Chas Freeman: World Disorder – Nuclear Weapons & World War (Transcript)

And second, it has gained the acquiescence of the world in its de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz. And this fundamentally alters the geopolitics of the region. It leaves the nations of the region with no alternative but to work out some kind of modus vivendi that will preserve the peace.

And this is a little hard to see at the moment because, for example, the United Arab Emirates has been actively urging the United States to double down on the war. And the Israelis have mounted quite a disinformation campaign, claiming the Saudis are doing the same, which is not true.

Just to finish this up, in terms of rearranging the geopolitics of the Gulf and thereby of the world — we’ve had a meeting in Islamabad between the Turks, Saudis, Egyptians, and Pakistanis, which resulted in some sort of agreements which we don’t know the details of. But following up that meeting, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan flew to Beijing and jointly issued a statement with Wang Yi, the Foreign Minister of China, with 5 principles for a settlement, or rearrangement, of the architecture of security in the Gulf.

This is interesting on several levels. First of all, one thing that these 4 countries — Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — have in common is a desire to wean themselves from dependence on Western and particularly American military technology. They have the capacity between themselves, the money, the industrial capacity, the technological acumen backed by China to develop a military industrial complex in the region. That will enable it to become far less dependent, not perhaps entirely independent, but far less dependent on the United States and the West, and therefore more independent in its orientation, both internally within the Gulf and beyond it.

Second, Pakistan has clearly been anointed by the Chinese as the preferred mediator. It has one of the largest Shia populations in the world. I think it may be the third largest in the world. It shares that with Iran. It has a long border with Iran. It has had its ups and downs with Iran, but its culture is heavily Persian influenced. And it now has a very strong relationship with Saudi Arabia, in which it implicitly is offering extended deterrence with the nuclear weapons component to the Saudis. So this is already a rearrangement of security in the region.

Attacks, False Flags, and the Ongoing Conflict

CHAS FREEMAN: One final note — obviously, because they are being hit since they harbor American bases, that is those other than Oman, which has provided an anchorage for the U.S. Navy at Duqm, a port on the Gulf of Oman. That’s the sole exception. Oman saw that port attacked early on in the war, but seems to have made its peace with Iran, so not been attacked again as far as I know. The rest are being attacked.

Some of the attacks appear to be false flag. For example, the desalination plants in Kuwait. Iran has denied that it attacked them, but they’ve been damaged. And if Israel were to pick out the country in the Gulf that it has the least affinity with, it is Kuwait, which has been very strongly supportive of the Palestinian cause. So I think we can’t rule out the possibility that whatever happened in Kuwait was in fact an Israeli false flag operation, not something from Iran.

But be that as it may, these countries now understand that as long as they have an engagement in the war, an involvement in supporting American or Israeli activities against Iran, they are going to be subject to attack. And it is dawning on people in Israel as it is in the Gulf that this war may not end. It may go into a less intensive, lower intensity conflict phase in which from time to time Iran strikes targets in Israel with its residual missile force, which it is adding to, by the way — the manufacturing is deep underground and it’s continuing. And the best intelligence is that somewhere between a third and a half of Iran’s missiles have been expended, meaning another half or two-thirds are still there to be used.

The interception capabilities of Israel and the United States have been successfully attrited and depleted so that we’re now seeing waves of attacks in Israel that routinely get through the defenses. The latest struck a drone factory apparently in a city in central Israel.

So what is going on is a lot of behind the scenes diplomacy, a lot of military posturing, continued exchanges between the United States, Israel, and Iran on the battlefield — some of them not going so well for us. And it’s a bit of a farce in the middle of all this for 40 countries, all of them close to Israel and the United States, to gather in London to discuss military options for the Strait of Hormuz rather than diplomatic ones. One can say that Europeans seem to be true to their recent selves, in that they don’t have any appetite for diplomacy, but are very good at making empty commitments to warfare. That’s where I’ll end here.

The Path Forward: Diplomacy and New Security Arrangements

GLENN DIESEN: Well, it seems that it will take a lot of diplomatic efforts to adjust to these new realities because it’s been delayed for so long. Indeed, if you look in the Middle East, we seem to have ignored that Iranians exist, that they have their own interest for a very long time. Of course, you can apply the same to Europe. For the past 30-plus years, we essentially built institutions such as NATO and the EU, said they represent Europe, and essentially the largest country in Europe shouldn’t be a part of it. So they don’t have representation. So we also pretend as if Russia’s not there. And it makes it very difficult now that the power distribution has shifted.

That is, if you would return to diplomacy, we start with a pretty bad hand. The United States is now seen as simply using diplomacy as a cover for surprise attacks against Iran. The Europeans aren’t much better. They don’t even talk to Russia in their conflict. So I was wondering, how do you see this moving forward? Because Macron just made this speech where he was arguing Europe has to build a new order and it can’t just be passive. It has to contribute in the construction of a new international order. But as you said, the only thing we’ve seen from the EU are condemnations of Iran for defending itself. And of course, this now initiative to begin to put together a group of countries who would like to see the Strait of Hormuz being open, but probably not having any military solutions to do so.

So how do you think it’s possible to restore this diplomatic path? I mean, is it probably going to be regional in the Middle East? That is, it has to be between the Gulf states and Iran, because I think the Gulf states have recognized that they’re kind of vulnerable. That is, in the past, if you hedged your bets on the United States, you were more or less bulletproof, you had the ultimate security guarantee. But it seems for both the Europeans and the Gulf states, they will have to adjust to a new security arrangement. But how do you see this being feasible? Because it’s usually countries that need a long time to adjust to such new realities.

The Collapse of American Diplomacy

CHAS FREEMAN: Well, don’t look to the United States to be helpful in the revival of diplomacy. I would not agree with you that Witkoff and Kushner represent diplomacy. Perhaps a sort of pseudo-diplomacy, a performative sort of diplomacy that, as you said, has been used twice, at least, I think more times, as a deception to enable a surprise attack.

The United States has essentially disassembled its diplomatic expertise. The Secretary of State doesn’t believe in diplomacy. He believes in kidnapping chiefs of state and government and blowing up boats on the high seas and using force. And my colleagues in the Foreign Service, the diplomatic service of the United States, are demoralized and many of them have left. We know that policies are made now without reference to interagency discussion. They come out of some part of Donald Trump’s body, whichever is being engaged at the time. So that is the state of American diplomacy.

Europeans still have a capacity for diplomacy, but seem to lack the will to employ it, as you indicate. I think Macron is correct. It’s not a new French statement to say that Europe needs to get its act together to help shape the world rather than be the victim of others or the object of others. He’s right. But is there any prospect of that in the short term? I’d say that the prospects have gone up because of the realization in Great Britain that Brexit was a terrible error and that Britain, having been essentially given the cold shoulder by the United States under Donald Trump, now needs to reengage with the continent, and maybe even find a way back into the European Union. It would have to be a reformed European Union. The European Union is not capable of making decisions on crucial matters, as it has repeatedly shown.

Proxy Wars and the Changing Nature of Warfare

Several other things have happened, Glenn. One is, I think proxy wars are a thing of the past. We’ve had a proxy war going on in Ukraine. It was between the two former bipolar overlords, the United States and Russia. The United States has dropped out of that. And Europeans who had been given the opportunity to enrich American arms manufacturers by buying weapons to transfer to Ukraine will now find that they can’t get those weapons because the American stocks need to be replenished and Israel has priority over them. So all of this is to say that things have changed.

One last point of irony is that we have Ukrainian military advisors now in the Gulf showing Americans and others how to use drones, because the nature of warfare has changed. Clearly, the United States has not reconfigured its armed forces to deal with the age of drones and the total transparency of movement on the battlefield. The best equipped armies in the world to do this are Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine is providing its expertise to the American or Arab side, the Israeli side, I assume. And Russia is providing its expertise to the Iranians. So we have a very different situation already.

Nuclear Proliferation and Iran

And I have not mentioned a key factor, and that is that it’s very clear that we have provided the advocates of nuclear weapons in Iran with an irrefutable argument that they need to develop them. There is no other effective deterrent to the kind of attacks that Iran has experienced for the last several decades, culminating in this war. Iran is determined that this war will end in such a manner that further provocations and attacks are not undertaken against it.

And it has to look at the several examples — negative in the case of Colonel Gaddafi, positive in the case of Kim Jong-un — that suggests that the only point of safety now, that international law no longer inhibits aggression or human rights or other war crimes violations, the only path to safety is the possession of nuclear weapons. Iran has reached that conclusion in my view. It has also, in my view, very likely decided to build an ICBM to be able to deliver nuclear weapons to the United States, as North Korea has done.

And when Iran fields a nuclear weapon — when, I should say, not if — you can expect the Saudis to accept a Pakistani base on their territory with nuclear weapons and try to acquire their own nuclear weapons. The Turks and Egyptians will follow. And there’s no way that South Korea, where the majority of public opinion strongly favors a nuclear weapon, will not also develop these weapons.

Japan, we’re told by the People’s Liberation Army, has sufficient plutonium to build 5,500 warheads, which I don’t think it needs. But it’s a reminder of Japan’s nuclear latency. And the discussion in Japan is now openly questioning whether that latency should not be breached and made active. In Europe, you also have a refocus on nuclear weapons, with Germans arguing now that maybe they need to do something in that realm.

So we’re seeing the beginning of the unraveling of the American military presence in Europe, the growth of a desire for a much more vigorous self-defense capability, the absence of any serious thinking about security architecture to include Russia, and no diplomacy aimed at threat reduction.

The Gulf War and Its Consequences

Meanwhile, in the Gulf, Israel and the United States have lost the war they started, but don’t quite seem willing to admit it yet. I expect, as the bombing of the bridge north of Tehran by the United States — which was apparently under construction, not in actual use — which is a war crime. This is infrastructure unconnected to any military advantage of Iran. I expect that the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iran, which has included attacks on universities, schools, hospitals, and so forth, much like the Israeli playbook in Gaza and in Lebanon now, foreshadows some cataclysmic denouement of the war, with the United States, as Trump has promised, hitting Iran very hard in the next couple of weeks in order to be able to quit. And if the United States quits, where does that leave Mr. Netanyahu and Israel? I don’t know.

GLENN DIESEN: Well, this is why it’s often preferable to have slower adjustments rather than these massive disruptions, because they lead to this kind of thing. For example, nuclear proliferation if the whole former security architecture breaks down like this. I think the Polish prime minister also made some references to that — that it might be required for Poland to also acquire nuclear weapons.

As you said, this is very problematic when security is not primarily pursued through mutual threat reduction. Instead, going back to this idea that if we only have more weapons, bigger guns, then this will bring peace — everyone thinking the same way, it looks like a recipe for disaster. But again, this is why you need diplomacy where you put yourself in the shoes of other people.

Kenneth Waltz and the Nuclear Deterrence Debate

CHAS FREEMAN: But you’re a political scientist and you probably are more familiar than I with the writings of Kenneth Waltz, who basically argued that the ideal state was one resembling his vision of Texas in the frontier era, where everybody had a gun and therefore everybody was very careful not to shoot at anyone else. He believed that if everyone had nuclear weapons, we would be a lot safer. I think that’s frankly preposterous, but we may be about to begin to test his thesis.

And by the way, it isn’t limited to Pacific Asia and West Asia that we’re talking about. We also have other possibilities. Brazil and South Africa have just done a Mutual Defense Industrial Production and Innovation Agreement. And South Africa retains the material for the 6 bombs that it built. It dismantled the bombs and the cruise missiles designed to deliver them, which it built with some assistance from Israel. But it has the technology. Brazil had a nuclear weapons program and was dissuaded from pursuing it. So there are other areas where things might break out, especially now that the United States has decided to amend the Monroe Doctrine — which was never popular in Latin America — to exercise hegemony through purely military intimidation.

Toward a New Security Architecture

So there’s clearly a new world emerging. It doesn’t look like a very nice one. And I think in the case of the Gulf, there are possibilities which are sort of interesting. There’s a possibility of an Islamic, pan-Islamic cooperation. You could turn over, with the Pakistanis doing the mediation, you could use the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which has 57 members, to come up with common rules based on Islam. The differences in doctrine between Shiism and Sunni Islam are very minor. There are differences in practice, worship practices and expectations and different schools of thought, but the lore of Islamic statecraft is something they have in common. Iran, of course, has its own pre-Islamic tradition as well. But there is a possibility to construct a new cooperative security architecture in the Persian Gulf.

Perhaps that might inspire Europe to do the same. Europe needs a cooperative security arrangement, not a security architecture that is based on confrontation between Russia and the rest. So I think there are some possibilities here, but who are the statesmen? Where’s the Bismarck? Where’s the Palmerston? Where’s the Metternich to put all this together? Perhaps there’s someone hiding north of the Arctic Circle in Norway who will come forward, a superhero, and do this. Or maybe someone from Malaga.

GLENN DIESEN: I don’t see anyone waiting. Well, I don’t see anyone in the European leadership ranks ready to make any big steps.

CHAS FREEMAN: No, it’s really quite pathetic, really.

The Failure of Post-Cold War Security Thinking

GLENN DIESEN: Well, this is what I was thinking as well. If we were purely rational, we would look towards what we’ve done over the past 35+ years. That is, if you go back to the early ’90s, many countries recognised that it would be ideal to have a security architecture with Russia instead of against Russia and keeping the blocs. But I think the reason why we went with returning to military blocs by expanding NATO was simply because — a good argument I would add — that this is what would bring the US into Europe.

And I think this is also something the US ambassador to NATO said in ’94, ’96. He made an argument that a NATO which included Russia wouldn’t be the same that brought the US to Europe. And again, it’s a reasonable argument. And if you want stability in Europe, you want the American pacifier, I can see why one would make that argument.

Now, 30 years later, when the US deprioritised Europe and had other things to do, the rational thing would then be to reconsider the bloc politics, whether we should go back to something like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The problem is that once we now reach a conflict, this clash with the Russians, too many emotions start to enter. It’s a bit like what George Kennan warned — that in ’98 he made this warning that at some point the Russians will hit back and then we’ll just kind of be outraged, pretend as if this is just imperialist Russians who can’t work with — right, if we could just assess it, okay, Russia responded to what we did, maybe we readjust. But it’s just emotional sloganeering.

A Eurasian Framework for Security

CHAS FREEMAN: There is another context possible. One of the objectives of the Partnership for Peace was to provide a mechanism for defense integration that did not include the independent Stans, Central Asia, who were part of the OSCE. But clearly Tajikistan is not a European country, whatever it is, and it’s a delightful country, I’m sure, but not European.

And so the question is, what’s the framework? And if you do go back to the OSCE, I think you have to now make it pan-European. So you need to involve China, Japan, Korea — both Koreas perhaps. In other words, you have to have a different framework for this.

One of the issues, of course, and this is where Russia comes in, in the European balance — one of the reasons the United States felt obliged to stay in NATO in Europe was European demands that we balance Germany, which without the American presence would be the dominant power on the European landmass. That is of great concern to the British, of course. They like to divide and rule Europeans, which is why they don’t want Russia in. It’s too big to handle, and it would cramp their style.

But now maybe we need to think about a Eurasian context for security architecture — perhaps an overall Eurasian context and then some sub-regions, sub-Eurasian gatherings within it that are all part of one whole. Anyway, I’m an old man. I’m not going to be around to be able to put that together. So I leave it to you.

GLENN DIESEN: Actually, at the Valdai meeting in 2024, I asked President Putin about this, the exact same thing — that is, the Eurasian solution to the European security architecture. Because in the East with BRICS, for example, they have this security with each other instead of against each other. That is, within BRICS — right, it’s China and India — they’re not going to ally up against the US. You can have Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Again, they’re not going to partner up against anyone either. Same with Egypt and Ethiopia.

So you have all of this, but we had that in Europe as well after World War II. The whole idea of the European Steel and Coal Community was that we seek security with other members, not against non-members. But after the Cold War, it switched. No longer would we seek security with each other, but instead we would look towards the externals — how to defend from Russia. And then suddenly you go back into this bloc thinking.

The Limits of Western Political Imagination

CHAS FREEMAN: Yeah, and the French thinking about how to French fry Algeria and so forth. A focus on external defense is all very well, but if you do it the wrong way, you make enemies rather than eliminate them. And Europe has done it the wrong way.

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, no, after I made that proposal, it was picked up in the local media at home where they made the point that it sounded like I advocated for some kind of a Soviet Union conquering Europe or something. I was suggesting a security architecture that moved beyond bloc politics, but it was treated as a surrender, because you can’t criticize NATO. Yeah, as you started saying, it’s a bit of diplomatic immaturity, I think, that it’s not possible to think beyond the bloc.

CHAS FREEMAN: A lack of imagination, a lack of ability to adjust to new realities. Very clearly, the realities we confront geopolitically, geoeconomically, are quite different from those that we grew up with, and we seem to be unable to recognize this and act accordingly.

You know, it’s really quite remarkable that after World War II, there really was a remarkable group of people in the United States and Europe who came up with some very new and effective institutions. The United Nations, which is now essentially irrelevant and clearly needs to be either revamped or replaced. NATO, which we’ve talked about, which no longer fulfills the purposes for which it was established because they’re irrelevant. There is no active threat from Moscow, if there ever was one. The mythologies that Russians want to invade Europe — no, they kept getting invaded from Europe, as I remember.

Anyway, we can’t get over the trauma of the hostage taking in Iran in 1980 and so on and so forth. Just the Iranians can’t get over their trauma either. Maybe we all need to have some kind of, put on some helmet and have AI erase our memories and start over.

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, well, you almost paraphrased George Kennan there again from the ’90s, because he was making the same point that there’s no political imagination apparently for anything else. He was making the point that after all these decades of a Cold War, we finally put this behind us. And he kind of criticized that there was no political imagination then beyond, okay, who should be on the inside of our bloc and who should be on the outside — that this was the extent of our political imagination to create a stronger security architecture capable of reducing all this competition for security.

No, but anyways, if we couldn’t do it in the ’90s, given how hot-tempered and immature the leaders are today, one isn’t filled with optimism. But where do you see China in this though? Because they are now rushing into — in terms of purchasing power parity, they’ve been the largest economy in the world since 2014. In terms of real GDP, they will get there sometime at some point. But anyways, either—

China’s Rising Global Role

CHAS FREEMAN: Well, they could get there quite suddenly. If the dollar instead of appreciating were to depreciate, devalue, which is something that could happen since central banks are now ridding themselves of their treasury holdings and looking to diversify their reserves, not necessarily into Chinese currency, but into many currencies. And more and more we see arrangements being made for direct settlement in local currencies of trade transactions. So I think we’re also looking at a looming financial revolution, a rewriting of the rules and the existing financial order.

China now comes out of this war pretty well. I think it has now overtaken the United States in global popularity and has a reputation for reliability. This is according to a latest Gallup poll just published, I think today, or perhaps yesterday. And it’s just gained a huge market for its electric vehicles since only the United States is now sticking with the internal combustion engine and everybody else has got the energy shock now — the oil and gas shock — to consider and wants to electrify.

Chinese leadership in solar, wind, nuclear energy now, and possibly fusion — they seem to be on the verge of commercializing fusion — but certainly in electric vehicles and the like, guarantees them a global market of immense dimensions and a technological lead in these crucial fields.

But China’s also emerged as the go-to country for mediation and rapprochement between enemies, as we saw between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier, and between Palestinian factions, between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s no accident that talks are taking place in Beijing under Chinese auspices, and now working with Pakistan on trying to come up with a way of producing a new durable order in the Persian Gulf, which they’ve made proposals about, as has Iran, as has Russia, but notably the West has not.

I think the answer to the failure of imagination is vested interests in a vanishing order. We imagine somehow that our Western supremacy can continue, that the benefits that we’ve had under the Pax Americana can continue, and that is not true. These benefits are being shredded before our very eyes.

It’s often said that generals prepare to fight the last war. Well, it looks like politicians prepare to conduct the last sort of diplomacy that was relevant and not the new diplomacy that is relevant. And that’s sad. That’s very sad. One has to hope that youth, which I can no longer claim, will come up with some answers to this.

GLENN DIESEN: Well, I’ve been a bit surprised by China’s — I mean, I was expecting maybe them to step up and play a diplomatic role that matches their economic position in the world. On one hand, I’m very glad they haven’t taken advantage of this crisis to build some anti-American bloc, because all conflicts now seem to be globalized. But it seemed like they could’ve played a role in terms of—

CHAS FREEMAN: Yeah, no, I mean—

GLENN DIESEN: Collective security though.

CHAS FREEMAN: If they were playing the classic European-American power game, then yes, they would’ve done that. I don’t think they’re interested in that. I think they’re very selfish. They seem to agree with George Washington that one should not have entangling alliances because they’re liabilities. They get you in trouble. You end up fighting other people’s wars for them.

And they don’t seem to aspire to the kind of hegemonic leadership that the United States has aspired to. And they don’t have the messianic impulse of either the American Republic or the Soviet Union. I don’t think the Russian Federation has a messianic impulse now. I suppose it might arise yet again from the Orthodox Church or something, but I don’t see it at the moment.

India also seems more concerned to practice an India-first policy. China’s got a China-first policy. The United States claims to have an America First policy, but doesn’t. This war in West Asia serves no American interest at all. It is destroying our global alliances. It has devalued our reputation. It is depleting our military capabilities. And the Trump proposal that we cut every domestic program in order to fund a $1.5 trillion war budget — I suppose now that it’s Department of War, I can’t call it a defense budget — this is basically stripping ourselves naked for an unknown purpose.

I guess my British ancestors, before they were diluted by Saxons arriving, used to paint themselves blue and go on the battlefield naked. Maybe we’ll come down to repeating that.

Trump’s Diplomatic Behavior and the Question of Leadership

GLENN DIESEN: Well, I am a bit surprised by some of the diplomatic behavior, if you will, coming from Trump, because in his last speeches he gave, he very openly mocked Starmer. He made references to Macron’s wife hitting him. And I’m by no stretch of the imagination a fan of Starmer, Macron, or Merz or any of these — I would consider them to be horrible politicians. But again, it seems very, I’m not sure what to say, unbecoming or uncivilized way of doing politics.

CHAS FREEMAN: Undignified. It’s vulgar. He aspires to be the turd in the punchbowl, apparently. That is not something I think most people are anxious to become. But he behaves in a petulant manner that resembles — you have children so you know what they’re like at 2 and a half. That is a predictor in the case of our esteemed president, who by the way is showing more and more signs of dementia, incompetence.

There’s an article in The Guardian today saying, if he were your aged father, would you take away his car keys? People are becoming concerned about that. But the 25th Amendment to the Constitution does not provide an answer to his removal from office, because it requires the vice president and the cabinet to declare him unfit for duty. And the cabinet is composed of the most incompetent sycophants in our history.

GLENN DIESEN: Still though, that could be a way out of this war if he would step down and J.D. Vance — he apparently does not have the same appetite. He’s been one of the bigger critics of this war.

CHAS FREEMAN: He’s not as charismatic by any standard as Trump. He’s probably not a very nice man. He’s certainly quite mean-spoken, as Europeans can attest, as Zelensky also experienced. So I don’t see him as a diplomat, even though he’s being offered as the interlocutor with Iran, now that Iran has correctly judged that Witkoff and Kushner are worthless as interlocutors.

So yeah, well, we don’t know what’s going to happen. This is only 2026. There are many more horrors before us as we go forward, I don’t doubt.

Looking Ahead: Will This War End or Escalate?

GLENN DIESEN: Just the last question. How do you, if you look into your crystal ball or any informed guessing, how do you see this war moving forward? Because Trump seems to be doing two things at the same time. He’s talking about the war being over soon, peace — you’re never sure if he’s trying to talk down the oil prices — and at the same time he’s going with full escalation. They could be the same thing. He wants peace, but he thinks it can only be achieved by maximum pressure.

But either way, do you see this war coming to an end over the next 2-3 weeks as he suggests, or is this going to be a long war with reckless escalation moving forward?

How Does the War End?

CHAS FREEMAN: Well, I think it’s fruitless to try to analyze that question by reference to the statements of Donald J. Trump, because he’s clearly more interested in manipulating the stock market than he is in strategic reasoning about the war. He doesn’t know how to end the war. I think he is a prisoner of Hegelian logic, which basically declares that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were wrong, and the purpose of war is death and destruction, and these are ends in themselves.

Or maybe he imagines that you don’t need to end a war with a negotiation. You just annihilate the enemy. This is actually the American way of war, of course, formed in our Civil War. Unconditional surrender followed by the moral rehabilitation of the enemy. World War I, also unconditional surrender and the victimization of the enemy in that case, in the form of reparations and other approaches to the Germans. And World War II, again, unconditional surrender, moral rehabilitation of the enemy.

The Cold War, unconditional surrender, but nothing after that. We had no imagination about how to, to go back to Kennan’s remark, the only thing we came up with was mutual threat reduction, arms control. You don’t reduce your arms with a country you’re prepared to develop as a friend. Anyway, that was our focus. Now it’s over. We don’t even have arms control. We have the opposite. We have nuclear arms races both going on and about to begin.

The War in Gaza and Iran

So, how does this war end? It ends the same way the war in Ukraine will end, on the ground. At some point, Russia will decide it has achieved what it needs to achieve and there will be an end to the war. But there’s not going to be an end to the war at the negotiating table. Because in that case, the West, Europe basically, and the Ukrainian government, are not interested in compromise.

Iran is not interested in compromise. Israel is even less interested in compromise. Its objective is to build a greater Israel through territorial expansion, and it’s conducting that in Syria and Lebanon as we speak. The means by which to secure a greater Israel is to eliminate Iran as an effective competitor. And Israel’s focused on that. Israel doesn’t want a ceasefire. That is why it keeps assassinating Iranians who are put forward as interlocutors and negotiators.

So, how does this war end? It ends when Iran decides it’s achieved its objectives. And could that be in 2 or 3 weeks? Unlikely. I suspect this war is going to go on quite a while. I don’t think Iran is going to run out of missiles with which to torment the Israelis. There are beginning to be messages out of Israel which suggest a very high level of distress. Nobody likes to dive for the bomb shelter 3 times a night. Nobody likes to see the buildings around them suddenly collapse. Nobody likes people who are wounded. We don’t know what the human toll is in Israel due to military intelligence clamp down on the press.

But anyway, I don’t think this war is going to — it may peter out over time. But as you said earlier, apparently this generation of politicians, if not, are not really statesmen, and they don’t seem to be able to understand when you have to change the game, because you’ve lost the old game.

Iran’s Strategic Gains

So, I would not underestimate Iranian determination to tough this out and Israeli inability to come to grips with the new realities. I think Donald Trump is being forced seriously to contemplate walking away from all this. And then you have an interesting question because the American people are not in a mood to provide more military assistance to Israel so that it continue rampaging through West Asia, dragging the United States into unnecessary and disastrous wars.

And so Israel’s ability to count on the American veto in the UN and to protect it politically, to count on endless war supplies, is not certain. Maybe inertia will carry Israel forward. Maybe not. So how does it end? Not on any terms that do anything useful for us or Israel, for sure.

Now, as I’ve said, Iran has already gained some of its objectives — an end to the sanctions on its exports of oil, the de facto recognition that it controls the Strait of Hormuz and will be able to manage it in partnership with others. Maybe not just Oman; maybe if the other Gulf Arabs made peace with Iran, it would admit them to the management council of the tollgate in the Gulf of Hormuz.

Russia’s saying the dissolution of NATO had a great boost in its oil revenues. And if you talk to Russians now, some of the more thoughtful would say, “Well, good heavens, we’re getting everything we wanted. Now what do we do?” I had a conversation the other day with a Russian friend, and we agreed that both countries are led by strongmen. His strongman is sane, and mine is not. That’s the only difference.

GLENN DIESEN: Important difference.

CHAS FREEMAN: It is an important difference.

The Failure of Hegelian Logic

GLENN DIESEN: Well, it looks like this is part of what you suggested. The frustration of Trump, though, is that the Hegelian logic isn’t working. That is because he expressed his frustration that we destroyed their navy, their air force, we’ve taken out all these military targets, so we must have won. Look at all the people we killed. We killed so many of their leaders. But if this was the logic, then the US would have won Vietnam, it would have won the Iraq War. But it’s not just killing people. It has to be, as you said, there has to be an extension of politics. There has to be a political objective being met. And as long as the Iranians see this as an existential threat and they will continue to push back, then simply murdering people and trying to bring them back to the Stone Age, to use the language of Trump, it doesn’t really achieve much except fueling hatred.

CHAS FREEMAN: His prior experience — there are two parts to that that are very relevant. One is that he had Roy Cohn as his attack dog, McCarthy’s principal assistant, one of the nastiest men who ever existed. And his real estate deals were all done coercively. And if you cross him, he sues you for, what is it, $10 billion the BBC is supposed to pay? I don’t know. A trillion, I think. Anyway.

And then the second point in his experience is when he does fail, as he has in this war, he declares bankruptcy and walks away with no obligations. So I don’t know what he’ll do, but nobody knows what he’ll do. I doubt he knows what he’ll do. But it’s a pretty bad picture when you’re dependent on utterly unpredictable whims and caprices.

GLENN DIESEN: I like the bankruptcy analogy there, but anyways, thank you very much as always for taking the time.

CHAS FREEMAN: My pleasure, and keep up the good work, man.

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