What have you learned since arriving to Stanford as a visiting fellow in Israel Studies about the need for education about Israel and the Middle East more broadly?

The twentieth-century English novelist, L.P. Hartley, once observed that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Well, the Middle East is a foreign region; they do things differently there too. The Middle East is an enormously diverse, vibrant, and exciting part of the world, but it is not a mirror image of America. And that is something that, frankly, very intelligent, well-educated and well-meaning members of elite American institutions often find rather difficult to acknowledge. The notion of difference is uncomfortable to many of us. We fear that pointing to differences will paint us as judgmental and make us vulnerable to social opprobrium, or worse. But grappling with places that “do things differently” is essential if we are going to understand a complex and contested world. Grappling with places that “do things differently” is crucial if we are going to fulfill our duty of preparing our students to become leaders that face the world with truth, moral courage, and sound policy. We need more and better education about Israel, the Palestinian people, and the Middle East because we want to strengthen our capacity for deep empathy, and effective interaction with actors that are guided by different worldviews. We also need more and better education about Israel and the Middle East so that we both appreciate what we have here in the U.S. that the Middle East lacks, while respecting the things that are prevalent in Israel and the Middle East that can benefit the rest of the world. 

What will you be teaching this academic year, and what do you hope students gain from it?

This year, FSI’s Israel Studies program offers a rich set of educational opportunities, both inside classrooms and outside, in various conferences, panels, visits and webinars. If there was a truly special ray of light for me in the last academic year, it was our amazing Stanford undergraduate students. I taught my course "Israel: Society, Politics, and Policy" last spring quarter, and will teach it again this coming spring. I find that our students come to the subject with curiosity, openness, critical thought, and the capacity for historical and comparative political thinking. In a class exercise we did, some of them even managed to put together a plausible Israeli coalition government, which is more than can be said for most Israeli politicians.

The program recently hosted two events with Tzipi Livni, who has held several senior leadership roles in the Israeli government, including as opposition leader to Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. In your discussions with her, what did she say that resonated with you? What are some of your takeaways?

It was a tremendous joy to host Tzipi Livni here at FSI and have her interact with so many of our faculty and students. No one alive today possesses the depth and breadth of her combined experience in domestic Israeli politics and constitutional debates, international peace negotiations, and post-war diplomatic settlements. Given the current situation in the Middle East, her visit could not have been timelier.

What really struck me in the set of conversations Tzipi Livni held with faculty and students, was her emphasis on two related points. One is her insight that tactical military successes – even spectacular ones – do not in themselves translate into strategic gains, let alone long-term changes in geopolitical realities. If war, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, is politics by other means, then military victories only matter if they are then leveraged for constructive changes in economic, social, and political conditions on the ground. Otherwise, tactical successes dissipate quickly and make little long-term difference. And second, the United States and its allies in the region – notably Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and, more tentatively, Saudi Arabia – currently lack a positive, forward-looking strategy for the future of the region. That vacuum will continue to be exploited by Iran, Russia, and increasingly China, at great cost to the peoples of the region and American interests. The blow of the October 7th massacre, and subsequent multi-front war faced by Israel at the hands of Iran and its proxies (based in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen) has derailed the broadly positive pre-October 7th dynamic of Arab-Israeli rapprochement and regional cooperation represented by the Abraham Accords. To counter what Ambassador Dennis Ross has called Iran’s “Axis of Misery”, we urgently need to articulate and pursue an alternative vision of peace, prosperity, and stability in the Middle East – what we might call a Middle East Peace and Prosperity Pact. Barring such a positive, forward-looking agenda, we are virtually guaranteed to continue on a downward spiral of war, instability, refugee flows, and state disintegration in the Middle East. This will play into the hands of the radicals in the region and serve Iranian and Russian interests, undermining American ones.        

How do you think the events of Oct. 7 and the ensuing wars will shape Israeli society and politics into the future?

The October 7^th massacre was not just another large-scale terrorist attack. It was what Anna Rebecca Levenberg and I described as a “Transformative Tragedy” that has already indelibly altered Israel and the Middle East, and will continue to reverberate for decades to come. On that day Israelis experienced their worst nightmare. Finding themselves defenseless for a few hours in their homes inside Israel (not settlements) they were attacked with a cruelty and glee reminiscent of the worst pogroms of the 14^th and 19^th centuries and the Holocaust. For one day, every single Israeli – and every single friend of Israel around the world – saw exactly what would happen to 10 million Israelis (Christians, Druz, Jews, and Muslims) if Israel was ever overrun by its enemies. The trauma has already produced five main outcomes:

Firstly, the social contract between the People of Israel and the State of Israel was broken on October 7^th and that fracture has been compounded over the past year by the excruciating failure to free all the Israeli hostages – 101 of which, alive and dead, are still in Hamas captivity. The breach of trust was also exacerbated by the Israeli government’s abysmal performance in the delivery of emergency public services in the weeks and months following the shock of October 7^th. Domestically, Israel will spend the next years, possibly decades, trying to restore or renegotiate that social contract and rehabilitating trust in the state. I don’t expect radical change in the next elections (scheduled for November 2026) but politically the Israel of 2030 or 2034 will be very different. Just like it took four years for the 1973 Yom Kippur War to bring about a transformation in Israeli politics and society, so will it be with October 7^th 2023 and the subsequent war, which is still ongoing.

Second, public outrage at the murder, rape, and mass kidnapping perpetrated by Gazans on October 7^th has moved the Israeli political map further to the right, though mainly to the center-right. It also makes Israelis less sympathetic to the real suffering of the Palestinians, the majority of whom are civilians caught up in the fighting in Gaza and anti-terror miliary incursions in the West Bank. The notion that Hamas’s massacre should instigate a process towards Palestinian statehood is now broadly seen by Israelis as an unacceptable reward for terrorism. This will make negotiating a two-state solution even more difficult than in the past, unless a credible new regional initiative addresses the Palestinian issue within a compelling broader package that would include normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, disarming of Palestinian militias, deradicalization of Palestinian education, and massive investment in economic development projects that would help ensure the stability of Egypt, Jordan, and a future Palestinian State. We must not permit the creation of yet another failed state in the Middle East that serves as a safe haven for terrorism.

Thirdly, October 7^th convinced the vast majority of Israelis that deterrence failed and that living in close proximity to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Hezbollah is no longer a tenable proposition. October 7^th turned a disastrous Israeli strategy of concessions and accommodation into a strategy of active dismantlement of the “ring of fire” built by Iran around Israel’s skinny neck. A year after the massacre, there remain over 100,000 Israelis internally displaced from their homes and communities in the south, on the border with Gaza, and in the northern part of the country, on the borders with Lebanon and Syria. Anyone who knows how small Israel is, is aware that “on the border” means literally within hundreds of feet of a fence, with Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah fighters waiting on the other side. The number one priority for the Israeli government right now is to restore enough security on those borders to persuade the 100,000 displaced that it is safe to go back home and that another October 7^th massacre will not take place, despite the repeated promise of senior Hamas officials to replicate the massacre again and again until Israel is annihilated . Reassuring the displaced is a tall order when trauma is fresh and trust is low. Israel is close to achieving that goal vis-à-vis Gaza, where Hamas and PIJ have generally been dismantled as a fighting force. As long as Hamas and PIJ are not able to be resupplied with Iranian missiles through the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, the risk of large-scale rocket fire from Gaza has been greatly diminished. Similarly, but much more challenging, in Lebanon the aims of the current Israeli campaign are to: (1) dramatically degrade Hezbollah’s vast arsenal of missiles, rockets, and drones; (2) find and blow up the extensive terror tunnel system built by Hezbollah on and across the border with Israel; (3) push back Hezbollah’s elite fighting force – the Radwan Force – from the border with Israel, and; (4) prevent Iran from resupplying Hezbollah.

Fourthly, the October 7^th massacre and subsequent war in Gaza and Lebanon, has put Iran and Israel on the path to direct military confrontation. For two decades, Iran’s strategy against Israel – pioneered by the late Kassem Soulaimani – was one of “annihilation by attrition” through proxies. The strategy was simple: if little Israel (economically open and dependent on Western support) could be made domestically uninhabitable, economically weakened, and internationally isolated, it would be gradually worn down and eventually become defenseless. And while Israel was busy fighting an endless war on multiple fronts – its people and high-tech economy suffering, and its international legitimacy undermined by images of dead children in Gaza – the Ayatollahs would be free to continue oppressing the Iranian people and building a nuclear bomb. Defeating Israel would be achieved not by one decisive blow, but by a million cuts from multiple proxies nurtured by Iran and housed in failed states across the Middle East. But sacrificing the lives of the proxy fighters – Afghans, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Yemeni – is so much cheaper for the Iranians than risking the lives of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Attacking Israel via Hamas or Hezbollah also happens to play much better for the Iranians on the BBC. Israel is made to look like Goliath fighting plucky “resistance movements” with exotic names in Arabic, not Persian. October 7^th triggered a process that would remove the veil of plausible deniability from the Iranian puppet-master. As Israel began to dismantle Hamas, the wizard of Tehran stepped from behind the curtain. The night between April 13 and 14 was pivotal. On that night Iran launched 350 projectiles – drones, cruise and ballistic missiles – at a range of miliary and civilian targets in Israel. And on October 2^nd 2024, as Jews in Israel and around the world were preparing to celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, Iran launched at least 180 ballistic missiles at Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. We are now at the beginning of the Iran-Israel War.

Lastly, Israelis, like Jews all over the world, were horrified by the ghastly scenes of celebration and “exhilaration” that exploded on elite university campuses in America, Canada, and Europe from October 8^th onwards – before Israel fired one bullet in retaliation. To witness some of the most privileged, liberal, and free young people in the world openly side with some the most barbaric, oppressive, and cruel terrorist organizations in the world, was no less shocking than the events of October 7^th itself. Israelis know that these displays of ignorance and bigotry are at odds with American values, and that the vast majority of Americans, including the majority of college students, want nothing to do with a worldview that pretends mass murder and rape is “legitimate resistance.” But they also know that shockingly few influencers came to their defense as their hostages were being brutalized in Hamas’s tunnels and as they were facing a multi-front war. The silence of human rights activists and feminist organizations was particularly deafening. The moral inversion of accusing, not Hamas, but Israel of “genocide,” simply serves as proof to most Israelis that they can only rely on themselves. The consequence of the last year is that virtually all Israelis – and the majority of Jews around the world – now understand the world to be far more ominous, far more callous, and far more antisemitic than they ever suspected before October 7^th. This will make Israel wearier of efforts at outside intervention and more determined to become more powerful and strategically self-sufficient. 

Scholars hosted by the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) on October 27 discussed the lessons of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its relevance for understanding the current Israel-Hamas war.

The seminar, “1973 Yom Kippur War: Lessons to Remember,” was moderated by Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI who is also leading the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at FSI. 

In his opening remarks, Diamond said, “Our hearts go out to the people of Israel and this struggle they have now in the wake of one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in anyone’s living memory, maybe the most horrific. And to all of the people in Israel and Gaza, who are innocent people who’ve lost their lives.”

Speakers included Or Rabinowitz of the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting associate professor at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC); Gil-li Vardi, a former visiting scholar at CISAC and Stanford history lecturer; Professor Emeritus Meron Medzini of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s spokesperson during 1973–1974; and Ron Hassner, the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. 

Israel’s Nuclear Question

On October 6, 1973, an Arab alliance of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur – the Jewish holy day of atonement. The three-week conflict was one of the deadliest Arab-Israeli wars. It ended with an Israeli victory, shaping inter-state relations in the region for years to come.

Rabinowitz addressed the nuclear dimension of the Yom Kippur War, quoting Richard Nixon, who said in 1972, “The Israelis have nuclear weapons. I’m not going to tell you how I know, but I know that.”

She said a “partial picture” exists of Israel’s nuclear capabilities during the 1973 conflict, and more research needs to be done. Back then, Israel and the U.S. had reached an understanding about Israel’s “ambiguous nuclear posture,” as well as an agreement that any U.S.-made fighter jets would not be used to deploy nuclear weapons. Regarding nuclear-equipped missiles, “we have to take it into account that this was probably a political signaling which wasn’t backed by an actual ability to put in a nuclear warhead on the ballistic missile, but we just don’t know,” Rabinowitz said.

She added, “I am convinced that Golda Meir would have shown nuclear restraint, even if a bilateral understanding had not been in effect with the U.S. – because it made sense, there were moral clouds, and the Israeli objective was to align itself with the U.S. and guarantee further collaboration, and that would have just backfired.”

An Evolving Military Strategy

Vardi said the Yom Kippur War generated a huge incentive for the U.S. military and others to later develop the “AirLand Battle Doctrine,” which emphasizes close coordination between land forces acting as an aggressively maneuvering defense, and air forces attacking rear-echelon forces feeding those front-line enemy forces. 

“It also taught the military leadership in Israel that their instincts are the right ones, that they should always be on the offensive. If war is coming, then they should always be very active about it – active to the point of aggression,” she said.

As for Egypt, Vardi said, they weren’t planning an all-out war against Israel if they didn’t receive help from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and their tactical goals were therefore limited.

She also noted Israel’s battle doctrine, which rests on three pillars – deterrence, intelligence, and military decision-making, as well as a defensive strategy to be executed offensively, by transferring the battle to enemy territory.

This doctrine failed on October 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than 1,400 people in Israeli territory. “Israeli security perceptions will need to change,” Vardi said.

Confronting Hamas

On October 7, Medzini said, Israel was dealt its worst blow since 1948. “Totally unprepared, wrong intelligence, the army in disarray, leadership, very poor response. And, parts of proper Israel were occupied by Palestinians with a huge number of casualties.”

He said, “The entire country was stunned. How could this happen to us?”

The Yom Kippur War was totally different than today’s conflict between Israel and Hamas, Medzini said. In 1973 it was launched by mostly secular governments in Egypt and Syria, whereas Hamas is a religious organization. 

“We thought in terms of Western thinking or Arab thinking. We did not take into account that Hamas is a religious organization. If you read their covenant, if you look at the logo, it’s not only to destroy the Jews of Israel, it’s to destroy the Jews” everywhere, Medzini said. 

Hassner said Israel’s opponents erred during the Yom Kippur War by believing the Israelis would be unable to mobilize quickly. 

“Mobilization turned out to be very easy,” he said, “because everybody was in the same place. Everybody was in the synagogue. And so, unit commanders just went to the nearest synagogues and told all the young men to come out. The roads were empty, which the Egyptians seemed to be unaware of. Mobilization to the front may have happened at twice the speed at which the Israeli military had planned to mobilize, because nobody else was on the road.”

Also, Hassner said, a backlash effect can exist if one is attempting to exploit their opponents’ religious holiday – “you are going to unleash a certain amount of religiously motivated anger.”

Regarding Israel’s security situation today, Rabinowitz said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies reflect a deep miscalculation of Hamas since the terror group rose to power in 2007 in the Gaza Strip. After Netanyahu took office in 2009, “he went on the record saying that his main mission is to strengthen Hamas” by favoring it over other Palestinian groups.

Medzini said Israel has to conduct a major operation in Gaza to make sure that Hamas loses its military and political capabilities. “You can’t kill an ideology. You can’t kill a religion. But you can certainly destroy a military capability and capacity,” he said. But, Medzini also noted, “Where do we go from here? What’s the end game?”

Diamond spoke of reigniting the peace process and bringing back the two-state solution in a very actual manner. “I’ll note what I think everybody in the room knows that if Hamas is removed from Gaza, something else needs to go and fill that gap.”

Scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies discussed the global and regional implications of Hamas’ terror attack during a webinar on October 13, 2023.

Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, moderated the conversation. Speakers included Abbas Milani, the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies; Ori Rabinowitz of the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting associate professor at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation; and Amichai Magen, of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and the inaugural visiting fellow in Israel Studies at FSI. 

Israel declared war against Hamas after the terrorist group infiltrated the country on October 7, firing thousands of rockets at residential areas, killing civilians, and inflicting the most lethal attack on Israel since its founding in 1948.

Diamond said, “The brutal October 7 attacks on innocent Israeli civilians by the terrorist group Hamas constitute one of the most appalling incidents of terrorism in our lifetimes.” He noted that for a smaller country the size of Israel, when compared to the U.S., their death toll of 1,200 that weekend is equivalent to more than 40,000 Americans – or more than 10 times the U.S. death toll on 9/11.

Impact on Israelis

Rabinowitz said Israelis have been deeply affected by Hamas’ atrocities. “It’s trauma being compounded by failure of the Israeli state and the army institution to respond immediately to all levels of this. It really brought to the surface images of the Holocaust.” 

However, she said, Israeli civil society is strong and resilient, and it’s taking on the role of providing what the government's institutions and leadership should have provided more quickly after the attacks. “Soldiers called up for duty were driven to the front by their parents and by family friends,” for example, she said.

Magen said Hamas’ attacks shattered three fundamental myths for Israelis. One involved the notion that Israel could coexist with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The second illusion that broke was the belief that the government of Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces could effectively protect the civilian population.

“The reason why this is a much bigger trauma than Yom Kippur (in 1973) is because on Yom Kippur there was a very high military death toll, but the civilian population was protected,” Magen said. "However, this time, thousands of Israeli civilians were massacred before the Israeli state could even respond."

The third illusion, Magen said, was the belief that global jihad was non-existent in today’s world. “This is a cautionary tale – sometimes Israel is the canary in the coal mine. What happens in Israel today may tragically happen in the United States or elsewhere.”

Iran and Regional Implications

Milani noted the speculation about whether Iran ordered the attacks, but said that misses the larger picture. “Iran created Hamas in this sense. Iran is the architect of the narrative” that the future of the Middle East must not include Israel.

He said the only solution for lasting peace in the region is a two-state solution (with a Palestinian state) and an Iran with a democratic government. But extremists are in power in all the involved countries and now this outcome is even more difficult, said Milani. “Iran has been adamant in undermining the two-state solution.”

Milani also said the Hamas incursions should end the illusion shared by some in the West that you can make enough concessions to the Iranian regime and it will change its support for terrorism. 

“This regime is not going to abide by laws, it is not going to abide by its commitments. It is murderously suppressing the Iranian people,” he said.

Iran, Milani believes, sees the Hamas attacks as a major turning point in its bid for regional supremacy and the demise of Israel. It wants to undermine the delicate normalization talks between Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. With Iranian-backed Hezbollah aiming more than 150,000 rockets at Israel, Iran is maneuvering for possibly a broader conflict and chaos that could see Israel confronting several fronts.

Milani added that his heart goes out to all the victims and the hostages of this ordeal, noting that the 2 million-plus citizens of Gaza are also hostages to this catastrophe. “Human beings should be considered as hostages in this brutal regime (Hamas).” Their lives should be protected as well, and this would be best for the future of the Middle East and for the future of Israel.

Factors Leading to Attacks

Rabinowitz said scholars in the future will need to examine how the more radical factions in the Middle East realigned and created such a situation, she said. 

Magen said Israel was too complacent in regard to their technologically-enhanced security systems, rife with domestic political polarization, and naïve that a deal could be struck with Hamas.

“Israel was clearly perceived to be vulnerable and divided internally, and the enemy pounced. We in Israel tend to think that we watch very carefully what is happening in the neighborhood, but the neighborhood also watches us,” he said.

With Iran nearing the nuclear threshold for a weapon of mass destruction, the West needs to be incredibly aware of this possibility, Magen said. 

Campus Conversations

Diamond and the scholars emphasized the need for civil dialogue and safe spaces for conversations on college campuses about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rabinowitz said the Stanford community is well-positioned to achieve this. 

She said, “We’re not in Israel and Gaza, and we can use this opportunity to foster more dialogue between the different groups, between different students, and I think that is part of our jobs.”

Magen said, “We must create constructive spaces for empathic and sympathetic analysis, conversation, and engagement. We need to talk about difficult issues – we live in a difficult world.” 

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies produced the webinar, “The Hamas Terrorist Attack on Israel and its Implications for the Middle East,” in cooperation with the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, where Professors Magen and Rabinowitz are visiting scholars. The program was launched in September 2021 with the aim of deepening FSI’s academic expertise in geopolitics and democracy studies as it relates to Israel.

Last week, Hamas carried out horrific, barbaric acts of terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians, resulting in over a thousand killed, including 22 American citizens. The brutality and scale of their slaughter – including killing grandmothers and babies – was shocking. No previous injustice, prior wrong, or longstanding grievance justifies these heinous actions. Hamas launched its terrorist attacks knowing very well that Israel would retaliate, deliberately triggering more suffering for the people they claim to defend. As an act of self-defense, the democratically elected government has the responsibility to protect its citizens and the legitimate right to use force for self-defense, first and foremost against Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also in response to other actors in the region – Hezbollah and their Iranian backers – if they try to expand the scope of this war.

In waging its military offensive, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) must abide by international law and minimize civilian casualties and civilian suffering. Hamas must do the same and stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect their terrorists and military supplies. That is both immoral and illegal. International organizations and the international community also need to work together to reduce civilian suffering in this war, including working with Egypt and Israel to allow safe passage for Palestinian refugees from Gaza into Egypt temporarily.

Hamas has consolidated a ruthless dictatorship to maintain power in Gaza. While polls show that Hamas is popular in Gaza, no citizen there voted for last week’s grotesque massacre, and obviously, Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Israel had no voice either. Even while watching with horror as some Palestinians celebrate these terrorist acts, analysts must be careful not to conflate Hamas with all Palestinians.

Palestinians deserve democratic governance, self-rule, sovereignty, and protection of their human rights and their property. The strategy of neglect of these issues has failed. In the book "Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can" which I published in 2010, I identified “help[ing] to negotiate a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine” (p. 203) as a key U.S. policy objective for promoting democracy and fighting terrorism in the Middle East. I still believe that today. But we must have the moral clarity to denounce Hamas’s horrific terrorism without qualification and at the same time give greater attention to protecting Palestinians’ human rights, including the right to self-determination. Passion for the latter is no excuse for the former.

As a professor at Stanford University who leads a major research institute of international studies, I personally and we collectively as an academic community have a responsibility to study and explain this conflict, both the short-term precipitants and the long-term causes. At the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, we have the Center for International Security and Cooperation which has worked on the Middle East for decades, as well as programs both on Israel Studies and Arab Reform and Democracy. We also collaborate closely with the Program in Iranian Studies. Academic research is our paramount mission. Follow their work in the coming days and weeks. Read my colleague Amy Zegart’s essay on “Israel’s Intelligence Disaster” in Foreign Affairs published today. 

Tune in to our webinar, open to all, on the Middle East this Friday at 2pm Pacific Time - register here. All scholars at FSI speak for themselves, do their own independent research, and follow no institutional guidance from me. No doubt, some will disagree with this essay. Academic freedom and diversity of views are positive features of our institution, our university, and hopefully all universities.

As a former policymaker still engaged in U.S. foreign policy debates, I also feel obliged to make recommendations that advance American interests and values. At this moment in history, charting a successful U.S. foreign policy course in the Middle East is not simple or obvious. Untangling complexity, accurately weighing tradeoffs, and anticipating second and third-order consequences of immediate policy actions is essential.

But one can do all these things – nuanced explanation and prudent prescription – without compromising on essential truths. Terrorism is terrorism. It must be identified clearly and denounced forcefully. It is never justified.

Click the link for a transcript of "Putin's Failed War."

The following commentary from Michael McFaul has been excerpted from his original conversation and edited for length and clarity.

Russia and China’s Relationship

Publicly, there’s still support and solidarity between XI Jinping and Vladimir Putin. But we have to look at what’s happening between the lines. I think it’s pretty tense. At the most recent Shanghai Cooperation Summit in Kazakhstan, Putin acknowledged that one of his agenda items was to address Chinese concerns about what he called “the Ukraine crisis.”

“Concerns” is not a very friendly word. In the Russian readout of that meeting, Putin expressed his appreciation for Xi’s “balanced approach” to Russia’s operations in Ukraine.  But a “balanced approach” is hardly a big sign of support. In the Chinese readout of the meeting, Xi doesn’t even mention Ukraine.

I think the Chinese are shocked, quite frankly, by how poorly the Russian Armed Forces are performing. So many countries, China and the U.S. included, assumed that Russia had the world’s third most powerful military. But it turns out that just counting tanks and the GDP per capita spend on your military does not capture the full extent of its capabilities. If you’re China and you thought you had a loyal, powerful partner, I think this is raising a lot of doubts right now.

Conflict, Economics, and Energy

I have a hard time thinking of a single Russian living in Russia, who's benefiting from this war.

Some people say that sanctions aren’t working. Right now the aggregate numbers do look good for Russia, and that’s because the price of oil and gas went up as a result of their war. But that’s only a short-term gain.

Over 1,000 Western companies have left. That means the innovation, that technology that comes with those companies is also being pulling out. When Exxon Mobil pulled out of Russia, that means technology for their oil industry that we would have been seeing the results of for decades and the future is going to be lost.

And it’s important to remember that the biggest sanctions haven't come yet. Those will happen in December when the Europeans are going to reduce their imports of gas from Russia by a significant amount, and the G7 countries are going to lead an effort to put a price cap on all exports of Russian oil.

Russia thinks it can use energy to blackmail Europe and the West. I think they’ve miscalculated on this. I think they're underestimating the reaction many Europeans might have to being coerced. Nobody likes to be extorted. Nobody likes to be blackmailed.

I thinks it’s a basic psychological thing that when someone is trying to extort you, your response is not going to be, “Oh my goodness, we’ve got to lift sanctions and be friends with this guy that's freezing us.” I think it will be just the opposite, that people are going to be a little colder and be willing to pay a little more to get back at the guy who tired to do this to them.

The War Ahead

I sometimes get accused of being a warmonger. I see it exactly the opposite. Putin will not stop fighting until the Ukrainian army stops him on the battlefield. So if we really want peace in Ukraine, we must continue to arm the Ukrainians.

Putin has already radically failed in this conflict. He thought the Russian army would be embraced as liberators, and it didn’t happen. He thought he could take Kyiv, and it didn’t happen.

This is a horrific war. The Russian Armed Forces attack civilian targets. That's terrorism. I'm not an expert; I don't know what the exact definition of terrorism is, but that feels like a terrorist act to me. They're not counter attacking the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They're literally trying to shut down the electricity grid and literally trying to drown people.

Putin doesn't care about basic human existence, and he's demonstrated that by the way he is fighting and by the way he is shipping innocent people into his country. He doesn't play by basic rules of the game that we thought were in place after 1945.

A month or two into the war, the Ukrainian government in Kyiv was talking in a much more limited way. Now that they've had these achievements and these victories, they're much more optimistic about their capabilities. And who are we to judge whether they're right or wrong? Because we've been wrong in judging their capabilities several times before. So, who am I to say, and who is anybody to say, that they don't have the capabilities to achieve these bigger objectives?

When President Biden announced in the spring that America would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the fall, he spoke of terrorism threats — but never mentioned Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan. In threat assessments about Afghanistan as late as April, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, barely brought up ISIS-K. On Aug. 20 Mr. Biden mentioned the group, in a speech on the last-minute effort to evacuate stranded U.S. citizens and vulnerable Afghans after the Taliban had overrun Afghanistan.

Read the rest at The New York Times