Amir Mizroch: you know how this works, right? Everything's on the record. Unless uh, you want to take it off the record or background, whatever, just gimme a sign.

Yeah, that's totally fine. My guest today is Dan Shapiro an American diplomat and national security expert who served as the US Ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017. Under President Barack Obama, fluent Hebrew speaker and strong advocate of US Israel relations, Dan played a key role in security cooperation, peace efforts, and military aid agreements between the two countries.  

Before his ambassadorship Shapiro was a senior advisor on Middle East policy at the National Security Council. After leaving his post, he remained in Israel working on regional policy issues at think tanks and advisory roles. In 2021, he joined the Biden administration as a senior advisor on Iran at the State Department.

Amir Mizroch: Is that all roughly accurate? 

Dan Shapiro: That's all rough, roughly accurate, except later in the Biden administration I did two other roles. One, I was the first ever senior official. Really a special envoy role to promote Middle East regional integration advancing the Negev Forum and trying to expand the Abraham Accords which I did until the October 7th attacks, and obviously couldn't do much on that after the October 7th attacks.

And after October 7th, I was recruited over to the defense Department to the Pentagon. I ran the Middle East Policy office for the last year of Biden.

Amir Mizroch: Okay. Brilliant. Thanks for filling that in. That's important stuff. And we'll get to October 7th in due course, I'm sure. I wanted to start off with this, , tweet, , on February 22nd that you sent out, and then just you just dropped those geopolitical grenade on Twitter and then just walked away leaving the rest of us with a lot of questions.

So here's what you said. Here's the deal. Trump calls his foreign policy peace through strength, but. Driven by his instincts of ownership, deal making and conflict aversion. The result is decline through, , weakness. The central thesis there seems to me to be, Trump is taking us back to, two centuries ago, the 19th century with a global restructuring that has three spheres of influence world divided into three spheres dominated by the US, Russia, and China. I wanted to start there, if you could just break that down for us.

Tell us what that thesis is, what is the 19th century doing back in our lives, and then afterwards we can, go into what that means for Israel. 

Dan Shapiro: Sure. Uh, well, thanks for having me, Amir.

And thanks for taking note of the tweet and opening the conversation. I think it's a really important conversation for us to be having.

You know, What I sort of was observing in that first month, let's say of the Trump administration was this kind of pattern emerging. And I didn't ascribe it to a grand strategy because I don't think Trump is a grand strategist. I think he is a person who acts on instinct and acts on what makes him feel good, what makes him feel good as a real estate developer and a person who thinks he is a master deal maker.

Of course, the art of the deal is his calling card. is to own things, and then to cut deals and to cut deals with the peers as he assesses are on his level. But also to avoid conflict. He's quite risk averse in many ways. And so, I started to peel back the layers on where those instincts lead and it very quickly of led to, uh.

A reversion to a 19th or 18th and 19th century spheres of influence politics where major powers carve out zones of the world that they dominate and they respect them, they respect those zones and try to minimize conflict between them. There may be some zones, some areas that are not fully in anybody's zone of domination or sphere of influence, so there might be some zones of competition.

But that's really the international structure that emerges from the instincts that he is acting on. 

Amir Mizroch: Could you take us just briefly on a quick history tour time machine? 18th century. 19th century spheres of influence? What was going on there and what makes you think what you're seeing now is headed in that direction. Sure. 

Dan Shapiro: There's a wonderful editorial cartoon I found from 1805 by an English artist named James Gil Ray. It's a fairly well known work. It's called The Plum Pudding in Danger, and it depicts the then prime minister of the Great Britain William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte of France.

Sitting at a banquet table carving up slicing off chunks of dish in. Into the areas they control. And if you sort of look back over the maps of colonial expansion in the 18th and 19th century, you see British obviously with their portions of East Africa and Southern Africa and Nigeria, of course India Australia, Canada what we all know as the British Empire.

You see the French domination of West Africa. And parts of Asia. You see other European powers with smaller bits Germany, Italy, Belgium Netherlands, all carving out Asian and African and a little bit of Latin American what we now know of as independent states, but were at the time simply their colonies.

The heyday of colonialism. Yeah, the era of colonialism, and there were the major powers, France and Britain. Of course, the Ottoman Empire had its sphere as well in the Middle East. But largely these powers respected each other's spheres of influence. But they tended to try to dominate them as empires do.

And without much regard, obviously, to the, those living in their empires as free and independent actors. And it's, it feels like something really from the history books, not something that we we're accustomed to. So what do we see now that Trump is is laying out as his vision?

First of all. He is obsessed and really on a bit of a crusade about what parts of the world, the United States should really have domination over. He wants Canada to be the 51st state of the United States. Talks about it incessantly. He thinks Greenland which is a province of Denmark, but or territory of Denmark but near North America.

He thinks Greenland should rightfully be held by the United States. He insists that the United States should have full control over the Panama Canal he very much is evincing this instinct that the United States should own, really control pretty much everything in the Western Hemisphere.

It's a Monroe doctrine on steroids. Monroe President James Monroe the fifth president of the United States issued a proclamation when he was president in the 1820s that intervention by other powers in the Western Hemisphere would be seen as a hostile act in the United States.

And that. Principle has waxed and waned over the decades and centuries of American history. But this version of Trump's is not just that other powers should stay out of the Western hemisphere, but it actually belongs to the United States. We should essentially own. That's instinct number one.

Instinct Number two is his deal making instincts. He talks about it constantly. All of his senior officials are, I think basically instructed to speak of him as the great deal maker. The only one who can make a deal on Ukraine. The only one who, he's the, is the master deal maker.

Everybody should respect that deal making ability. It's a big part of his image, his his, the reputation he carved out first in the business world and then as a celebrity and then gradually into politics. And he is obsessed with the idea that he can make the greatest deals and there are none greater than those with the United States' Great power rivals.

There's really only two peers for him in that deal making construct. That's of Vladimir Putin, Russia and Xi Jinping of China. So of course we see this in the way the Ukraine conversations are playing out where he has essentially launched a separate negotiation line with Russia excluding Ukraine from the table.

He has really quite upfront made various concessions that he expects. Russia would hold on to certain Ukrainian territory and Ukraine would not be able to join nato. These are elements of a deal. They sound like concessions to me, but elements of a deal that he thinks he can swing , with Putin .

He is of course, had this now very public spat with president Zelensky of Ukraine, first calling him a dictator and blaming him falsely for starting the war, and then the drama in the Oval Office where Zelensky was stating some rather clear truths that Russia has not a respected previous ceasefires and so needs some security guarantees anyway, so we see the way he's afraid that Zelensky intervention is going to spoil the opportunity for him to carve out this this big deal with with Russia. And that bodes very poorly if you ask me for our Asian partners if he is prepared to sell out Ukraine and largely ignore or abandon the interests of our European partners in pursuit of a deal to end the war in Ukraine with Russia.

It is very likely that he would find that there are similar in Taiwan advantages to doing the same for Taiwan. If Xi Jinping decides that the time has come for China to make its move on Taiwan that he would be able to negotiate the grand bargain a great deal. And if you send out from that South Korea, Japan, or other Asian partners, you can really see a scenario emerging.

Where the United States dominates the Western hemisphere. Russia dominates Eastern Europe and Eurasia, former states of the former Soviet Union, China dominates the Indo-Pacific. Not necessarily invading and taking over all these countries, but really having dominant political control.

And then there are zones of competition. The Middle East is probably one of those, maybe Africa, where it, it's about mostly about pursuing resources. So that's the second of those. In the third of those is this aversion of conflict. Trump talks all the time about avoiding wars, about not getting into wars, about stopping wars, about wanting to be seen as a peacemaker.

He seems to covet the Nobel Peace Prize. Members of his team are now openly campaigning that he should be r Uh, eceiving a Nobel Peace Prize either now or after the the war in Ukraine. But, there are all kinds of ways of avoiding wars especially with other aggressive actors in the international system. One is conquest, right?

You become the strongest single actor and you you do a war, you win it, and then you dominate. Another is what we've been accustomed to over, over many decades is deterrence and a network of alliances. And if you think about it, NATO is one of the great success stories in preventing wars. So since the World War ii, there hasn't really, until Ukraine been, the exception of the Balkan Wars.

And after the breakup of Yugoslavia, there has not been a major land war in Europe. And that's largely attributable to NATO as a network of alliances that has provided strength and deterrence against, yeah, against common enemies. And then the third way, of course, is preemptive capitulation or making these arrangements, we'll call them.

And these are these spheres of influence models with other aggressive actors. So yeah, 

you know that, 

that combination of instincts, it seems to me. Is steering us on a path toward a world that looks just nothing like a world that we have known for the last seven or eight decades and a lot more like, a world from two or 300 years ago.

Amir Mizroch: Right. Okay. That's brilliant. Let me just try and see if I get this right. So Trump he's driven by this idea of ownership like a real estate mogul deal making. He thinks he can, he can fix the world through these deals and   

also an aversion to conflict.

So if we're looking at this, the scene that played out 200 years ago between France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Netherlands the 19th century two questions here. One, what was it like? Just for people, for business was it peaceful? Was it a better world because you had these spheres of influence?

Maybe this is a good thing and I'm really playing devil's advocate here. But then right after that we saw that the 20th century really started with two world wars. Can you take us back into what was it like back then is there an equilibrium? Is it stable? Our world feels not so stable now.

Is this a model that potentially most people will be okay with? 

Dan Shapiro: Yeah, it's a great question. There may be in such a model periods of relative stability that is a plausible, stability meaning not major conflicts. And within a period of relative stability it may be a period when business people who are simply focused on doing their own deals on access to resources, on access to labor.

Are able to thrive to some degree, usually having to make very significant concessions to play by the rules of these major powers. It's not a system where one would expect a significant, what we've become to known as the rule of law or rules based international order.

It's basically you have to suck up to the emperor whoever the dominant powers in the sphere of influence you're operating and they set the rules. There's not a kind of unified and agreed upon set of norms and rules that apply across the country, across the world.

So there may be some elements of the stability there, but I think at some cost because that usually comes a lot of corruption. A lot of dirty deal making and a lot of exploitation I don't think ultimately it's a very stable system in the long term because other countries that find themselves under the domination of one of the   

great powers in this scenario, generally at some point even whether a colony or whether they're just someone who is threatened by them

will push back against that that circumstance, especially as they're forced to pay tribute and their economies are made secondary to the economies of the great power . And sooner or later the friction between the great powers becomes a source of potentially global conflict.

And that is exactly where we found ourselves at the beginning of the 20th century. So again, you might find that there's a period of stability. You might find that wealthy and actors and business leaders can make the necessary arrangements with the great power leaders emperors call them uh, during that period of time and come out okay.

But that doesn't mean that most people will come out okay. But over time it seems to me it leads to a lot of friction and competition that can ultimately blow up into a much greater kind of conflict. One of the things that this set of instincts plays to is something that you hear a lot from members of President Trump's base.

They'll call it the MAGA base. Which is, for lack of a better term, I would say an embrace of America's decline. They constantly talk about how they don't wanna have any more foreign wars. Well, of course nobody wants foreign wars, but they speak about it in a way that is, is hostile to US deployments overseas there's actually a bit of a civil war within the Republican party really directed against those who were seen as guilty of mistakes in the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. There were mistakes in those. But it, it plays into a kind of an isolationist strain that reappears over and over again in American politics and most prominently in the 1930s. And it never ends well because when the United States hunker down focuses on its own territory, maybe its own hemisphere in this case and other great powers can go wild elsewhere out in the world. It ultimately affects our interests and ultimately, as we did in World War I, what could we get drawn in to defend those interests. So that's why I say it's not really peace through strength.

That's the slogan. It's actually declined through weakness By choice. 

Amir Mizroch: I wanted to just have a look at a few of the countries and territories who are, let's say, on the fringes or on the borders of those spheres.

One is Europe, right? 'cause there's a US sphere, a Russia's sphere, China's sphere. Europe is a big sphere in the middle. Eastern Flank is under attack, but it still hasn't coalesced really around one Europe wide defense infrastructure spending, all that kind of stuff.

Then you have countries like Canada, Australia and then if you look at where we are in the world, Israel and the Gulf in between the Russian sphere and the Asian sphere, and I. Israel still completely reliant on US backing.

So before we get even deeper into Israel, could you just take us on a, just a small whistle stop tour of some of those places? Europe, Canada, Australia the Gulf. How do they play are they just gonna hedge or , do they have to choose sides?

Dan Shapiro: Well, Europe, I think the real danger here is ultimately a collapse, or at least a dramatic diminishment of NATO. The United States under multiple presidents of both parties for decades has absolutely committed to NATO and to expanded NATO as other countries joined. As they right to do and as they, embrace freedom after the Cold War.

And it's, as I said, been a remarkably successful defensive alliance for decades.   

President Trump hates NATO. He's made no bones about that. He was very close in 2018 to actually withdrawing from nato. His own advisors desperately worked to prevent him from taking that step. He constantly criticizes attacks the democratic partners in NATO never has anything negative to about Putin. He has plenty of invective for democratic partners in nato. And sometimes, he's got a legitimate criticism. He's not the first president to say other NATO members need to spend more of their GDP on defense spending.

Plus the 2% target that is established under President Obama and most countries are now reaching a few and exceeding a few. Still not yet, but, and President Trump deserves some credit for that, as do other presidents for pushing for that over the last decade. But lo and behold as they are now mostly meeting that target he's moved the bar to 5% of bar that course the United States doesn't hit.

And we'll get back to US defense spending in a moment. But he's now got another kind of excuse or rationale to say, look these, partners in NATO are no partners, and they're freeloaders and we're doing all the work. The idea that we could go four more years and have nato and certainly, what we're seeing in the early days of Ukraine diplomacy and not have NATO be dramatically diminished as an effective defensive alliance and maybe even dismantled or have the US withdraw from is very realistic. 

If that's the case, then It's easy pickings for Russia. Again, Russia's not gonna invade the entire continent of Europe but it will have its eyes on The Baltic states it will have its eyes on Poland or parts of Poland. It will have its eyes on other parts of the former Eastern Bloc or former Soviet Union that it, it believes Putin certainly believes rightfully should be under Russia's control.

And as that happens western European states who might be not in the line of fire of Russian tanks invading will still nevertheless have to deal with a significant threat from Russia and have to cut deal their own deals. They may increase their defense spending.

They may rally as they're talking about doing more of a European defense, and I hope they will, but at some point those pressures from Russia will make it harder for them to resist the Russian influence, and certainly the Russian ability to affect their decisions.

 Australia is of course an interesting thing. If there is a pushback to this thesis within the Trump administration, it is around Asia, there are hawks either in or coming in to the Trump administration who argue that the US interest to confront China or to manage our competition with China.

Some even have created a rationalization for what Trump is doing on Ukraine to say this is a way to split Russia from China, which doesn't seem to be logical or well executed because again, it's abandoning other partners we would need like Europeans to help us in that strategy. But there are those who say, yes, we'd have to defend Taiwan.

We'd have to defend that other network of Asian partners. That includes Australia, South Korea, Japan, and the like. And of course we have some treaty obligations there. At the same time we have seen President Trump, this got lost in a lot of the news around Ukraine. East has stated that what he believes he should do and can do is meet together.

He and Putin and Xi Jin. Negotiate a 50% cut in defense spending by all three countries. That's a remarkable statement. Again, speaks to his sense that he has two peer deal makers in the world and he'll cut these grand bargain deals that will bring peace as he defines it. But 50% cut of all US defense spending.

Now, the US defense budget for last year, 2024 was. That defense budget supports 11 aircraft carriers, strike groups, thousands of military aircraft, a worldwide network of military bases in Europe, middle East, Indo-Pacific, and elsewhere. There's of course, room for efficiencies and room to improve limit waste and everything, but a 50% cut.

Would really make it inconceivable for the United States to project power. Yeah. And defend his interest In those three regions. Yeah. That's a budget that is designed for purely homeland and hemispheric defense and it leaves the rest of the world to others. Now could he get those cuts through? Well, there would be pushback from some Republican to Congress, but he is already directed the Pentagon to cut 8% a year for the next five years. That's without the

big negotiation with Putin and Xi that he imagines. So that's about a third of a cut. Again, I'm not sure it'll all be enacted, but again, this is a vision. So if I'm a country like Australia depending on US power projection to help me resist Chinese influence I gotta look out the next four or five years and wonder, will the US military have anywhere near the resources required to project power in that region?

Then that's quite apart from, defending Taiwan from an invasion or defending, Japanese territories from Chinese, by the way I didn't get into this in the Twitter thread, where that leads almost certainly is Japan to consider a nuclear option as a defense against China, they swore off nuclear weapons because they're on basically under the US umbrella of protection but if they don't feel that protection then they would've to really seriously reconsider that not, they're not alone. 

Lemme just quickly get to the Middle East. The Middle East is really I think a zone of competition in this model. The United States is always gonna support Israel.

President Trump supports Israel. I don't have any doubt. That aid will continue to flow. And that will mean the United States has a stake and will have relationships, certainly with our Gulf partners, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others because of their resources, because of a lot of financial and technology connections that we have with them.

But it'll be competition. There's a lot of pressure in the Trump administration to remove US troops from Syria and Iraq which are there mostly to fight ISIS, but also provide some ability to compete with Iran for influence in those countries. The Saudis who are interested in a normalization deal with Israel, but only if it comes with a, US security guarantee.

I would've to really ask a serious question of would they be able to get a security guarantee they could rely on in this in this arrangement. And that creates openings for Russia and China to exert influence. Again, not to dominate in the same way Russia might in Europe or China might in the Pacific, but certainly to develop relationships to have more military connections, sell more of their military equipment and become more of a player and a kind of a balancer to what has mostly been a region under mostly US influence. And I see competition there and in the Middle East and also in places like Africa. We're also unilaterally disarming in another set of tools, which is the soft power tools. President Trump and really, I guess it's Elon Musk and his Doge wearing his doge hat has largely dismantled in the first six, seven weeks of the administration, US Agency for International Development.

Foreign eight is an easy target. It's hard to find Americans who will defend it. Although it will affect Americans when they can't sell their agriculture products into those markets. When disease outbreaks happen in other countries and move across the globe and affect Americans, we will feel it.

But it's an easy first target. But what it has really set up is a situation where places like in the Middle East, in Latin America and in Africa in parts of Asia where the United States has been seen as a partner, a friend helping ,people achieve their dreams, be healthier solve food insecurity and medical challenges uh, to economic development.

Some civil society development in support of more democratic and open governance systems that we're walking away from that. And that, of course will create openings for Russia and China to come in and exert influence either by replacing us or simply by criticizing us for having walked away ourselves.

Amir Mizroch: The thing I love most about this episode this far is that it's just getting darker and darker.

And I think, we need to leave maybe a minute, half a minute at the end just to try and see if there is a silver lining here. But I wanna take you deeper into the Middle East and I wanna ask you about Israel. So you said that the Middle East is gonna be a zone of competition the US.

It's still gonna back Israel. Although with a potential 50% reduction in military, don't really know how that's gonna work. The real issue still seems to be about the Iranian nuke. If Putin Trump and Xi make a deal for these spheres or something like that, where does the Iran Russia nuclear story kind of fall?

 Israel basically has its airplanes on the tarmac. It's had its airplanes on the tarmac for many years. But the Iranians seem to be either weeks away, months away, or who knows, somewhere in between weeks, months away from getting a nuclear weapons capability. And that seems to be the end of the line for Israel, the end of the Zionist dream.

The just the end of us. It just feels like that, it always been talked like that in terms of, existential risk and Holocaust. So if there's this big state deal making three zones of influence, the Iranians have been helping the Russians a lot in their war in Ukraine.

The Russians, I'm assuming, have done some quid pro quo with the Iranians, whether it's, energy, whether it's military advisors or whether it's nuclear stuff. So what can you tell us about how that issue plays out? 

Dan Shapiro: Well, I think there's probably a short term and then a medium or longer term answer.

President Trump has said very clearly that he is committed to preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, as have all of his recent predecessors, of course. And we know that Iran sits on nearly the threshold of the ability to produce a nuclear weapon at a time of its choosing. And so there's some big decisions coming up probably this year.

Again, in his self as someone who. Wants first to try to negotiate to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapon. And he has said this much and the Iranians have sent sort of mixed signals about they might try negotiation. They don't really trust it. The Supreme Order says, we've been burned before, but maybe it's not something we should completely rule out.

Of course, the administration, Trump not yet fully staffed. US administrations to and the people who are most influential, like, Steve Witkoff, who's the president of Special Envoy for the Middle East, is also doing the Ukraine negotiations, and he's been at least mentioned to somebody who might handle Iran negotiate.

That's a lot to take on for a very understaffed group. So I don't think the negotiations are gonna get a launched right away, but I do think probably over the course of the spring and early summer, there's an opportunity to at least test the proposition. Can president Trump negotiate with Iran?

Will Iran negotiate with President Trump on a kind of a grand bargain , that takes Iran firmly off the path of a nuclear weapon? Of course, what Iran would have to concede in that deal is a very significant amount of basically dismantling their enrichment capability. Exporting all of their high uranium stockpile putting in place, intrusive and permanent inspections and really without any sunsets.

That was of course, one of the big criticisms of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal had sunsets on the restrictions. So Iran just could wait and I don't. Any Trump deal would agree to give Iran, another 10 years and then they could come back to this. So, but I find it implausible that Iran would agree to all those terms.

And of course, even if they were to agree to all those terms, they would require and insist on very significant sanctions relief. And a lot of our sanctions are imposed against Iran, not only because of their nuclear program, but because of their support for terrorist organizations. And the proxies around the region, of course, have been so, so deadly in attacking Israel and attacking us and other partners.

So, it's a, it's very hard to imagine that whole deal coming together in the next, let's say six months. During which time the European partners, the British and the French and their Germans will have to make a decision about whether to trigger what are called the snapback sanctions from the 2015 deal.

They're still members of the deal, even though the US pulled out, and they have the ability since Iran is in violation of that deal. To say as of October, I forget the exact date in October that all of the sanctions that were eased under that deal will snap back into place. Russia and China cannot veto that.

That's built into the previous resolutions. And then you have a potential crisis where Iran maybe threatens to withdraw from the nuclear nonproliferation

of decision. President Trump and Prime Minister Netanya will really have to decide is this the time for the military action and how, if that's done, whether it's Israel alone, whether it's Israel, the United States together whether the sequencing and there's a lot of preparation that goes into that, but I, it's most certainly a serious possibility that could happen later this year.

Certainly that decision point. Now if you managed to either through a deal or through a successful military strike, put Iran, years back from the ability to have a nuclear weapon. By the way, that's a Russian and Chinese interest. They're not exactly excited about more nuclear powers and Iran wouldn't be the last one.

Other countries if Iran pushed back and we had done. Heavy lifting of the dirty work I would expect Russia to continue and maybe even become the sponsor of Iran's sort of recovery from that. And by recovery I don't mean necessarily. Domain, but, and there are other military spheres. Iran, of course, has been a major supplier of drones, drone technology and actual drone co-production for Russia to use against Ukraine.

Also missiles. Iran is interested and russia's interested in selling to Iran but Iran's interested in acquiring Russian advanced aircraft upgrading their own ballistic missile technology. So mentioned in. Trump statements about a nuclear deal. And so I, it would make sense to me that just as the United States would retain its strong partnership with Israel, Russia seeking to compete with us in the region and sustain its influence would have a very strong influence, especially that's after Ukraine war.

They're less overstretched to helping build up Iran's non-nuclear, conventional military capabilities, which as we know that under this Regime can pose great dangers quite apart from the nuclear. So 

Amir Mizroch: yeah, 

Dan Shapiro: to me in the international system I'm describing those types of competitions can lead Israel to maybe have a breather from the nuclear threat, but followed by the resumption or the increase in the conventional threat of Iran

Amir Mizroch: apologies for the blunt question, but if Trump can throw Ukraine under the bus and he could potentially throw Taiwan under the bus, could he throw Israel under the bus?

Dan Shapiro: I don't want to make that prediction. I think Israel has a unique position in American politics and also in understanding of American national security interests. Certainly there is strong bipartisan support for continuing that, that relationship. It would be a major breach within the Republican party if President Trump would walk away from Israel.

So I, I don't anticipate a moment of abandonment as one is it's a lot easier to we're seeing happening in Ukraine and it's easier to imagine happen in. But look, any us ally, any US partner has to start to grapple with the implications of the world that could emerge from these instincts and the way Trump is pursuing if the United States is ultimately focused on controlling and dominating its hemisphere and leaving other spheres of influence to Russia and China.

 And if we are dedicated to major reductions in our own defense spending and our ability to project power as we now also put on the shelf soft power tools any US partner is going to have to say, well, how much is the United States prepared to do in moments of crisis, how much will it have the industrial capacity to do?

How much will it have the political will to do in moments of crisis? As I said, I think the Saudis have really asked the serious question is the mutual security treaty that they were negotiating with us and the Biden administration as part of the normalization deal with Israel still available to them?

And if it's available, is it even meaningful from a Trump administration?

And then even our closest partners in that situation will find that they need to start to, find ways of building their own connections and having a modicum of influence with Russia and China. Course. We've seen this in the past, whereas Israel just voted with the United States at the United Nations along with North Korea and Belarus and a bunch of other autocracies against a resolution that criticized Russia for invading Ukraine, which of course, Russia.

It did that Israel did that, I assume, because it always votes, almost always votes with the United States, with the United Nations because we do so much for Israel with the United Nations. Fair enough. But that's a, an example, and we know that Prime Minister Netanyahu has historically found that he thinks he has a.

A way of building a workable, effective modus vivendi with Putin. It might be very comfortable for him to slide back into that mode. Previously we've had Israel thinking that it had an opportunity for kind of a major economic partnership with China. That was when I was ambassador and in the years, maybe shortly after that, and then by 2016, '17 '18, as the US Foreign Policy Establishment, bipartisan of course really began to focus on China as the major challenge in the major competitor to the United States.

It put some limits on Israeli Chinese partnership, but I could certainly imagine that reemerging as a way to hedge against the ability to have influence with China and how it conducts itself in the Middle East. 

Amir Mizroch: Last two questions. October 7th for me personally has crystallized for me the fact that anything is possible.

Nothing is gonna be abnormal anymore. So if I twist the question around and say, the US walk away from Israel, throw Israel under the bus to make a grand bargain. What should Israel be thinking in terms of independence and just even the ability to manufacture its own bullets and shells, let alone, chart, its own path through these three spheres.

Dan Shapiro: So that those questions were already rising even post October 7th and even independent of Trump's return to office. Some of it related to concerns about whether the US would provide certain equipment, frankly, although I know there's been a lot of discussion around one shipment that President Biden paused.

The vast majority of the assistance that Israel needed was flowing. $14 billion worth over the course of the war, there were limits on what the United States could provide when there were actual limits to what we had. And there were competing requirements from Ukraine as well. And so that led to a discussion in the Israeli defense establishment that, Israel needs to be able to manufacture and produce its own much more of its own military requirements.

Certainly bombs, bullets there may be probably, we're not talking about aircraft maybe that comes later, but we are talking about not depending on a, a US and global defense industrial base that just is not necessarily poise and it may take them many years until it is sufficiently expanded to provide for those needs in real time.

And so that was already happening. And I think it's it's understandable and it's legitimate. Now when I was ambassador, we negotiated a 10 year memorandum of understanding between Israel and the United States on military assistance $38 billion. That includes both regular military assistance and missile defense program.

And we're in year seven of of that 10 year agreement. So, the United States and Israel should be getting to work on the next MOU at least generally been 10 year MOUs. And so you'd wanna sign it a year or two before the end of the current one so the IDF has time to make some acquisition decisions based on knowing what the, what kind of funds will be there. And, I think it's it, one might think that Trump being very pro-Israel and critical of Biden fairly or unfairly, I think mostly unfairly, that Biden wasn't supportive of Israel would try to prove otherwise by coming in with a, a much larger package for the next MOU, ours was $38 billion. And certainly Israel will come in with larger numbers. And on the other hand, again, a country that is deciding that its interests are hemispheric smaller defense budget for itself that means a declining defense industrial base, or certainly not the expansion of the defense industrial base that we actually should be working on in the United States.

Started to work on leaves me with a question whether Israel will get what it thinks it needs out of that 10 year MOU and might very well add fuel to the notion that Israel has to be much more self-reliant on producing its own needs, and also find other sources. Whether those a European and maybe even, 

I mean you can play this out.

I don't think this is an immediate problem, but you can play this out to where they have to start thinking about Russian and Chinese systems as well.

Amir Mizroch: Just a quick thought on what you said about Trump and Biden. I think that in our darkest days, in the days and weeks after October 7th most Israelis looked at president Biden as the greatest thing that happened to Jews since Persian Emperor Cyrus, the Great who let Jews come back to Judea after the Assyrian Conquest.

to me it just seemed like, incredible just incredible. That was what Israelis needed at the time. So we're looking at the 18 hundreds early 19 hundreds. So if 2025 is shaping up to look a lot like, which year? 1870? 1812? What would you fold that space time to?

Dan Shapiro: Yeah, late, late 19th century. Of course Trump is doing other things that echo that era. His tariffs trade wars that he's launching he attributes to 

the what he calls the, the brilliant policies of president William McKinley, who was the last president of the 19th century and who did impose tariffs and then later walked away from 'em as he understood the damaging impact they were having on the economy. But I think we're sort of in a late nine, potentially late 19th century moment.

Look, there's opportunities to push back here. There are Republicans in Congress who believe strongly that the United States should stand with Ukraine who believe Vladimir Putin is a dictator and a threat. Who believe China is a competitor that we need to to help defend partners against even while we find ways of also doing commerce and cooperating with 'em where we can.

There are enough rep, actually, there are enough Republicans in Congress given the small majorities that they have that they would, if they chose to be able to significantly restrain these late 19th century impulses that president Trump is voicing and exercising. So far we haven't seen much pushback.

But there are definitely people, I know them senators, members of Congress and their staffs who are somewhat unnerved by the instincts and the result of those instincts that they're seeing outta the Trump administration.

The one who's been most articulate in pushing back on this has been Senator Mitch McConnell.

In the last two years of his term, he no longer holds a leadership position and he is free to speak his mind, and he is never been a particular fan of Trump. But he's particularly articulate on the dangers of a us withdrawal from the world on the dangers of walking away from alliances on the dangers of.

The United States thinking it can just manage this global competition with these two great power competitors slash adversaries without coming to the aid and being there for our partners who could fall under their sway. So, I'd like to listen to him.

I, I don't know that he's, the, has the influence he had when he was the leader of the Senate caucus. But he's an important voice, and I know there are a lot of people who agree with him whether they're saying so or not.

Amir Mizroch: Thanks for that kind of tour, tour de force really around how things are shaping up. It's really challenging, even depressing almost to find any kind of optimistic way outta this.

But I guess it's really important for people just to understand how those major geopolitical chips are falling. Right. Just to get a sense that we're heading into a world that most of us have never known before, but existed in a certain way about a hundred, 200 years ago.

Dan Shapiro: Listen this is probably a moment to remember the words of Winston Churchill who said, the American people will always do the right thing, but often after they've exhausted every alternative. I actually don't think the policies and the instincts and the derivative outcomes of them I've described are endorsed or supported by the majority of American people.

I think there will be pushback, we'll have a midterm election in a little over 18 months. We'll have a, another presidential election in four years. I think there will be a response to this, but I also think it's worth looking with our eyes wide open at what the President of United States says and what he means and how he acts and, try to assess where we're headed. And I say it with the full intention to try to push back against a lot of those derivative outcomes. 'cause I think they're very harmful to our national interest and to the world. 

Amir Mizroch: Dan Shapiro, thank you so much for being on The Dejargonizer.

It's really great to speak to you again. 

Dan Shapiro: My pleasure.