Are we heading towards a deal?

I don't think so, just given who's making decisions in Iran, and given that gap between what Trump can accept and what the Iranians might be willing to give.

But this will not be over.

I hope I'm wrong by the end of Trump's presidency.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And as election day approaches, the country is deeply divided.

The conservative party fights for its political survival.

The opposition hopes to capitalize on voter frustrations.

And with the war dragging on, foreign policy is dominating the debate.

The outcome could have enormous consequences, not just at home, but around the world.

No, I am not talking about the United States.

I'm talking about Israel, because Americans aren't the only ones heading to the polls soon.

Israelis will vote on a new government on October 27th, and after more than 18 years in power, off and on, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a very serious challenger in retired Israeli Defense Force's Chief Gadi Eisenkot.

During those 18 years, Netanyahu has transformed both Israel and the Middle East.

After Hamas' attack on October 7th, Israel responded with a vengeance, decimating not just Hamas, but most of Gaza as well.

To Israel's north, Hezbollah's presence in Lebanon has been severely diminished.

And even under a new government, Israel's approach to an increasingly unstable Middle East is unlikely to change all that much.

My guest today, Brett McGurk.

He has spent decades working on Middle East policy from inside the White House, serving under four American presidents, Republican and Democrat.

He served as the White House coordinator for the Middle East under Biden.

He's helped lead negotiations over the release of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th.

He knows both Netanyahu and Eisenkot well.

He also has a new book out, Brink, Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages.

I recently met up with him in Washington to discuss Israel's upcoming elections, Trump's war with Iran, the growing threat from the Houthis, and if the United States has a broader strategy for a rapidly changing Middle East.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

Hey, big boy.

Happy birthday.

Oh, thanks, Xi.

74 years young.

Wow, you don't look a day over 47.

But first, a word from the folks that help us keep the lights on.

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And... - Brett McGurk, good to have you on the show.

- Thank you, and great to be here.

- You look a lot at how the world has changed since October 7th, and most recently, headlines being driven from the Middle East from perhaps an unlikely corner, the Houthis.

We've been there before.

I want to start with that.

- The Houthis, sure, happy to get right into the Houthis.

I dealt with this problem directly.

In fact, Ian, Brink, the book I have out, the first chapter, talks a little bit about this problem.

And, you know, the Houthis are an indigenous group to Yemen, and they overthrow the legitimate government, but they're heavily backed by the Iranians.

And, I mean, their main weapon system is anti-ship ballistic missiles and ballistic missiles, which we saw recently in Riyadh, tragically.

And that is all IRGC in Iran.

And that happened really over a decade.

And this is an awful, awful problem.

The Houthis are dispersed across Yemen.

They're dug into mountains.

In the age of drone warfare, you can launch a drone from anywhere.

They're very accurate.

And like, I struggle to come up with the kind of military answer to the Houthi problem.

It appears that the Saudis don't have a military answer.

I mean, Mohammed bin Salman is like moving from secure location to secure location.

He's not able to be in public right now.

You've got missiles that are traveling hundreds of miles that the Saudis are apparently not able to intercept that are hitting Riyadh airport.

As you say, tragically, 13 people dead, hundreds civilians that are wounded.

This is clearly not sustainable.

So, what do you do?

How should the Americans be responding to this?

And how should the Saudis respond if those things are different?

First question for any scenario like this, I always ask, what's the objective?

I think you've got to think about what is it.

Is the objective to defeat the Houthis?

Is the objective to degrade the Houthi missile and drone capability?

Is the objective to contain and do a deal with the Houthis, as the Saudis have done a number of times?

I mean, what are we actually trying to do?

And right now, I don't think the Saudis have an answer to that question.

I think they would like to somehow find a way to actually defeat the Houthis and get rid of this problem.

That's probably not going to happen.

Right.

Some of their initial announcements were take all the land back, but that hasn't been moving.

So then it gets into degrading their capabilities, and that's the objective.

But again, we've tried that.

That's very difficult.

So the Americans have basically said, OK, you're attacking the Saudis.

You're not attacking us.

So we're not going to be directly involved again in this fight.

The Saudis are clearly extremely concerned about that.

But if you're the United States, if you were advising the president right now, you would say, good, stay clear of that or not?

I think CENTCOM will come into the White House with, here are some options.

Here are some things that we have left off the table in the past.

Here are some things we might do together with the Saudis.

When I dealt with this problem in real time, when the Houthis were targeting American naval ships -- and people forget about this.

I mean, one thing that was -- which, again, they're not doing right now.

Not doing right now because of the deal that was cut in the first year of this current Trump administration, right?

It was basically like the U.S.

went to war with the Houthis, a deal was cut through the Omanis, they're not going to target our ships, but the Houthis retain the right to target others.

So we basically got out of it to protect U.S.

shipping, which was the objective the president had set.

But now the Saudis are now in this alliance with Pakistan and Turkey.

It is like I've never seen a moment, Ian, I've been doing this for 20 years, that things are so fluid and like first principles are open up in almost every capital.

Who are our partners?

Who are our allies?

Yeah, because if you're Saudi Arabia, you don't know that you can count on the United States going forward.

Exactly.

Who do we count on?

How they then play off the different countries in the Middle East, I think is, is potentially quite dangerous, honestly.

And I would, I would like the United States to play a bit more of a forceful diplomatic role to try to pull this together in a way we have some sort of concerted, organized, collective effort.

I mean, right now, I'm not seeing that.

When we started to grapple with the Houthis, and I have this scene in the book, President Biden, I was very much of the view, we had to take military action against the Houthis, because we were, from day to day, and what I was hearing from the Pentagon and Central Command, we were within seconds of having dozens of dead American sailors.

And I cannot overemphasize how serious this situation was.

You have these anti-ship ballistic missiles being fired at our ships.

We are firing interceptors to take these, this is the first time it ever happened in combat.

And Biden's view was, I'm not going to take this on ourselves.

So do the diplomatic legwork, build a coalition, and then we'll take it on.

That was kind of his late 2023.

You get a sense of how these debates happen inside an administration when you're contemplating military action.

So just to bring it up to present day, finding a way, and it's hard right now, and this is not the kind of the modus operandi of the current administration, finding a way to bring countries together.

I think it's really important because if it's just the US, Saudi's on their own, UAE kind of on their own, Bahrain, Kuwait, everyone is looking around like, you know, where is the US going to be in two years?

Where's the world heading?

And who is going to help protect us from a problem?

And you're right, the Houthis are not Iran.

There's some differences, but at the end of the day, they are all the missiles and drones.

Without Iran, you don't have all this stuff.

And Iran is just so loaded up with missiles and drones, and once they get that capacity and production back up, they'll be able to scale it.

It's a huge challenge for the future of the world.

So one other place I want to talk about in the region of course is Israel and we do have elections coming up in short order.

Never count Netanyahu out in any environment until it's over, maybe not even then.

And yet there is a possibility and the polls increasingly look like Gadi Eisenkot would lead the next election, former Chief of Staff for the Israeli Defense Forces.

If that were to come to pass, hard to imagine that Israel's foreign policy in the region would suddenly change dramatically.

But where do you think it would make a difference?

Yeah, it's interesting.

I know all these guys.

I've known Gadi Eisenkot a long time.

Completely different personality than Netanyahu.

Eisenkot is kind of the thoughtful warrior scholar.

A very deep thinker about where Israel needs to head.

Again, a scene, a very difficult scene that is in Brink.

I was in his home at his Yeshiva for his son, Gal, who just died in Gaza.

And he turned around and took a book off his shelf and opened it up to a page.

It was about the Second Intifada.

And he read from it, and the quote was--I'm going to paraphrase it here.

The quote is in the book.

"I know the cost of war.

I have a five-year-old son.

And effectively, if we don't get things right, my son will be fighting terror just like I did."

And that five-year-old son, he closed the book, put it on the shelf, he said that five-year-old son was Gal.

Who was killed and who had just been killed.

I've never had a conversation like that with Bibi Netanyahu.

So I'm not, I don't want to suggest he's not also, he fought, his brother died in the Entebbe raid, you know the history.

But he is much more immediate of the moment.

Everything is the immediacy of the moment.

And I describe him in the book, Netanyahu, like impossible to pin down, you know.

So a couple of things will not change, I believe, after October 7th.

And this is what I think, just whatever you feel about this issue, and I know it's so polarizing, Israel, Gaza, Palestinians, but Israel after October 7th, and I think Eisenkot shares this, Netanyahu shares it, will never allow threats to gather again.

Like Israel will never allow 30,000 Hezbollah troops to be sitting on the northern border, and that's a problem that you just have to kind of manage.

They'll never allow Hamas to be reconstituted in Gaza, ever.

And I think that applies to threats further abroad, including Iran.

Their security doctrine after October 7th has just completely changed.

I think Eisenkot would very much share that.

So a change in policy toward Lebanon, Iran, even Gaza, and the fact that whatever comes in Gaza after this, it cannot be Hamas.

I think Eisenkot would be the same.

Where we would see a difference and an important difference and a needed difference is the West Bank.

Now, the West Bank, in the Biden administration, we sanctioned Israeli settlers.

I mean, it was a big step we took to try to -- And some of this has been the fact that Bibi is in coalition with -- Exactly.

This is another key question.

Kind of a fascist party at the end of the day.

Every leader is constrained by politics.

And when Bibi came back into power in 2023, he had a call with Biden.

Biden was calling to congratulate him after the election.

And Bibi said, unprompted, he said, "Hey, Joe, I know I got this coalition, you know, but I'm driving the bus."

You know, he said it right away.

Meaning Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and these guys are kind of in the backseat.

So, when I was dealing with the State of War Cabinet, which Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were not included in, and Eisenkot was there for a significant part of it, kind of a unity cabinet on the Gaza piece, but Smotrich, Ben-Gvir were doing, and the West Bank has now become such a flashpoint, and that has to change.

So if you have an election in which Eisenkot comes in, I think you'll see a significant change in the West Bank, but still, I think Eisenkot would bring the hammer down on what the hilltop youth in these groups are doing.

- On terrorism.

- On the Israeli terrorism in the West Bank.

But if anyone's expecting a total sea change in like overall Israel security doctrine and how they're viewing the world, I don't see that.

And even a Netanyahu with a broader base coalition, if that's how it comes out, you also might see some decent changes.

Honestly, we'll see.

I, scenario analysis, put my hat on.

What are we likely to see?

What worries me is you'll have the two main coalitions kind of tied, and you'll have the Arab coalition in the middle, and you can't form a government, and then you'll have a new election early next year, and then Bibi's the caretaker.

- And then Bibi is still the caretaker, yeah.

- And it just kind of, everything is in a bit of a standstill.

Israel needs a new government and some sort of a broader-based coalition to unify.

And the country in some ways is so unified and so divided at the same time.

It's a dichotomy.

- So we'll move to Iran.

I mean, you have said, you've been critical, let's say, about the war because it has at best been incoherent what American war goals have been.

But we're eight months into this now.

What would you want now that, again, if you're parachuted in, what do you think American war goals should presently be?

Leave aside whether or not the decision to attack was ill-founded or not.

I do think it's worth pausing on that.

We can come back to it.

But coherence is a key word.

And ends ways and means.

And the textbook Midnight Hammer last year had coherence.

This does not.

Versus this.

This does not.

That's clear.

But I've gone through that plenty of times.

So here we are.

So—but now we're in it, and we're in a very difficult patch.

It is—I—the thought of parachuting into this and even to have that responsibility on your shoulders is something I would not want to think about, because I've kind of been in these rooms.

This is really, really hard.

And you face the problem.

I relate a little bit to we're about to have a midterm election.

I was in the first Bush White House, Ian.

And Republicans and George Bush got clobbered on the Iraq issue.

Democrats took both houses.

And what did George W. Bush do, given the situation?

He doubled down on Iraq.

We did the surge.

And so whatever happens here domestically, I think you cannot just back out of this situation.

You cannot just say, OK, fine, Iran, you're going to do your thing in the Strait of Hormuz.

You know, we're going to -- we'll kind of maybe regroup and come fight another day.

I think that would just accelerate all these kind of negative trends that we just mentioned.

So what do you do?

I think you try to keep this economic pressure in place.

There will be escalations, and then I think that's going to happen over the next two years.

But the question is, as you are keeping this economic pressure in place, you're building up leverage in the negotiation, ultimately.

And so what I would really, if I was in the Councils of Government now, what do we want to achieve in that negotiation?

What is realistic, and how do we use that leverage we're building to try to get that agreement?

And is that negotiation principally about control of the strait?

Is it also about nuclear enrichment and stockpiling?

Is there anything else that you need to throw into that?

I think the two, what's amazing of course is that Iran had the sweetest deal it could ever have in June, and this shows who's in power in Iran.

I'm understanding what you're talking about.

And who's in power in Iran now, I think, demonstrates why it's going to be very hard to get a deal on anything, because it's the Vahidi and the guys in the Revolutionary Guard.

That's right.

The fact that they blew up that deal in June was nuts.

Strait of Hormuz is obviously has to be part of it, but it's the nuclear.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's the nuclear program and enrichment.

I can't see the Trump administration backing off on that.

Missiles, drones, I doubt—I've done these negotiations with Irani and I know what it's like.

And it's going to be extremely hard.

But yeah, you're building up unprecedented economic leverage, and it's a decent hand to play if you're a diplomat in the room with the Iranians.

But I think it has to include the nuclear.

And I do think we should keep a hard line on this at this point, on Iran giving up its enrichment capability.

They're not enriching now.

The risk is they try to rebuild that capability in Pickaxe Mountain, which is an even harder target than Fordo.

And then you got a much harder problem on your hands.

So use economic leverage to try to get the best possible deal you can, with the nuclear being the primary objective.

And you mentioned at the beginning that after Bush got pasted in the midterms, he engaged in a surge.

Trump is about to get pasted in the midterms.

Do you worry that beyond the economic blockade and stranglehold, as it's intended, and the Iranians are not getting oil out right now, so it is going to affect them economically, that Trump is in danger of making that same decision?

Well, for the surge, I was in the White House with President Bush and Surge, I supported that decision.

I thought, given the -- we did a whole strategic review.

We looked at every possible option.

And we had to affect that basic ends, ways and means problem, which is the Iraq War had never been resourced, and we did the -- I thought the surge was the right thing to do.

I don't think the Trump administration will go through that type of rigorous strategic review process.

It feels unlikely.

But I cannot.

And this is where, and let's face it, I think people have underestimated Trump's commitment on this issue.

And so if I had just my pure analyst hat, if I had to do a scenario analysis, I think the more likely scenario after the midterms is an escalation rather than a de-escalation.

And that's kind of what I can see.

From the U.S., yeah.

From the U.S., maybe with Israel joining in.

But then what does Iran do?

So Iran is, I think, has used this time most likely to prepare for strikes across the Gulf.

So more energy strikes and it can be a real mess.

But if I had to say where is this heading?

We're going to have midterm elections, there will be an Israeli election.

Are we heading towards a deal?

I don't think so, just given who's making decisions in Iran and given that gap between what Trump can accept and what the Iranians might be willing to give.

And I can see this returning to a military conflict.

It will flare up, and then it will have a kind of temporary down.

But this will not be over, I hope I'm wrong, by the end of Trump's presidency.

I've sat at the table with the Iranians many times over the years.

They will wait out the Americans, as bad as it might be from them.

Again, the guys are making decisions, not the Iranian people.

They'll wait the U.S.

out.

Now, can this economic pressure get so dire that they actually can't?

I know some Iranian experts who have that view.

We have not seen that yet.

I have not seen it yet.

- So, I guess what I wanna close with is we take all of this, and we look back in the United States.

Americans, clearly part of why they voted for Trump, not once but twice, was a desire to end a lot of these very costly and ultimately failed foreign entanglements.

- Yeah.

- That was talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.

But now you have a sea change, especially among younger Americans, on Israel too.

How should American leaders, either party, don't really care, respond to that change?

I think don't learn the wrong lessons of the past.

I think it's true we have overinvested in some cases.

That's the Iraq-Afghanistan experience.

But also when we underinvest and pull back too much, we open a vacuum and get sucked back in massively.

I've seen this repeatedly.

I saw in Iraq, we left in 2011, then we had ISIS.

I saw, we just mentioned the Yemen that we pulled back massively, the Houthis, of course, strengthened.

On the Israel question, I think you gotta look at our broader all Middle East policy and the support we provide to very important countries, whether it's Jordan, whether it's Egypt, whether it's the countries in the Gulf and why we do it and what we get out of it and kind of a zero-based budgeting type analysis, and I think we get a lot out of it.

But what troubles me about the Israel debate here domestically is it has become so polarizing and I think often without a true grappling of the underlying issues and how difficult they are.

And one reason, Ian, I wrote this book was just to say, here's what it's like in the room.

Here's what it's like dealing with Hamas on one floor, Israel on another, while Iran is doing everything they're doing.

And I don't end the book on a hopeful note.

I ended on a lot of books like this, Ian.

Last chapter, here are the five things we need to do.

I don't, like, there's often no finality in these things.

They're shifting advantages, and the U.S.

has to stay diplomatically engaged and maintain our partnerships in the Middle East and around the world.

If we don't, the vacuums that open up and the risks that we take on, things can get even worse.

>> Brett McGurk.

>> Thank you.

>> Thanks for joining us.

>> Thank you.

>> And now to complicate things even further, I've got your puppet regime.

>> Hey, big boy, happy birthday.

>> Oh, thanks, Xi.

74 years young.

>> Wow, you don't look a day over 47.

>> Ha, that's how old I was when I started this freaking job.

>> That's a long time.

You're about to catch up with Joseph Stalin.

>> The GOAT.

>> Anyway, here's to many, many happy returns of the day.

>> Many, many more.

>> Many, many, many more.

>> Many, many, many, many more.

>> We could live forever.

>> They can transplant fresh organs into us.

>> Download our consciousness.

>> Put our brains in jars.

>> Clone us.

>> Clone us.

>> Clone us.

>> Wait, I don't want somebody else in power who's not me, even if it's also me.

>> Good point, no clones.

>> No clones, but they could still embed us as microchips in every living person.

>> Sick, you know you could be in power until there's like 3 billion Chinese.

>> And you could be in power until there's only 3 Russians.

>> Very funny, Xi, but as long as we get Ukraine, it's worth it.

>> Wow, you are a wild guy, birthday boy.

>> Can't stop, won't stop.

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you're looking for your own exit strategy from all this geopolitical chaos, we've got you covered.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Our people are working to build a brighter future in automotive, greenhouse agriculture, clean tech, environmental conservation, and beyond.

Cox Enterprises, in the business of what's next since 1898.

Additional funding provided by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.

Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... [music]