gaza. It’s a rough neighborhood, and sure, there’s pressure on Jordan.

The United States has normally long been a strong supporter of Jordan, providing military and economic assistance. I think there’s some question about that going forward in the Trump administration, which is cutting aid generally. It may not be as acute as most of the other things we’ve talked about, but yes, it’s one more thing that could easily go wrong in the Middle East without appropriate attention and resources.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you think about U.S. policy toward Israel in future administrations in which you may serve or not, do you see it as time to move beyond the two state solution and diplomacy around it as the right move for U.S. policy? And if so, what would it mean? What would the new paradigm look like?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, no, that’s a really tough question because I am realistic enough to acknowledge that it’s hard to see a two state solution anytime soon. It’s just unrealistic, with the degree to which settlements have expanded, Israeli public attitudes about it, the lack of an agreed and unified moderate Palestinian governance that could be the head of the Palestinian state. So it’s a bit silly right now to talk about a two state solution. On the other hand, it still remains the question: what’s the alternative?

It’s not credible or realistic to me to imagine one Israel in which Arabs and Jews work hand in hand and nobody pays attention to ethnicity. Eventually that would be a Palestinian majority, so it couldn’t be democracy, and you have a minority of Jews ruling over a majority of Arabs. So I still think ultimately we’re going to have to get some version of that, but I’m not naive enough to sit here today and tell you that that’s any realistic near-term goal. Even in the Obama administration, when I was doing Middle East, and it was already pretty incredible, a bit of a stretch then. You remember [Secretary of State John Kerry] went to Congress and he said, I think he said like, “we have 17 months before the window of close.” I don’t know the math behind the 17 months, but what he was getting at is as settlements expand and attitudes change, we have an opportunity and we should get this done now, or it’s only going to be worse.

Now he was certainly right about that, about it only being worse 10 years later, for a ton of reasons. But we used to talk with other officials then—we could still then at least credibly say that there’s a peace process that we’re trying to deliver two states. And we would say to each other, “What would we do and say if it ever got to the point where that was just laughable, and you couldn’t say it with a straight face?” We might be there now. But I still don’t know what the realistic alternative is.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Looking ahead to the Democratic primary that’s going to start, presumably the minute polls close in the 2026 midterms, or possibly even before that, given where things are, I just imagine that both Gaza and this set of questions is going to be a really explosive one in those debates, a bit like Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

PHILIP GORDON

For sure. It was already deeply divisive during the last presidential election, obviously with Vice President Harris who then became a candidate. I was caught in the middle of all of that. And caught in the middle in the sense that you really couldn’t bridge the gap between the two sides, which were deeply, deeply dug in. There wasn’t a ton of space between them. As you know, Vice President Harris took a view, which was basically her genuine view—that you shouldn’t have to choose. That Israel had the right to self-defense, and we should always be there to make sure Israel had what it needed to defend itself. And at the same time, the situation in Gaza was unconscionable and there needed to be greater and more effective efforts on civilian casualties and humanitarian assistance, and there should eventually be a Palestinian state with dignity and security for both sides.

That was genuinely her belief. That’s kind of the line we took in the campaign. And yet the party was still deeply divided between those who were suspicious and didn’t think we were committed enough to Israel and those who were furious that we weren’t doing more to improve the situation in Gaza. And I fear, as you suggest, we’re going to rerun that debate, maybe even in more severe form. Because as bad as it was then, if this goes on and is still going on then, and Israel is even more pursuing displacement and occupation, and the Trump administration is giving it a green light, you could see a real debate within the party about how to handle that situation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the hope of allowing us to end on a somewhat more uplifting note, or at least for what qualifies as uplifting now, you wrote a piece that I find really interesting in the Financial Times, calling on policymakers to really learn from Trump’s willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and political obstacles. You alluded to some of this earlier. Beyond the Middle East, do you see other areas where U.S. foreign policy could benefit from a little bit more of that spirit and a little more of that willingness?

PHILIP GORDON

Yeah, I think the rule generally applies. I mean, I wrote that about the Middle East because Trump had just come from the Middle East and had just done a series of things that seemed politically controversial and that we weren’t able to do, in some cases to my frustration. And then he did, and he got away with it, so to speak. So I think I’m really applauding not even necessarily the specifics of those things, but more the style and attitude of just saying, here’s what I think, and here’s what I’m going to do, and I realize there’ll be critics, but too bad.

And that’s where I think, and I was sort of implicitly critical of previous Democratic presidents, I think people give you credit for just authenticity and strength. And if you look like you’re uncertain and you’re doing it for political reasons, then they sense that and hold it against you. And all of these things are hard and controversial, so you’re just going to have opponents. But I think taking a clear and strong, and I would say in our case, principled stand—I want to be clear that I would recommend for Democratic leaders different things to take a stand on than some of those Trump did or would, like taking a plane from Qatar. I would not recommend high levels of corruption to Democratic leaders, but even just standing by and defending what you’re doing, I think people appreciate that strength.

Obvious caveat is that Trump controls his party in the way that Democratic leaders don’t, so could have done that. One of the things I gave Trump credit for is doing the nuclear deal, even though it was controversial and the Israelis didn’t want him to pursue it, but if you just say, look, we’re doing this—now, it would have been harder for Biden to do that, because even within his own party there would have been criticism. And yet I would still recommend it, just saying, look, this is the right thing to do, and we’re doing it, and defying your critics to oppose you. I think that style as much as in any particular policy issue has a lot to be said for it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Phil, thank you so much for doing this today, and I will say, on balance it might not be better for the country and the world not to have you in government, but it is great to have you back in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

PHILIP GORDON

Thanks, Dan. Great to speak with you about these things, and I look forward to appearing in future pages of Foreign Affairs.