Ep 190: Michael Doran on “Restraint” and the Middle East

Michael Doran, senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson Institute

Aaron MacLean:

In my lifetime, American presidents have come into office each wanting the same three things. They want better relations with Russia. They want to get serious with China in the Pacific, and they want to get the heck out of their Middle Eastern entanglements. The Trump administration here in April of 2025 seems to be proceeding apace, and we are going to talk today about some of the challenges in the Middle East and a trend in thought that goes by the name, restraint.

Speaker 2:

It is a prescription for war.

Speaker 3:

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Speaker 4:

December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infamy.

Speaker 5:

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

Speaker 6:

We continue to face a grave situation in Japan.

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:00:52].

Winston Churchill:

We will fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and the streets. We shall never surrender.

Aaron MacLean:

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today, Michael Doran, who is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. He's taught in many places. He's written many books. Most recently, he wrote a long essay in Tablet Magazine, which caught my attention. It's really very good, I recommend it to you, called the King's Foils, about foreign policymaking and foreign policy debates in the current Trump administration. I guess it's not most recently because you did have a Wall Street Journal piece over the weekend about Syria, but those two things kind of go together, so we'll talk about them all at once. Mike, welcome back to the show.

Michael Doran:

Great to be here, Aaron. Thank you.

Aaron MacLean:

So the Tablet essay is a analysis and criticism of a trend in the foreign policy debate that you label as "Restraintism." And I wanted to open with the, well, two obvious questions. First, what is it? But second, why this neologism? Did I pronounce that correctly? Why not isolationism or realism or neo-isolationism or these other terms that you hear applied to at least similar trends.

Michael Doran:

So first of all, what is it? These are the people who are arguing that Ukraine and Israel are dragging the United States into unnecessary conflicts that are not in its interest. And if we just cut a deal with Putin or cut a deal with Iran, then we can stabilize Europe and the Middle East. And in the Middle East context that comes with the idea that Israel is catapulting the United States into conflicts with Iran that are not in its interest. Jeffrey Sachs, economist from Columbia I believe, could be wrong about that, just appeared recently on Tucker Carlson and said Benjamin Netanyahu has dragged the United States into six wars, I didn't know we had been into six wars, because of Israel, and he's trying to bring us into a seventh with Iran and so on.

These are the Restraintists, why do I call them Restraintists? This is what they call themselves. I believe in calling people what they want to be called. I don't want to misgender anyone, Aaron, and I don't want to call these people something other than what they call themselves. There's a network funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a network in a number of different think tanks: Defense Priorities, Stimson Center and so forth, oh, the Quincy Institute, they very consciously created this network and they very consciously made sure it was bipartisan. And the network then has a lot of influence inside the Trump administration. It's won some key jobs. And so after the meeting in the Oval Office, the very contentious meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, a lot of people in the pro-Israel world where I spent a lot of my time, were asking themselves, did Trump's willingness to move away from Ukraine and present himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine, is that a portent of things to come with respect to Israel and Iran? And so I was just thinking through that problem.

Aaron MacLean:

One of the interesting things about this trend is, as you point out in the piece, and you sort of alluded to just now, not only is it not just a feature of the Trump administration or of the right, but it has a bipartisan quality. Some of the institutions you just pointed out, the Quincy Institute is a collection of analysts from both the left and the right. It does seem odd that you have this union of policy views and prescriptions happy on both the left and the right, less so I guess at the center.

Michael Doran:

Yeah, inside the Trump administration and around it, so let's say on the Tucker Carlson show, these Restraintists are presenting themselves as the opposite of a neocon, and they are presenting themselves as something entirely new. New and different, and they're also presenting themselves as the face of conservative populism. This is the voice, Aaron, of the common man on the street or woman on the street who has been ignored by the globalists who are in control of our government and in control of the mainstream media. And they have been squelching this authentic voice of the American people. That's the way they present it, and I don't see it that way. Certainly there are people in the electorate who think like this. These views are not uncommon, but that's just the point. They've been around a long time and they've been around a very long time inside the American National Security establishment. And I know because I worked in government and I've been arguing with these people since 2005.

Aaron MacLean:

Okay, well, that's where I want to go next. I mean, we will come back to Trump and we'll come back to the claim that you make, which is that this is not authentic, this trend of thought is not authentic Trumpism or authentic Trump populism. We'll come back to that. But the time is 2007, maybe 2005, depending on where you want to start. But the incident that you say crystallizes or begins the post 9/11 story of Restraintism is America's non-involvement with an Israeli strike on the Syrian nuclear program in 2007. Flesh that out for us. What role did Restraintism play? Tell us a little bit about the incident and tell us about your experiences with it.

Michael Doran:

I made a distinction in the article between the era of restraint that we're in and Restraintism. The era of restraint starts with the backlash to the Iraq war. Many Americans, I think polling says a majority of Americans think that the Iraq war was a mistake. In fact, as I understand it, I haven't done a deep research on this, but I've seen the polling from time to time, a majority of Americans who served in Iraq believe that the war was a mistake. And Americans are wary, they're concerned about the debt, they're concerned about imperial overreach. They want a more judicious American policy that puts less emphasis on large scale military deployments to the Middle East. That's the era of restraint. That's public opinion.

The Restraintists come with a very specific menu, saying, reach out to Iran, distance yourself from Israel. And those ideas in my mind do not comport with the view of the majority of Americans, certainly not the majority of conservative Americans who support Israel and want to see Iran taken down a peg. So the Restraintists who are on both sides of the aisle, they're in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party, and they're in the National Security Bureaucracy as well, they capitalized on the era of restraint to say, "Well, we have the answer. The answer is Obama. Let's do the JCPOA. Let's put a bear hug around Israel. Don't let it operate. Distance ourselves from Israel. Hammer away on Israel on the Palestine question and try to stabilize the Middle East by reaching out to Tehran."

So this era began, the era of restraint as opposed to Restraintism began in September of 2007 when the Israelis attacked the Al-Kibar nuclear reactor in Syria. I dated it then Aaron, because the Israelis came to Washington. Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, came to Washington earlier in the spring and revealed to George W. Bush and his top officials, the existence of the Syria nuclear reactor, and said that there was a short window to take it out before it went online and started producing radioactive material.

And Bush said, "No, the United States will not do it," and also counseled the Israelis not to do it themselves unilaterally. And the Israelis didn't take that advice and went and did it. But what I pointed out in the article is that this is a real turning point because according to Bush's notion of what his foreign policy was, to try to prevent the nexus of terrorist sponsors, state sponsors of terrorism and terrorism groups with global reach and WMD proliferation, we should have taken out the Syria nuclear reactor.

But because of the backlash in public opinion, Bush didn't want to do it. He didn't want to go down in history as the mad bomber who widened the war. He could see very clearly what the script was going to be on the left if he attacked and in Syria it was going to be "What the Iraq war wasn't enough for you? Now you want to start a war in another country expanding the war, bringing us closer to destabilizing the whole Middle East, killing more Americans, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." That was the script. He didn't want to deal with that so he counseled the Israelis not to do it.

The Restraintism, I don't see that as necessarily Restraintism, although the Restraintists were certainly counseling Bush to go that way. Restraintism, I saw in the Bush administration all the time in the Iraq war, during the Iraq war. The office, this is not well understood, I think by people, the White House office that was responsible for Iraq when I was in the White House was very much in favor of reaching out to Iran. They believed that the way to stabilize Iraq was to have good relations with Iran. And so they were Restraintists just like the people who are now in the Trump administration, pretending that they're something totally different than we've ever seen before and representing the voice of the common people. I've been dealing with these arguments, exact same arguments, exact same arguments and exact same attitude, since 2005.

Aaron MacLean:

You had an interesting discussion as well about the role played by the Iraq Study Group, which is something that maybe those who are newer to the scene may not remember as a major feature of the, I guess it's the second Bush term, but just say more about this period. I think everyone in their mind has Bush chalked up as, well, to put it in the language of the Restrainters, peak NeoCon-

Michael Doran:

Neocon warmonger -

Aaron MacLean:

... Yeah, these dynamics were complicated even then, who were these people? What was the Iraq study group? How did that play into things?

Michael Doran:

So look, inside the administration, let me give you an example of a Restraintist who doesn't get coded that way because he's not in bed with the Libertarian Koch network right now he doesn't get coded that way, but he's always been there. This is Brett McGurk. Brett McGurk who ran the Biden Middle East ... He was the senior director and responsible for the whole Middle East under Joe Biden. He was there in the George W. Bush administration. He was in the Iraq office, and like I said, that office believed that you could stabilize Iraq by reaching out to Iran. The logic was we're carrying out a democracy policy in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, we toppled him and he was the enemy of Iran, and he was a Sunni who was suppressing the Shiites who are a plurality of the Iraq and the majority of the Arabs. And by carrying out this democracy policy, we were empowering the Shiites who had historically ties of affinity to Iran.

So the idea is, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Saddam Hussein was our enemy. It was also Iran's enemy. We toppled him. We empowered the friends of Iran, the Shiites, in Iraq. We didn't have long-term aspirations to control the oil or anything else, any imperial aspirations. We just wanted an Iraq that wasn't going to threaten its neighbors. That corresponded to the, supposedly, I didn't believe any of this, but this corresponded to the desire of the Iranians. And so what we needed to do was to convince the Iranians that we weren't using our position in Iraq to try to topple Iran, and that we really just wanted to create an Iraq that they could live with and that we could live with and so therefore we could do this together, so let's reach out to them.

Obama comes along. Obama comes along after Bush, and he takes this thinking and elevates it to the strategy for the whole Middle East. By the way, McGurk, what a great survivor. He worked in the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration. Then he worked in the Obama administration, then he worked in the Trump administration, and then he worked in the Biden administration, each time getting a more important position. So these people are embedded in the national security bureaucracy. They've always been there. Back in the Bush days, the Iraq study group was a congressionally mandated study on how to get out of the Iraq war. It was bipartisan James Baker, uber-realist, who was the Secretary of State in George H.W Bush. So he came out of Bush world, but he represented a different kind of trend than Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in their later iterations in the George W. Bush administration. He's a realist. And the realists, whether we're talking about Mearsheimer and Walt in academia or James Baker in the policy world, are Restraintists.

This is who they are. They believe that there's a deal to be had with Iran and that Israel is forcing us to take extremist positions against Iran that are scuttling that deal. The Restraintists inside the Bush administration were whispering to people outside the Bush administration saying, "Hey, there's an opportunity now that we're bogged down in Iraq and things aren't going well, to further our positions." So they whispered to people in Congress and that gave us the Baker Hamilton report, authored by none other than Ben Rhodes, that's the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications under Obama. And the report calls for reaching out to Iran, for pulling the troops out of Iraq, reaching out to Iran, reaching out to Syria, and starting a peace process between Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians and the Syrians on the other.

Because Aaron, the way to stabilize Iraq is to have an Arab-Israeli peace process. This is crucial to the Restraintist thinking. It's actually from a actually real realist point of view, it's absurd. What the hell does the Palestinian question have to do with Iraq or Afghanistan for that matter? But in their minds it does.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's set aside that piece for a second. But whether it's the narrow Bush, relatively narrow, pretty broad actually, Bush objective of stabilizing Iraq with the assistance of Iran or the much broader, as you characterize it, Obama desire to stabilize the region through detente and cooperation with Iran. How is it that this point of view doesn't represent some sort of legitimate American desire following the shortcomings of our policy in Iraq, in Afghanistan as well as time goes on, to seek accommodation with those who also presumably want some level of stability, perhaps at the price of greater control and security for themselves, but who are we really to point fingers for that kind of thing, and a desire for peace and less American engagement in a part of the world that is famously violent and complicated and at best limited business of ours? How is what you just outlined, not a sort of expression of a natural, and on some level quite understandable, populist impulse?

Michael Doran:

It is. I think it is an expression or it appeals to a very commonsensical and legitimate attitude, right? That this place, the Middle East is very far away. We don't understand it well. Bush had these grandiose, this grandiose project of bringing democracy, and this led us to get into very open-ended commitments of men and materiel that are not in the American interest. That is, to me, a completely legitimate position. And if I hadn't served in the Bush administration, I might even be a more vocal proponent of it, but I feel a little bit of loyalty to the administration, and I'm a bit more aware than everybody else is. Of all the debates that went on inside and that the idea that this was just a big NeoCon muscle movement was, it seems to me, is a caricature of what happened.

But the position as you describe is very legitimate, and the idea of seeking a balance in the Middle East is, I think, a smart one as well. But the Restraintist agenda does the opposite. The Restraintist agenda starts from the assumption that conflict in the Middle East is caused by our relationship with Israel. It starts with an assumption. It imputes to the Iranians Pacific goals, Pacific inclinations that they do not have. The Iranians are trying to expel the United States from the Middle East. This has been their explicit policy from 1979 until yesterday. They tried it in many different ways. They have never given up on this. The evidentiary record on this is huge. So people who are calling themselves realists are saying that are saying none of that is true. Iran really wants to deal with us. Somehow they know this. A lot of them have no experience in the Middle East at all.

Jeffrey Sachs right now, who's now on Tucker Carlson presenting himself as a guy who really understands how the Middle East works, like hell. From where does this great knowledge come from? So where does it come from? Hostility to Israel. It's domestic politics. It's a reaction to what they perceive to be the influence of Israel. And they want to counter it by saying, "No, no, no, we shouldn't do what they say Israel is saying." Often they don't even know that either, but it's a perception of they don't like the kind of people in domestic American politics who are pushing these agendas. And so they say the exact opposite. It isn't coming from a knowledge of what's actually going on in the Middle East at all.

So I'll give you an example if I may, from the Baker Hamilton report. I was in the Bush White House where the Baker Hamilton report came out. It was like, if I recall correctly, December of 2006, maybe. I don't know, I should know my history better than that, especially since I lived it. But anyway, I got sent over, I went over as the delegation, me, Peter Rodman, who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense who had responsibility for the Middle East and John Hillen, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs, the three of us-

Aaron MacLean:

Soon to be on School of War.

Michael Doran:

Oh, good. You could ask him about this. We went over just as the Baker Hamilton report came out and all of our ... so we went to the IISS Manama dialogue, but as US officials, you go to this thing because you can meet everyone in the Middle East, all the foreign ministers of the Middle Eastern countries, in one day. You just sit there, it's like speed dating. Oh, it's 11 o'clock, it's the Iraqi foreign minister. It's 12 o'clock, it's the Saudi foreign Minister, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you go down the line. And all of them, the Baker Hamilton report had come out just on the Friday before we got there, or the Thursday before, they were all going crazy because they thought we were going to cut and run and cut a deal with the Iranians and hand the whole Middle East to the Iranians, and they wanted assurances that we weren't.

So from a realist point of view, if you want to create a balance between Iran and the rest of the Middle East, then you want to have your allies on board. You don't want to have them run cutting deals, separate deals with Iran and helping Iran to throw you out of the region. And so we had to sit there. Me, Hillen and Rodman, we developed very quickly, because all of our allies were panicking, so we developed a little patter to say, "We don't abandon our allies." And apparently someone, I don't know who, I was off in the Middle East, somebody, I assume it was somebody close to the Saudis, but I'm making that up, I don't know, somebody got to George W. Bush, and he put out a statement immediately.

The minute the Baker Hamilton report came out, he came out immediately and said, "We're not going to follow the recommendations of the Baker Hamilton report with regard to Iran," with regard to Iran, and precisely in order to calm everybody down. So me and Rodman and Hillen could point to the foreign ministers and say, "Yeah, and notice the president's statement? We're not going to cut and run on our allies."

By the way, I was at a dinner and I sat next to the assistant secretary at the British Foreign Ministry, and he said, "Why did Bush come out?" They liked it because they loved all the peace process garbage in the Baker Hamilton report. Europeans love, it's in their DNA to process peace. So I was sitting next to this guy and he asked me about Bush's statement, and I said, "Why did he make the statement? Because the Baker Hamilton report ..." Well, before I tell you what I said, Steve Hadley, the National Security advisor, my boss, just before the Baker Hamilton report came out, he said, "Listen, this report is coming out. Some of you may not agree with it. You keep your mouths shut. This is where the intersection of foreign policy and domestic policy, and the president has to thread this needle, and it's up to him to decide how to do it. Don't you box him in. Don't you say a word. Anybody asks you about the Baker Hamilton report, stay mum. Right? Okay."

So it was really ... Steve Hadley's, a great WASP gentleman. He doesn't really often say, "You will do this," and give orders, but he did. So anyway, I went there. I was there in Manama sitting next to this Brit, and I said, the Brit asked me why did Bush make this statement about this rejection of the Baker Hamilton report? And I said, "Because he thinks it's a warmed over pile of steaming dog shit." And then the next day or the day after that, in the Financial Times, there was an article from the Middle East correspondent saying that George W. Bush thinks the Baker Hamilton report is a warmed over pile of steaming dog shit.

Aaron MacLean:

Good job.

Michael Doran:

I thought, oh no. Oh, no. Hadley's going to understand that I said this. Nobody ever called me on it. I don't know if anyone ever noticed, but-

Aaron MacLean:

Well we'll take this as your formal confession.

Michael Doran:

I hereby confess that I called it. George W. Bush didn't.

Aaron MacLean:

It's good to come. I hope you feel unburdened.

Michael Doran:

Much better now about that.

Aaron MacLean:

The membership of that delegation, just to our running theme that the Bush administration was in fact more complex than the reputation that has earned John Hillen, who if memory serves-

Michael Doran:

[inaudible 00:25:27].

Aaron MacLean:

Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan in the pages of foreign affairs back in those days, and you-

Michael Doran:

Yeah, but Hillen is a real realist. Like when I say real realist, because there's this, like I was saying before, it's a strange thing about America where you have these, in the policy world, you got James Baker, there's realism, and then Mearsheimer and Walt, who I think are crazy, they call themselves realists. Any realist understands that Israel is a great asset to the United States and Middle East. And so, sorry, I interrupted you, so Yes.

Aaron MacLean:

Oh no, I'm making a point with which I think you'll agree. So you have Hillen and you have you who, I don't think of you as a NeoCon per se, though maybe we should define the term. And then Peter Rodman, who begins his career as a close associate of Henry Kissinger, not a noted NeoCon, whatever, his many qualities. And that's the Bush administration's delegation to this Middle East conference.

Michael Doran:

Yeah, I called myself ... I didn't really understand all this stuff very well because I came out of academia and I was sucked out of academia into the Bush administration, and I had not spent much time thinking about different foreign policy orientations and so on. And so whenever people would call me a NeoCon, I knew enough, I sensed I was not a NeoCon, and I knew because I didn't really believe in democracy promotion. But I didn't know, I was not very experienced. So I used to tell people, I'm not a NeoCon. I'm a running dog of the NeoCons.

Aaron MacLean:

That's good. That's good. Okay. So Obama takes Restraintism to this Maximalist vision of the Middle East. You've never really said, I think for the record, and maybe it would be good to solicit it, okay, so we don't like the Restraintist because while it may seem reasonable to pursue a balance in the Middle East, and that seems like a small-r realist goal that's reasonable, maybe even necessary, we think they're dishonest and they want to just sort of hand the whole thing to the Iranians at the expense of our traditional allies. Is that too far? Go ahead.

Michael Doran:

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. That's true. There are some of them, certainly Michael Dimino, I don't know him personally, but he's now the DASD for the Middle East, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, and the Trump administration who comes from, I think, Defense Priorities, if I'm not mistaken, which is one of these Koch-funded think tanks. He was on record, I think I quoted him in the article, if I'm not mistaken, saying the United States has no interest, no vital interest in the Middle East, and the only reason it's there is to protect Saudi Arabia and Israel. If you ask me, that's Looney Tunes, I think it's crazy, but I think he probably believes it. But there are tons of others who don't go that far and don't say, "We should pull out of the Middle East." They will qualify it, and what they want is a balance.

But they think that the reason that we don't have balance right now is because we are too solicitous of Israel and not friendly enough to Tehran. And that just shows a complete lack of understanding of how the Middle East works, who the Iranians are, what our Iran policy has been. If we've done one thing with Iran since 1979, it's tried to run after it and cut a deal with it because we knew there were guys there in Tehran that really wanted to cut a deal with us. This is a theme that's been there since the Reagan administration.

Aaron MacLean:

That's helpful. That's really clarifying. And the attitude towards Israel is the main, or perhaps most noticeable break between Obama and Trump, amongst many others. But there's a palpable frustration, annoyance, maybe more towards Israel and towards Netanyahu personally under Obama. And that all flips pretty dramatically under Trump One, as does Iran policy overall, we're kind of in a different place now, 2025, and we should get to that. But under Trump One, the attitude towards my earlier observation about the cyclical nature of things, the pendulum swings back. We pull out of the JCPOA, we adopt this campaign of maximum pressure. But at the same time, Trump also has both the rhetoric and, I think, the sincere intention of reducing the American role in the Middle East. And these two things in his mind work in parallel, a kind of swinging back to an alignment with traditional allies like Israel and Saudi and others, which not in the Saudi case, but leads to the Abraham Accords and a desire to reduce the American role, as opposed to the Obama goal of reducing the American role by swinging towards Iran.

Why, in your view, I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth here, why was Trump One, first term Trump, right, and Obama wrong?

Michael Doran:

I think it just goes to worldview. I think that Obama is a progressive. He himself has an unrealistic ungrounded understanding of how the Middle East works, what the goals of countries like Iran are, and secondly, the domestic politics lined up perfectly for him because he created this picture. You remember when he sold the country on the joint comprehensive plan of action, the Iran nuclear deal. He said, "There's my plan, which is a huge giveaway to Iran or war. That's our choice. We don't have a deterrence." The thing that Obama did, we don't have a deterrence option. The thing that Obama did in all of his presentations of the options was to gut deterrence as a real option. So I mean, if we take the caricature of what Bush was, which is open-ended, large-scale deployments to the Middle East on the one hand, and Obama, which is give everything to Iran, Trump is squarely in the middle there, and he believes in deterrence.

Trump has this sort of distinctive chip in his makeup, in that he believes that economics is the driver of international relations. I think that as a kind of fundamental assumption, I would disagree with that. Perhaps with you, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think what you and I share in common is a belief that the military balance is really the single most important thing driving international politics. It's not the only thing. We don't have to be reductionist about this, but it's the single most important thing, and it's the thing that you need to get right up front, because if you get it wrong, it can bedevil everything else. But Trump comes from a different point of view. He knows that the military balance matters, but he starts by thinking about economics, and he wants to use the economic tools first and back them up with the military instrument, and he wants to achieve a balance, so being a businessman, so we can all make money. It is the kind of materialist view of how all this stuff works.

Like I said, I could sit and philosophically argue with Donald Trump on this point around that point, but I can get behind that. I can get behind that 100%. Makes a lot of sense to me because Trump, the man understands deterrence, he understands it in his gut. He understands it from negotiating. You want to negotiate from a position of strength. You don't want to just start giving the enemy stuff before you cut a deal with them. And I think Trump also came to understand who the Iranians were. After all they tried to kill him. I think he's got a healthy understanding of that.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, and I want to get to the Middle East challenges in front of Trump today, April, 2025 here in a minute, whether it's Iran or Syria. But before we do, one more scene setting question, which is help the listeners understand, because I think there's some, I confess to some of it myself sometimes, there's some confusion as to how the President who, for example, ordered the strike on Qasem Soleimani or the President who quite recently was calling for American ownership of Gaza to turn it into a sort of profit-making enterprise of some sort-

Michael Doran:

Gaza-Lago.

Aaron MacLean:

Gaza-Lago. I heard Mar-a-Gaza, what was it? Trump Riviera I thought was a good one. Andrew Roberts had a good piece in the Free Beacon outlining, if you like, historical precedents. It's good to get someone from the British Empire or a historian of the British Empire to talk about precedents for that kind of thing. So you have all that in one column. In another column, you have someone who calls for the end to endless wars who did couple a pretty hawkish approach to Iran in the first term with a desire to draw down in Syria, which caused his Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, to resign.

Michael Doran:

Bill Mattis said, I don't know,

Aaron MacLean:

Well, we can go to the weeds there-

Michael Doran:

[inaudible 00:34:22].

Aaron MacLean:

But who's hired? I mean, the whole jumping off point of your essay in Tablet is not that these people exist and breathe and that annoys you. No, it's that they have positions of real prominence in this administration. So the same president who has Mike Waltz as his National Security Advisor, and Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State also employs a number of people who come from this network and I think would actually, and have on the record, said that they're believers in capital R Restraint. Explain what these apparent inconsistencies or oscillations to the listening.

Michael Doran:

I'll do that, but can I go back to your previous question and make one other point about Trump?

Aaron MacLean:

Please.

Michael Doran:

And it's the Israel point, and I want to make it because I need it to answer the question you just asked. Progressive Americans hate Israel, or let's just say progressive Americans are critical of Israel. Maybe that's a more restrained way of saying-

Aaron MacLean:

You can defend that one more easily, I think.

Michael Doran:

Yeah. Okay. So they don't like close relations between the United States and Israel. And so Obama created a picture of the Middle East which said that all of the people that progressives don't like: Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, evangelical Christians and so on, they're the cause of war in the Middle East. Iran in this picture doesn't become the peace party, but it is the object of diplomacy, which is the path that we need to take in order to bring peace. And so it plays out as good domestic politics. Donald Trump, in addition, I think to, in his gut understanding deterrence, he also has in his coalition a very strong pro-Israel contingent. And his electorate, his base, is pro-Israel.

And if we've learned one thing about Donald Trump since 2016, it's that he's a pretty good politician. You can't do what he's done. Remarkable, greatest comeback in American history. You can't do it if you don't understand who you're appealing to out there. And so Trump understands that Israel, that he's in the pro-Israel ... His coalition, his electorate is pro-Israel, and he himself, there's no reason to believe that he himself personally isn't pro-Israel. So he's never going to go the Obama route in that regard.

Now, regard to your question, I already forgot what it was. Sorry.

Aaron MacLean:

Oscillations, the guy seems to go back and forth pretty dramatically. Hiring and policy. There's an appearance, Mike, of inconsistency, but I think you have an account that attempts to, what would the ancient astronomers have said? That you're going to save the appearances, you're going to save the appearances of the Trump administration. You're going to explain it to us.

Michael Doran:

Yeah, so I don't think I want to go with the ancient astronomers because I think you're talking about those who they still wanted the Sun to be revolving around the Earth, and so they-

Aaron MacLean:

That's a very sophisticated pushback. But yes please-

Michael Doran:

I'm not going though. No, no. No, I think Trump wants economic-based deterrent, deterrent and economic policy. He understands that he has to deter Iran. He understands that very clearly, and he understands that he wants to be aligned with Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are the two countries that are most threatened by Iran. Actually, clearly we saw him in his press conference, with his most recent press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he also wants to be aligned with the Turks, our traditional ally. That's the triumvirate, Ankara, Jerusalem, Riyadh. He wants to be in good terms with all of them, and he realizes that he needs to deter the Iranians, but he also knows that he can't trust the traditional foreign policy establishment because they knifed him in the back in Trump One. So he has to create his own team. And in doing that, he has reached out to these Restraintists.

He also has a Libertarian base in his constituent, in his domestic base. He has constituents who are Restraintists. He also, I mean, look, he won Michigan by reaching out to the Arab vote in Dearborn and elsewhere. And that's not necessarily a big pro-Israel bastion, the Arab vote of Michigan. So he wants to signal to diverse constituencies in domestic politics that he's open to their viewpoint, that he's taking it seriously. And so he does that in a typical Trumpian fashion. He's riding two horses at the same time, and he makes statements on Monday that are clearly designed to appeal to the Israel and the pro-Israel community and the evangelicals and everybody like me that thinks that Iran is the problem. Then on Tuesday, he makes statements that are designed to appeal to the other constituency. But if you follow what he does and pay more attention to that than what he says, I think you come up with a pretty consistent line of deterrence through strength. That's what I see him doing.

Aaron MacLean:

You have a riff in the piece as well that I thought was helpful, which is the oscillation, just to stick with the word between a kind of hawkishness and-

Michael Doran:

The zigzag is the strategy.

Aaron MacLean:

Exactly, exactly. I thought that that was well put, and that was clarifying for me, that it keeps things off balance to his benefit.

Michael Doran:

Oh, yeah. He also-

Aaron MacLean:

[inaudible 00:40:12] him as the final arbiter of policy, not just abroad, where you're zigzagging between escalation and accommodation, but at home in the Washington policy debate, the zigging and the zagging ultimately redounds to his own decision space.

Michael Doran:

Yes, yes. So look at the difference of opinions there. You've got Tulsi Gabbard who's inclined toward the Restraintism viewpoint, and you've got Mike Waltz who goes a different direction, and they're both sitting there around him, and one day he says he throws a bone to Tulsi, and the next day he throws a bone to Waltz, and in the end, all the big decisions will be made by him and they'll be taken to him, and nobody can predict it. You and I, if we're looking at the Iranian nuclear negotiations right now, you and I can't predict how this is going to unfold, nor can the Iranians, and Donald Trump likes all of that. He likes the uncertainty among his advisors, and he likes the uncertainty abroad, and it's not such a bad thing either.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, that's unfortunate because my next question was going to be to ask you to predict how the Iranian negotiations were going to unfold. So we'll do our best, even though you've just told me that you're unqualified to offer such predictions.

Michael Doran:

I can see a lot of intelligent things around, but I can't just ...

Aaron MacLean:

So we're recording this on Monday the 14th, the president's envoy, Steve Witkoff, was just in the Middle East engaging in some sort of talks. They appear indirect by any sort of standard, what might typically be applied to it with the Iranians. And just to speak in sort of broad caricatures for a second, one group who follow these issues is worried that Trump will walk away from these negotiations and will be embroiled and yet another Middle Eastern war. I guess that's the Restraintist fear. And then another group is worried that these negotiations are going to lead us back to the JCPOA or a deal similar to the JCPOA, which is basically the only kind of deal this view would hold that the Iranians can accept. So what's going on here?

Michael Doran:

I've never seen the situation in the Middle East as a whole, like it is right now where we're really on a knife's edge or at a turning point. There are enormous opportunities in the Middle East today, and there are also, as always, the threats. And so a year from now, we could be in a completely different Middle East, and it could be unlike, it could be peaceful, unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime, you and me, Aaron, or it could be a lot worse. And it is very hard to predict which way it's going to go. And I think every issue we're talking about, I can point out how this is the case, whether it's Iran proxies, Iran nukes, Syria, whatever, but Lebanon. In the case of Iran nukes, we've got a large buildup of American power. We've seen in Donald Trumpian fashion, an assertion of American military power by attacking the Houthis, which was a signal to the Iranians as much as to the Houthis.

We have a threat coming from Trump saying in early March. He said, we settle this nuclear thing within two months, or else you're going to see bombing like you've never seen it before. But then he sends off Steve Witkoff, who made very, I would say, relatively conciliatory sounding statements. They accepted the ridiculous Iranian desire to have proximity talks rather than meeting face-to-face so that the Iranians can say that they don't sit down with us because we're weak and illegitimate and so on and so forth. They can pretend to be strong when they're not. And the early discussions appear to be about returning to JCPOA-type restrictions on the Iranians. That's what it looks like. Nobody who knows what's actually going on has briefed me on what's happening, but all of the body language sounds like another JCPOA-type negotiation.

So I can score this if we're scoring it toward what I think it needs to be, which is a real hard-headed deterrence against Iran, really take them down a notch and show everyone in the region that they have been taken down a notch or conciliation of Obama's style. You can score this either way. And so I think we just have to watch and see what happens. If they actually strip Iran of its nuclear weapons capability verifiably, and so that everyone in the region sees that that has happened, I will say this is a fantastic policy. I'm not ready to pronounce on it right away.

I didn't love the fact that we sat down. We allowed them to do this proximity talk nonsense. I didn't like the fact that it was only 45 minutes of negotiations. We're going to meet for 45 minutes and then have another week before we sit with them for 45 more minutes. Because what the Iranians are trying to do is string us along, buy time. They're concerned about the end of the snapback mechanism which is going to disappear in October. And if it's not activated the snapback mechanism by July, then it probably can't be reactivated. And so they want to string the negotiations out past July, so they're going to meet once a week for 45 minutes and play their games about whether they're actually talking to us or not.

Aaron MacLean:

So for those of us in the Peanut Gallery who struggle with the difference between Mauritius and Mauritania, what is the snapback mechanism? Explain that to the crowd.

Michael Doran:

Snapback mechanism. The UN resolution, I think it was 2331 that recognized the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, created a mechanism that allows all of the UN resolutions on Iran. So the 2331 temporarily lifted all of the UN resolutions on Iran, which require order Iran not to have enrichment and reprocessing capabilities. So as a matter of international law, they take the fuel cycle away from the Iranians. All of those, there are, I think, six of those resolutions, they can all be reinstated. And they put economic penalties on Iran as well, economic sanctions. They can all be reinstated by any signatory to the JCPOA through this snapback mechanism.

Aaron MacLean:

Last question for you, Mike Doran, and we've gone on for a while, and we can't go on for another hour on this. I mean, I could. I would enjoy it. But in a few minutes, talk about the other major goal in the Middle East that you prescribe for the Trump administration. If the goal with regard to Iran is, I'm going to put words in your mouth here, but you go ahead and correct these if I get it wrong, the restoration of some kind of favorable balance with Iran in which Israel, Saudi, et cetera, play a central role. That's goal one. Goal two is figuring out the future in Syria and heading off a looming collision there between Jerusalem and Ankara. If those are the other two, if it's Riyadh, Jerusalem and Ankara that are the three nodes, we have a looming confrontation in Syria between Jerusalem and Ankara. Talk about that. Talk about the shape of what you think is feasible there. Talk about the dangers as well. What does it look like if it all goes wrong?

Michael Doran:

I'll do that, but there's one thing I want to make one statement really clearly, which I think came out in our discussion, but it didn't come out as clearly as I would've liked it, and I didn't think of it until now, and that's that this whole discussion of the Restraintists, one of my goals was to make the point that the Restraintists don't represent Trump. Trump is in a very different place, and that's why I'm not overly worried about these guys. I don't agree with them. I think a lot of what they say is hogwash, but I don't get too upset about it because I realize that there's a different kind of guy in charge who has a different view, and we should all remember that.

Syria is, after the Iran nuclear question, Syria is the most important issue strategically for the United States. Historically, we don't see Syria. Our National Security bureaucracy for some reason is kind of blind to it, but it is absolutely the place where the new order in the region is being built and our two allies, our two most important allies for building a new order in the Middle East, Turkey and Israel, are bumping up against each other. The friction is growing. It could actually lead to war. The job of a superpower is not just to constrain enemies, it's also to manage allies. And so the goal should be to turn Syria into a buffer state between Israel and Turkey. Left to their own devices the Turks and the Israelis will not find an accommodation, I don't think. Let's say I'm not confident in that. But if Trump gets involved directly, negotiates with them and presents the United States as part of the buffer between them, I think that he can take both of them to a place that is mutually beneficial.

Aaron MacLean:

And so the reason why, absent Trump, you think it's unlikely that an accommodation between the two has come to, is because their goals are just irreconcilable. That is to say Turkey wants a rebuilt and strong partner in Syria and Israel just can't accept that. Or, characterize the dispute, if you would.

Michael Doran:

So Turkey is increasingly ... Erdogan's Turkey is increasingly presenting Israel as "The Other." As the enemy of Turkish national security. Erdogan recently prayed for the destruction of Israel. He has repeatedly said that Israelis are carrying out a genocide in Gaza. He has looked forward to the time when Turkey will liberate Jerusalem and so on. This is a kind of rhetoric toward Israel that you don't hear coming from the Turks toward anyone else. So this is a great concern, as you can imagine, in Jerusalem. The Israelis see Ashara, the Islamist who's now in charge of the interim government in Damascus as a proxy of the Turks. And so they are fearful that Turkey will start playing from the point of view of a significant Sunni power, the same role in Syria that the Iranians played. I personally am less concerned about that, but you can't say that the Israeli concerns are coming from nowhere. That would be a gross dereliction of duty by the United States to assume that.

But I personally think there's a way to find a modus vivendi between the two, or at least I think that that's what we should try. We shouldn't say it's impossible before we, The United States, try. Only The United States ... Erdogan has a pragmatic, non-ideological side. If you followed his career for the last quarter-century, you can see that he's been on every side of every issue for pragmatic reasons, only the United States with its power can bring out the pragmatic element in him. I don't think the Israelis themselves can do it.

Aaron MacLean:

Well then I know I said that was my last question, but I lied. This is my last question. Help me distinguish then, your prescription for Turkey and your prescription for Iran, or actually that's the wrong ... It's not help me distinguish. I can distinguish. It's a very different prescription. You're quite hawkish on Iran and not on Turkey. Go ahead.

Michael Doran:

So you would say that, if I understand you correctly, I'll repeat your question in different form. You're saying, Mike, aren't you saying that all of the things that you reject about Iran, because the restraint is to say, Iran is pragmatic, let's cut a deal with it and so on, aren't you making exactly the same arguments about Turkey?

Aaron MacLean:

I was politely winding up to that, but you got to the punch before I did.

Michael Doran:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no, I am making the same arguments that they make about Iran about Turkey. That Turkey has a pragmatic side. We can appeal to it and so on, and they're making, the people who disagree with me about this, in the pro-Israel world, there's a lot of people who disagree with me and they say, "No, no, no. Erdogan is a Muslim brother," and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, they are right that the structure of my argument about Turkey is nearly identical to the structure of the argument that the Restraintists make about Iran. But it's very easy for me to make this because I think Turkey and Iran are very different places. They're not the same country. The Turks are members of NATO. They have a capitalist economy that is tied into the free market. They have a history of working productively with people they call enemies all the time.

The Turks, Erdogan is the staunchest supporter of Ukrainian claims against Russia. They've never accepted the Russian occupation of Crimea. They haven't accepted the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and they support them. At the same time, Erdogan has kept a line out to Putin. He's got one of the more productive relations with Putin, even as he has totally opposed him in Ukraine. So the Turks are fantastic compartmentalizers. I don't think anyone compartmentalizes quite as well as they do. They're heirs to nineteenth-century European balance of power politics. The fact that the Erdogan has an ideology that he expresses from time-to-time in ways that are very disturbing, doesn't mean that they have stopped being who they've always been for the last 500 years. So I just think that people who read the Middle East ideologically are always going to get it wrong.

Aaron MacLean:

Mike Doran, it is always a fascinating conversation with you. I'm not just saying that. Every time we talk, I learn something, and I'm grateful to you for coming back. Thanks for joining.

Michael Doran:

What did you learn this time?

Aaron MacLean:

A few things here and there. A few things here and there. Talk to you soon. Okay?

Michael Doran:

Sure.

Speaker 10:

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