1177: Iran vs. Israel 2025 | Out of the Loop

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Today, an out-of-the-loop episode on Iran and Israel.

It's been a while since we did one of these, and it's on the same topic as one recently, but the Israeli attacks on Iran might actually present an amazing opportunity for a sustained peace deal in the Middle East.

Jason Pack of the Disorder podcast joins us today to share his expertise on Iran, Israel, Iran's nuclear program, the war in Gaza, and a whole lot more.

Here we go, out of the loop on Israel and Iran with Jason Pack.

Jason, thanks for joining me, man.

I appreciate it.

I know it's short notice and late where you are.

My pleasure, Jordan.

So you speak four languages.

You've been kidnapped twice.

Jason, you don't have to copy my bio just to get on the show.

And I'm flattered, but it really wasn't necessary.

What languages do you speak?

My Arabic used to be quite good, particularly when I lived in Syria because you couldn't get around with English there.

Once you know Arabic, Hebrew is like almost the dialect of Arabic.

It's quite easy.

The grammar rules are simpler.

The vocabulary is much smaller.

And then for my graduate work, I worked at the the archives in France, and I like me some Cote d'Azur and some fine wines, so I've tried to work on it.

Nice.

All right.

And so, where did you get kidnapped?

I don't want to focus really on this, but I know people are probably curious because people ask me that all the time.

It's funny that you mentioned that because I had not told the details of the story until just recently when the PKK, which is essentially the Kurdish Workers' Party, the liberationist Kurds in eastern Turkey, they decided to give up their struggle against Turkey just earlier in the spring of 2025.

And then I told that story in The Spectator, but I took a cab in Aleppo with a Fulbright buddy of mine.

We were going to Beirut.

I had this big date with Sophia.

And what do you know?

We didn't make the date.

They smuggled this illegal pipe from Syria to Lebanon.

They were doing illegal drilling in the Lebanese mountains.

And we were asked to give a voluntary donation while we were detained by gentlemen with AK-47s.

And out of the kindness of my heart, I voluntarily donated.

Okay.

Interesting.

But you missed your date.

That was, well, it was a pretty good excuse, I would say, to miss a date.

She actually didn't believe me.

Surprise, surprise.

Never been friends after that point.

Oh, really?

Like, she never believed you?

It was just like, all right, you're a liar.

Bye.

We met the day after.

Okay.

And she's, I can't believe you didn't let me know.

And I'm like, you know what?

I only had my Syrian chip and my phone.

This is back in 2004.

In the Lebanese Mountains, there's no signal on your Syrian chip.

Also, I feel like when you're getting kidnapped by guys with AK-47s, why didn't you text me?

Falls a little bit like

there's a few reasons I didn't text you.

Namely, I didn't want to get shot in the face with an AK-47.

You sat at a cafe all night while I was being held at gunpoint.

Yeah, I think that she just fundamentally didn't believe the story because there are some wild elements.

And again, I don't know if we should get off on this tangent, but it is not the traditional kidnapping story.

Let's put it that way.

You've lived in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Oman, which I heard is really nice, actually.

And Gaddafi-era, Libya.

What is it like to live in Gaddafi's Libya?

In Assad, Syria, for that matter?

Because aren't dictatorships like police states, aren't they kind of safe because all the criminals are either dead or running the government?

That's exactly right.

They're terribly safe, but they're two incredibly different places.

To start with Libya, when I was there in 2008, picture Cuba, in other words, rusting 1970s infrastructure, but a place that was really wealthy.

In other words, you have falling apart but fancy hotels, and then everyone is really afraid to talk about things.

And Syria, very much the opposite.

Syria,

vibrant cafe life.

We have to keep in mind that both Damascus and Aleppo are among the oldest constantly inhabited cities and beautiful Ottoman palace restaurants and very green and...

quite multicultural.

And Libya, I wouldn't recommend the culture.

Let's put it that way.

Interesting.

Okay.

Well, that's a bummer.

You'd like to think these places are all nice to hang out.

But I suppose now that there's a civil war and actual slave markets in Libya, maybe it's not exactly a good hang if it ever was.

All right, let's dive into the Iran stuff because that's why people have tuned in.

I'd love a brief overview of what's been happening between Israel and Iran over the past couple of weeks.

Obviously, we can't go all the way back to, whatever, 1948 or whatever with Israel and Iran.

But I would love to hear about the latest volleys, why these are happening.

So for people who don't follow the news, what has been going on?

Because now they're hearing mumblings about Iran, and they're not sure what's going on, and they know Israel's involved, and maybe that's it.

Sure.

There was a 12-day war, which was initiated by Israel because they launched a secret attack with drones and airstrikes.

But in a way, the war was initiated by Iran because Iran has backed Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and these are terrorist proxy militias that have attacked Israel from before October 7th, but doubled down on their attacks after October 7th.

So the Israelis had been preparing, and I kid you not, for decades to

attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran's nuclear scientists, and key infrastructural nodes.

For example, there were some missiles that were smuggled by the Mossad into Iran in 2008 and sat in a truck until they were used on the sneak attack on June 13th.

Wow, of 2025.

So these missiles have just been sitting there, basically getting old enough to enlist in the military themselves at this point, or vote, whatever, depending on which jurisdiction you're in.

And then somebody's been babysitting these things and then just opened the garage door and let them fly.

That's crazy to me.

Well, essentially, the Mossad had a multi-decade-long operation, not only to compromise the highest echelon of the Iranian government, but to spy on every aspect of its infrastructure and nuclear program, and then to catch it by surprise.

And for those who haven't paid attention to this kind of meta dynamic, it's that there was good cop, bad cop going on between the Israelis and Americans on negotiations with Iran, because Trump tore up Obama's Iran deal, known as the JCPOA,

and then he was trying to negotiate his own deal with his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.

And Witkoff had tempted the Iranians into another round of negotiations on Sunday.

And it was the Thursday before the Sunday that the Israelis attacked.

And it appeared that those last rounds of negotiations were a ruse.

And it showed that Trump could actually keep a secret and he could good cop, bad cop the Iranians.

This attack was pretty devastating.

You hear that a bunch of commanders died, a bunch of nuclear scientists died.

I mean, they kind of seemed to know where everyone lived.

And there was one story that I heard elsewhere outside of a news source, but from another source, somebody being interviewed from Israel.

And they said something like, the Israelis were able to essentially create a mandatory meeting for all of the top brass of Iran's Air Force and Missile Command.

They got invited by the right people.

They got the email.

They all cleared their schedules.

It was in the place of Israel's choosing.

And then everyone showed up and immediately got whacked and died.

This was some medieval shit.

Like, yes.

I call you to the Knights Council where we will be having the reconciliation meeting with your brother.

And then all the knights go to the council and they're locked in the room and it was set on fire.

Like,

this is the classic

intel bait and switch tactic.

And you may say, well, this is very immoral or it's whatever.

Except the Iranians have armed Houthi and Hezbollah proxies, which have been bombing Israel for no reason since October 7th.

So they got their just desserts, or as my father likes to say when he hears about something like an Iranian nuclear scientist falling out of a window, couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

There's a lot of people online saying Iran has a right to defend itself, but I think that when you look at it that way, it's okay, as long as we don't count the Houthis, we don't count Hezbollah, and we don't count Hamas, then Iran is defending itself.

But if you count all the proxies they use to attack other people, they're attacking other people, and this is them getting smacked across the face.

I think what's weird is a lot of people online, they'll go, it's okay, it's a proxy where it's this and this and this.

But once you start being being really effective with how many people you kill that are important, like a bunch of commanders and a bunch of scientists, it's like, wait, you're not playing fair.

You're supposed to shoot missiles and like miss and then hit farms, and you're supposed to shoot rockets and they're supposed to get intercepted by the Iron Dome, and everybody looks tough.

And it's like, you're actually doing a bunch of damage to us.

Now we're going to cry on Instagram and have all of our supporters cry online.

It's odd to me.

It's like, are we fighting a war or are we just like flexing our biceps in the mirror?

I'm a creature of the center left, but one of the things I found about the left is that it loves a loser.

And that is quite self-destructive.

We've picked political candidates both in the UK and U.S.

who are hapless.

And then we tend to like basket case countries.

Oh, but they're the underdog.

And too much success, that must be immoral.

They must have rigged the system.

I want to point out, though, that this Israeli sneak attack,

as successful as it was, and as much as it succeeded in drawing the American patron to finish what Israel could not, it hasn't entirely decimated the Iranian nuclear program.

Therefore, we can tell funny stories about how the Israeli commanders outwitted many people, but they didn't likely finish the job.

And it is propaganda to say, oh, the Israelis won this 12-day war.

It's not as simple as that.

I read this today in the Times.

I think they've taken out a lot of top brass and important people, but they set the nuclear program back in Iran something like three months.

i mean it's probably hard to get an exact date or number of digits but if we're timing iran getting nukes in single digit numbers of months that seems pretty tenuous and dangerous you know if you think oh we bombed forto with their uh capacity where they enriched uranium and we blew up all these launchers they're gonna be gone for it it's like you know one guy raises his hand and says three years another person says no way five years it's gonna take all this time to retrain people another person 12 weeks yeah but that sounds about right it's like geez man it takes longer to manufacture the weapons we used in the attack than we set them back.

Or did we simply set them back that number of months, but they're still, I don't know, N years away from the bomb itself?

That's what I'm confused about.

I want to say that these are known unknowns.

You're referring to the American classified intelligence report that was leaked on the successfulness of B-2 attacks, and particularly those bunker-busting bombs that hit Fordot, Natans, and Esfahan.

No one knows.

It may be that those in specific set them back three to six months, but the Israeli actions decapitating decapitating various scientists set them back two or three years.

I was always a proponent of a multilateral sanctions regime with carrots and sticks like the Iran deal under Obama.

But in the absence of that, I do think that what Trump did established excellent deterrence.

And therefore, it almost doesn't matter if it was militarily successful in hitting the enriched uranium because we weren't trying to hit the enriched uranium.

We were trying to show we have the will to attack if you're going to try to break out.

Deterrence is a state of mind more than it is a physical thing.

Interesting.

Yeah, that was another question I had, which is, why does he warn them, hey, we're going to blow up this facility?

So then they move all the uranium.

And I read somewhere in this, again, fog of war, but they had filled all of the tunnels up with poured concrete a few days prior.

Well, actually, that's a good question.

Why would you pour concrete in tunnels of something that's prevent them from collapsing?

Oh, I see.

You think they're just going to go and dig this stuff out at some point and then reopen the facility?

But surely they moved the uranium.

And also, that was part of the idea is maybe we don't want a plume of enriched uranium in the air in the middle of Iran.

And again, I am someone who mostly loathes Trump.

But as we say on my disorder podcast, we like to call a spade a spade.

And I advocate for order.

If Trump said to them, we're going to attack these facilities.

Please move the enriched uranium because we don't want the water table to become radioactive and we don't want the environmental disaster of this.

Good on him, because that's the right thing to do.

And this seems to have been something that the Iranians respected because when they launched their symbolic counterattack against the American air base in Qatar, which is only a very short distance from Iran, ergo, if there was no warning, they could have really hit American service personnel there.

The Iranians gave Trump the ability to make sure that none of our service personnel were hurt and that the majority of the missiles were shot down.

So I think that choreography is really good.

And you can establish deterrence without killing people.

And you might even be able to set back the Iranians and make them want to negotiate a better deal without having to blow up their uranium enrichment facility.

So again, I don't know how the diplomacy will play out from here.

But there is a case to say that the combination of carrots and sticks and forewarning and surprise was actually quite elegant.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I'm sure they moved all their personnel out of that plant too before we bombed it.

I guess it was nice of them, is that what we say?

To have us remove our service personnel from that military base so they didn't get hit by incoming missiles.

How come a country like Iran doesn't just buy technology and uranium from places that already have it, like North Korea, right?

Why don't they just say, hey, guys, you want a couple billion dollars?

We know you're broke as hell.

You have nukes.

Send people over here and help us.

Or do they already do that?

And if they already do that, can't they just buy uranium from North Korea?

Or is uranium so valuable and hard to enrich that North Korea is only selling expertise and not raw material?

This is a great question.

I want to point out.

I'm a Middle East expert and I am not a nuclear scientist.

However, what I understand is that the Pakistanis incepted the Iranian program, right?

They had this scientist, A.Q.

Khan, who is incredibly famous as the mass proliferator of nuclear knowledge.

And he actually was relevant for the North Korean program.

He was training the Libyans when they got caught red-handed trying to smuggle uranium.

And that's one of the things that got Qaddafi to finally pay for the Lockerbie bombings and to give up his program.

So the Pakistanis were massive proliferators and they sold expertise.

Uranium can be shipped and smuggled, but it can also be detected.

And we know where the Pakistanis have theirs and we know where the North Koreans have theirs.

And North Korea and Iran are not near each other.

It could easily be intercepted.

And it's a risky transaction.

And I think that states don't give away these sovereign capacities because they're always afraid that the state that they might give it to will not have exactly their interests.

So if we look at Pakistan and Iran, obviously Pakistan is a Sunni country and it's allied to Saudi Arabia.

And Iran is a Shia country and it's revanchist and it's against Saudi Arabia.

So the Pakistanis and AQ Khan was going rogue.

And he helped them in some ways, but he wasn't going to give them the enriched uranium because what if there was a war and then the Shia had a bomb?

The Sunnis are quite happy that the Shia don't have a bomb.

So I want to point out on this note, America does not let Britain have

the missiles which launch the British nuclear deterrent.

And America and Britain are arguably the two strongest allies in the world.

It's not just that Britain is America's closest ally.

I would say the intelligence sharing relationship, the political relationship, and the economic relationship is the deepest relationship between two countries.

And yet, we do not allow Lockheed Martin to sell the missiles to Britain.

We only lease them so that the lease can be terminated.

So, something relating to nuclear is such a critically important sovereign capacity that states are unlikely to want to part with something like weapons-grade enriched uranium.

I see.

Well, you never can trust those Brits anyway.

They've shown that time and time again.

No, I'm

just pissed off.

A double-digit percentage of the listenership.

No, I kid.

Okay, why is now a great opportunity for Trump to show how 5D chess that he is playing and end this war?

Because you and I were talking offline yesterday and you wrote a piece for the Boston Globe that was really clear.

Like, hey, it doesn't really matter if you don't like Trump or you do like Trump.

Now is the time to actually put something into action because...

I don't know, maybe Iran is a little bit on the back foot.

Israel is looking for an excuse maybe to stop the war, hopefully.

And Trump would love to look good for stopping it.

And everybody in the world is maybe we can stop shooting missiles at each other.

So this does seem like the timing is good.

I'd love for you to explain what that would look like.

Sure.

I think that there are multiple layers here.

Let's start with the ceasefire layer, then get to the permanent peace layer, and then get to the whole regional reconfiguration.

On the ceasefire level, I'm not sure that the timing is perfect, right?

Because the Israelis established complete aerial dominance over the skies of Tehran so that they could operate a full full fifteen hundred miles, two thousand kilometers from their country and hit targets against the nuclear program or against the regime.

And therefore to be stopped and curtailed just as they had achieved that, they might have felt we couldn't complete the job.

Conversely, from the Iranian side, the Iranians might have felt, oh,

we were just figuring out how to more break through the Israeli Iron Dome and we depleted their arrow and Thad missiles, which is part of the Patriot system which blocks the missiles.

If we had had more time, we could have brought them to their knees and caused more civilian casualties.

So there's a balance there.

But a ceasefire is always the right time if it saves people's lives.

So that's what's going on in the ceasefire level.

What Trump did was by

interjecting America, the hegemonic global top-orderer superpower, into the conflict.

He could then say, look to Israel, I helped you with this thing that you couldn't do by yourself.

I now won't tolerate any more attacks.

And then Iran, I won't tolerate more retaliations because then we can come in much harder.

We want to make sure that the Persian Gulf is open.

We want to make sure that oil is flowing.

And I don't want the bad pull numbers that this war will have going on.

And again, I have to tip my hat to him.

I believe that the markets are not biased.

And the stock market soared.

Oil price went down $10 a barrel for Brent crude and WTI, almost to the levels from before the war started.

And you can't rig that.

If the markets think that the ceasefire isn't going to hold or this is not sustainable, then the oil futures will be high.

But the markets believe that he pulled off a tremendous coup.

And again, this gets back to deterrence theory, Jordan, still on the ceasefire level.

I got to hand it to the guy.

If your adversaries don't know what you might do, if you violate a thing, you have one of the core elements of deterrence.

You don't have mutually assured destruction.

You have a wild card that people aren't really in the mood to flip over all the time because it might not be good for you.

Interesting.

So just having a ceasefire between Iran and Israel does nothing.

It neither gets rid of the initial cases belly from the Israeli perspective, which is that Iran is nuclearizing so as to destroy Israel and Iran is supporting proxies.

And these are these militias that are like almost states within a state in Lebanon and Yemen.

In Yemen, the state within a state runs the state.

In Lebanon, the state within a state runs its own army and own institutions and education.

That's Hezbollah.

The Hezbollah and the Houthis, yeah.

Exactly.

Okay.

So those cases belli have not been addressed if you just have a ceasefire.

And then from the Iranian side, they say Israel oppresses the Palestinians.

It occupies Palestinian lands.

It's a regional hegemon which supports our Sunni enemies, particularly Saudi and the UAE.

And over time, Israel has gone more and more to supporting those Sunni Gulf states.

And the Iranians feel more cornered, for lack of a better term.

And therefore, just having a ceasefire doesn't address either side's grievances.

I happen to believe that there is this unique historical moment.

It has to do with the wild card of Trump, but more so it has to do with the regional geometry, for lack of a better term, being reconfigured.

There had been a balance between the Shia Crescent and the rest of the Sunni Middle East and Israel.

And that Shia Crescent has been destroyed because since October 7th, the axis of resistance, as it's called, and those are Iran and its proxies who are mostly either Shia or allied with the Shia, they have been weakened and degraded.

Your listeners may remember the Hezbollah Pager attack where the Israelis introduced micro-bombs into Pagers in Lebanon.

That decapitated a lot of the leadership there.

The Houthis have been bombed not only by Biden, but by Israel and by Trump.

And therefore, that there is this new balance of power where the axis of resistance, the Shia crescent, is weakened.

And then Syria flipped.

Syria was run by the Assads.

I lived there when Bashar al-Assad first came to power.

And they are from the Alawite sect, which is a kind of heterodox Shia.

And they are backed by Iran.

Recently, they were turfed out of power.

And we have a Sunni Islamist, Ahmed Sharra, known as El-Jolani, who runs the country.

So that essentially took one piece of the chessboard and flipped it.

And then Trump did something genius, which is that he said, oh, great, I'm going to lift the sanctions and we can do business with Syria.

Whereas the Europeans were not willing to lift those sanctions until he did it.

So the chessboard is able to be reconfigured in a way that favors our Sunni allies in the Gulf and favors a kind of Anglo-American-Israeli position on how to work with moderate allies in the region and to potentially constrain Iran.

And it may be that Trump and Witkoff are too transactional and short-sighted to bring this about and they haven't done anything to achieve it yet.

But maybe they've cleared the ground.

And I think that the Europeans need to step into this void because Trump is very bad at the long term, even if he is sometimes genius at the transactional short term.

If we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust, you're going to want to go up in flames while sporting some of the fine products and services that support this show.

We'll be right back.

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Now, back to Out of the Loop on Iran and Israel with Jason Pack.

It just seems to me like, isn't Iran going to go, all right, we're still going to try and come out with a bomb here?

Why would we stop?

Especially if you set us back a couple of months or maybe a few years.

That just proves to us that we need a bomb because you never would have hit us if we had one.

100%.

We're speaking on June 25th

of 2025.

And this morning, the Iranians said, guess what?

We're going to go immediately for a bomb because we understand that if we had the bomb, we'd never have been able to get attacked like this.

And you invoked the North Korea lesson.

It's sometimes called in the Middle East the Libya lesson because Qaddafi decided to give up his program as well as his anthrax and other biological weapons.

And what do you know?

Then the West could support a popular uprising against him, and he got killed in a ditch.

So what's called the Libya lesson is that if you nuclearize, you're in power forever and your sons get to inherit the throne.

Just look at North Korea as opposed to Libya.

The Iranians, of course, are thinking that.

But if we have the whole region on board, in other words, if we could actually get the major European countries and Trump's America and our regional allies in the Sunni Gulf plus Turkey, it won't matter if China and Russia support the regime.

They could really put the screws on the Iranians economically, and they could have a system whereby it would be very, very unlikely that the Iranians could nuclearize.

And we could give security guarantees to Israel, which is that if the Israelis end the war in Gaza, commit to a Palestinian state, they could get a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia, something like the Abraham Accords 2.0, which Biden worked on and Trump and Jared Kushner worked on.

And we would would give them a commitment if the Iranians were getting close to a breakout in the nuclear program, oh, we will support you in a military option.

So it would be essentially a multilateral approach to the denuclearization of Iran as part of achieving many regional objectives.

I see.

So you think Iran will eventually just be exposed as kind of this militarily defeated, morally bankrupt nation.

I mean, their whole thing is, hey, we're against imperialist aggression, even though they're throwing proxies all over the Middle East and doing the exact same thing.

It seems like they've always calculated the West is going to back down.

Do we think they can learn that that's a mistake?

Because it's their whole, we're going to go straight to the bomb, doesn't really sound like they've learned that lesson.

I love how you put that, Jordan.

They calculated that Trump always chickens out, and they calculated it because Biden and Obama didn't exactly push maximally to get the best deal with the JCPOA.

And I love the Iran deal, but it had some bad provisions.

And I don't want to get into the details, but maybe now we're in a position of greater strength and unity, and we could negotiate a better deal.

And that's exactly what deterrence is.

So I want to make an analogy with Russia and Ukraine.

I will blame Obama in 2014 for not enforcing the Budapest Memorandum when Putin annexed Crimea.

And that's what allowed Putin to miscalculate in 2022.

Oh, I can invade the rest of Ukraine and I'll get away with it.

No one will do anything because in 2014, the sanctions were not tough enough.

However, if we defeated them in a war and then we're negotiating again, they know that we mean business because we've spent all these billions.

We've developed this drone army.

We did this.

We did that.

NATO countries upped their defense spending to 5%.

And now if we look at the Middle East, the Iranians were shown as completely incompetent, not even able to keep their kind of signal messages private.

And then their entire leadership, think of how funny this is, they knew

that the Israelis wanted to attack at a certain time, but their leadership was blown up in their own beds.

They weren't even sleeping underground the night of the attack.

It's mind-blowing.

Yeah, interesting.

They kind of just thought, oh, this isn't going to happen.

This is ridiculous.

They're just bluffing.

Oops.

But even if it isn't going to happen, you live in the Middle East.

You're an Iranian nuclear scientist.

You sleep underground.

Yeah.

Every night.

Not just on nights where Israel says they're going to attack, but every night.

Exactly.

Okay.

So who needs to be in the room for this to be real?

You said the major European leaders.

Who else needs to be in the room to get this deal signed?

Obviously, the Ayatollahs and the Israelis and the Americans, Germany, France?

I think that the Qataris are the key here, right?

So if we look at regional diplomacy in the last five years, everything happens in Doha.

When you need to get Israeli hostages released, you go to Doha.

When you need to get the Russians to give back Ukrainian children that they kidnapped, you go to Doha.

When we were making a deal with the Taliban, which was a disgraceful deal, where did we do it?

In Doha.

I want to point out that when we got the ceasefire that Trump announced, the only people that could get the Iranians to honor the ceasefire were the Qataris.

So if we can make a deal where the Qataris want to mediate this and then the Europeans want to actually do the economic bits.

We are in business.

Okay.

How do we cut the chain between Iran and these proxies, though, right?

Because they've got Hezbollah, they've got the Houthis, they got Hamas.

You're going to be shocked to hear the answer.

Doha.

That's the answer.

Doha.

Because all of the money for Hamas to build the tunnels in the period 2006, after they won that election till October 7th, that money was sitting in bank accounts in Doha.

And it wasn't that it was money that the Qataris paid for terrorism.

And I hate when people to my right, the kind of FDD crowd, and we're talking the real Republican Zionist neocons, say the Qataris funded terror.

And that's not true.

It's that the Qataris were told you need to pony up money to rebuild houses in Gaza and rebuild education there.

And Hamas happens to use that money to build tunnels and stockpile weapons.

So we can do things with the Qataris Qataris

to have more anti-money laundering and to have pressure on certain Hamas leaderships and certain Houthi and Hezbollah leaderships.

The reason why it's all in Doha is Turkey doesn't have exactly the financial heft that the Qataris have.

And in Iran, you're disconnected from the financial system.

So yes, there are Hamas leaders who are in Iran, but they can't transact multi-billion dollar business to resuscitate their empire.

Okay.

What about Netanyahu?

I mean, someone's got to tell him, okay, time to end the war, even though your whole brand is strength and survival.

Good luck with that.

Because isn't he maybe a little worried that he's going to get prosecuted for things?

And he staked it all on this.

It's not only that he's worried, Jordan.

He has carved out a position for himself that so long as the war continues, he can stay in power.

And if he's not in power, as you alluded there, he may face corruption charges, or there could be an election and he'll lose because he's unpopular.

That said,

he achieved his life ambition and will go down as a hero for most Israelis.

Not a hero for me because the corruption, the warmongering, some of the hatred against Arabs, which was completely unnecessary, even while trying to achieve strategic goals.

His dalliances with Putin, that stuff, I think, for many Israelis is...

loathsome and they loathe him.

They just want to see the back of him.

But guarantees can be carved out here.

Netanyahu is not a dictator, but I'm going to refer to something called the dictator's dilemma, Jordan.

The dictator's dilemma is: so long as you're in power, you're not going to die in a ditch.

But as soon as you are not in power, your enemies are going to use the secret services or

the courts and they're going to prosecute you, and you're going to either end up in jail or die in a ditch.

I think a political solution can be made with Israel and its allies, whereby Netanyahu

rides off into the sunset.

He gets some kind of prize for what he's achieved.

And it's not that the corruption cases are dropped, but he's an old man and his wife is very old.

She's the one who's at the kind of linchpin, Sarah Netanyahu, of these corruption cases.

And if they do the right thing, what do you know?

America makes a place for them in Florida or something is worked out here because we can't let one man's personal motives hijack a whole region.

There's something that I either missed or didn't understand.

So we're calling for Iran's full denuclearization, no civilian program, decades of inspections.

What gets them to say yes?

Cash, security?

Aren't they going to look at, again, the Libya lesson, the Ukraine lesson, and say, no, thanks.

People who give up nukes, they get wrecked.

That is the paradox in the conundrum.

They have their feet to the fire, or as some people might say, they have their balls in the vice.

They are really prostrate now.

And what I would say is, guess what?

We're not going to stomach regime change if you do X and Y and Z.

Or if you

ever block the inspectors from coming in, the war restarts and the sanctions restart.

There's a term here called snapback sanctions.

These existed prior to the JCPOA and prior to some of the parts of the Obama-Iran deal, which I think were in error.

We can create a legal regime where it incentivizes the Iranians, not only the leadership, but the people and the scientists, to want want to comply with the inspectors.

And you may say it's impossible, but a lot of things have happened in the last 10 years in the Middle East, which are quote unquote impossible.

I think that solving this is actually among the more possible things.

And the Iranians, the Qataris, and the Saudis in the plan that I put forward can equally take a victory lap.

We ended the war in Gaza and saved these babies from dying.

We got the Israelis to commit to a Palestinian state.

And yes, of course, the Israelis are going to get bribed with American investments into their high-tech sector.

And the Israelis are going to get bribed with more student visas for people to go to Silicon Valley.

But Gazans and Iranians are going to get bribed with visas to study in Europe and with billions and billions to regrow their economies.

So, I mean, there's an ability to bribe all these peoples.

And I want to say, the thing that the peoples of this region share is human capital.

Iran is not only a rich civilization culturally, it's it's amazing the technical and human capital skill that exists in that place relative to how oppressive the government is.

It's in Europe's interest to want to open up and create these programs.

And the Gulfies understand this.

They know that so long as Iranians or Palestinians are not a security threat for them, they're very happy to work with them and have them staff their economies.

Yeah, it's very interesting.

I've gotten a lot of messages on Instagram and an email from Iranians in the past week or two.

And I was just like, oh, sorry for what's going on.

And they were like, we're so mad.

And I was like, yeah, it's a really complicated situation.

And they're like, one guy said something, I'm so angry.

And I was like, I'm sure you are.

And he goes, we really want them to keep bombing.

And I was like, wait, where are you?

And he's Iran.

And I was like, you want Israel to keep bombing.

And he's like, yes.

And I did a double take because I was like, wait a minute, what?

I want to point out that I have a girl I dated in New York.

She elite Iranian woman.

She wants the Israelis to keep bombing.

I know people in the Shah Shah orbit in LA, in Sweden, elsewhere.

They'd like the job to be finished.

It's mostly a social class thing.

If you're elite in the level that did well under the Shah,

you've been suppressed by the Ayatollah.

And they think that if the regime collapses, there will be an inversion and the old elites will come back and it'll be good for them.

If you're more a lower middle class person, particularly from a rural background, the Shah was quite oppressive.

Not that the Ayatollahs, but you don't want the Israelis to finish the job because you're going to lose your social standing.

And I don't think that we can impose regime change.

It didn't really work very well in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And therefore, if the Iranian people want to do that,

they can do that actually much better when we've stopped bombing.

That's right.

I agree with that.

I just thought that was an interesting sort of counterintuitive thing to see in my Instagram inbox, which is that the people in Iran are like, keep it going.

And I'm like, wait, what?

Let's talk about Gaza.

The Saudis, are they potentially willing to bankroll Gaza's reconstruction?

I mean, I think it would take a multinational effort here, but first of all, somebody's got to pay for this.

Who's going to do that?

And who is administering the hospitals?

Who's doing the police thing in Gaza and the border patrol and all this stuff?

Because when I was in Gaza, this is like 25 years ago.

The police that I talked to, because they were friends who were Hamas supporters, actually turned out, and they worked for the Palestinian Authority.

Reconcile that one.

But we went and talked to their police friends, and they were joking about torturing people and like chasing women and putting bottles up people's butts and stuff like that.

These are not good police officers.

These are not people that treat citizens with respect.

These are people that are also working with Hamas and things like that.

Like the whole thing is rotten to the core and the people who live there are just dealing with this crap on a daily basis.

You can't just have somebody in a government office that says, this is how it works.

You got to replace the police and the border patrol and all the security officials and possibly all the other civil servants, too.

I love how you've brought it down to the level of corruption.

Gaza is a very corrupt place and corruption undermines people's morals.

No one trusts anyone and hence there is a reversion to an almost primordial clan-like structure.

If he's not my brother's friend, I can't trust the guy.

And it's very difficult, even with all the ideological and Islamist and anti-Semitic layers on top when trust is so broken down.

But to go back to your question of who bankrolls it, the answer is that it's going to be who's always bankrolled the rebuilding of Gaza, the Europeans and the Gulfies.

The Qataris, after the 2006 Gaza War, they rebuilt all the hospitals and the roads.

The Europeans send billions there pretty much every year.

They send billions, even though they know that a lot of those billions end up in the corrupt pockets of some police official who has a brother in Switzerland who's laundering the money for him.

That's why my plan, which I'm the first to say, it may not work.

It has some pie-in-the-sky elements.

But all I want to say is you show me a better one because we're in something I would call the enduring disorder where all solutions look bad, and there's every reason why people with the same interests don't coordinate together.

So I want to create a situation where we have mutual incentives, and that's to get Gulfy Arabs,

regional states, Israelis, Dias Rura Jews, and the West, as well as Russia and China, to have similar interests.

They're never going to be the same, but if our interests can be 80% the same, we can work together.

Those Ayatollahs might never build a nuke, but they can get a hold of some of the bomb deals on the fine products and services that support this show.

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Now, back to Out of the Loop.

Do you think it'll have to start off as a police state to keep Hamas from infiltrating through all the structures that are being rebuilt?

I'm going to say something which is unpopular.

It has to start off as a neocolonial state.

The key point here is that administration that I call for, and I've been calling for this since October 7th, I've briefed U.S.

Congressmen, I've written pieces in the Boston Globe and foreign policy about a cuttery-led quartet of Arab states to administer Gaza.

Administer means police, borders, hospitals, scholarships.

It has to be neocolonial because there is no authority in Gaza which is neutral.

The Palestinian authority is rotten through the core.

Hamas is going to try to reconstitute itself.

And then you have either the Klans or the militias that the Israelis have funded, which are like rival gangs, right?

They have drug wars, they smuggle aid.

And does a neo-colonial solution sound good to me?

No.

However, it might be the best of the alternatives.

And it's going to be a solution which prepares for elections in five or ten years to hand off first at the local level, to train, to have scholarships, to really create a best practices transparency system.

And it's not Trumpian pie in the sky that it's going to be a Riviera.

It isn't.

It's going to be a tough slog, and it may have aspects not of a police state, but of a neo-colonial juggernaut, which is not necessarily going to be fair, but it's going to be the way that things worked in the 19th century, which is order was imposed and there were carrots at the end of the line so that people's living standards could improve.

And then if you have the hope that your kids are not going to be living in this shithole, I think people are going to want to take the steps to get there.

I hope so.

I feel bad for everybody in this situation.

Let's say China or Russia spoils the deal or aims to.

What are the pressure points that the West still holds?

Because I know with Iran, China wants Iranian oil, right?

So they're not clamoring to screw up any deals.

They want the Strait of Hormuz open.

They want Iranian oil.

They don't want it being bombed all the time.

They might be in on this, but what if they're trying to spoil the deal with Gaza and other things like that?

What are the levers the West has that we might need to pull?

Jordan, allow me some more flattery here because I learned from Trump flattery always works.

You are asking excellent questions because my theory of the enduring disorder is that some powers in the 21st century simply want to disorder the world without having an alternative order.

And that makes Russia today different

than Stalinist Russia or Khrushchev's Russia.

I might not have loved communism, but it was an order.

Here's the economic textbook.

Read your marks.

Do this, translate this book from Russian.

It was an order.

What Putin wants is that Gaza and Libya are just completely disordered and the Iranians have a bat shit, crazy economy and they can sell their oil at a discounted price.

So he may actually want to spoil something which is working in Gaza just to spoil it so that the West can't be on the same page.

The reason that Putin loves for the Sahel countries, and those are the ones just south of the Sahara Desert, to be completely basket cases is then they emit migrants who go to Europe, and that drives European populists to the anti-migrant neo-populist right.

And then they are disordered because they don't want to be a part of the EU and they don't want to do this with NATO.

And that driving to neopopulism just disorders things.

He doesn't have any other reason for there to be these crazy migrant flows.

So the reason that he will be against a genius solution like getting the Saudis to want to rebuild Gaza and making a deal with Israel and having the Iranians get a lot of rebuilding assistance for giving up their nukes would begin to order the Middle East.

And then it would be unleashing a region that has human capital, oil wealth, and a great geostrategic location.

And the Russians would be like, oh no, all of a sudden there's all this economic growth and oil is being produced and we're not a part of that.

So he very much might want to spoil that.

My solution

is

Putin isn't going to be there forever.

We need to defeat him.

And this may sound very controversial.

How can you defeat the leader who sits atop the world's largest nuclear arsenal?

I think that we will defeat him.

We may not win immediately, but if we make sure that the Ukrainians don't lose the war, eventually Putin will either die or collapse, and the new Russian regime may look more like the Yeltsin regime, which was willing to do business with the West or corrupt, but not so ideologically bent on disordering.

And then we could be in a world where we can actually work together.

God, I don't know.

That seems like it might be hinging a little too much on idealism that the next guy who comes in isn't going to be as bad as Vladimir Putin or just another flavor of that same thing.

But I'm no Russia expert, and I know that's a little bit of a tangent.

How much runway do we have to lock down this sort of Gaza-Iran deal?

Is this something that you think, hey, we better do this in 2025?

What sort of event would you be looking to that says, uh-oh, it's too late?

Would it be another Israeli attack on Iran?

Would it be another kind of breach of the ceasefire?

What are we looking for?

Let's go back to these three levels again, because the ceasefire is very tenuous.

Trump has not spelled out

what the punishment is for

violating it.

He will drop a few F-bombs on live TV if you violate it, but what else is he going to do?

I would like him to spell out some carrots and sticks.

And it may be that he's done that behind the scenes.

And if so, good on him and Witcoff, that they've thought that through.

But I don't see that America or Trump is going to broker this kind of deal of the century.

Trump says that he does deals of the century, but if you look at what he did in North Korea, he's only willing to go and have the meeting.

He's not really willing to do the sacrifices to say get a deal with North Korea over the line.

This is where

experts come in.

And who has the experts?

It's the Europeans and the UN

and the Gulfy allies who've been working on this stuff and have the top academic and diplomatic expertise.

That's not how Trump does this transactionalism.

So I think that we have only a few number of weeks.

I wish it wasn't the case, but the deal will break down if the underlying root causes, which led for there being this war, are not treated, right?

I I like to use a divorce analogy here, Jordan.

I do think that a lot of diplomacy and a lot of things that are going on in the Middle East are like human relationships.

And I want to quote Robert Kaplan here.

Politics is all about interests until it's all about Shakespeare.

And in the enduring disorder, everything is about Shakespeare, meaning the human relationships, the jealousies, the flattery, the revenge.

And in a marriage, if you and the wife love each other, but you can't stand when she calls her mom and uses her mom's advice and not yours.

And then you guys have an argument and you make up.

And then you make love and you're happy, but you didn't deal with it's not okay when you call your mom and then she convinces you to buy something with my credit card.

That's the unallowed behavior.

And you're just like, oh, I'm sorry.

I love you.

Let's go out for a romantic date and it's solved.

And we're in a situation now where Trump has excellently figured out a way to get the Israelis and Iranians to fear his hegemonic power and to make nice publicly.

But he hasn't dealt with any of the underlying issue.

And I almost feel that he can't.

And that's why we need Starmer and Macron and maybe specifically Mertz.

Germany has traditionally been loath to put itself forward in foreign policy.

It usually follows the EU, follows what France does.

But I see that there's an opportunity with this new German chancellor for a range of historic reasons that he could work together with others to actually initiate.

I see.

So you think Europe's in a key position here?

It'd be great to see some leadership from them, maybe something that Washington can't or won't provide.

Here's a key thing here, which everyone knows, but usually you can't articulate.

America is biased towards Israel.

It's just the truth.

It's not anti-Semitic to say this.

It is.

That said, there are many European countries which are biased towards the Palestinians.

Ireland, Spain, Norway.

We know it.

It's not just in how they recognize the Palestinian state.

It's where their donations go.

It's where their protests go.

It's how their diplomats are trained.

This is not a bug.

This is a feature.

We can have the Europeans

put forward a pro-Palestinian approach and counterbalance with where we know the Americans are at.

And that's what went wrong with all the rounds of Oslo and the JCPOA.

These things have tended to be done in an America-first framework.

And that's probably not what we can deal with in today's enduring disorder where so many poles are pulling in opposite directions.

We need to coordinate together.

Yep, that makes a heck of a lot of sense to me.

Jason, I hope that people seize this opportunity right now because pardon me for not being super hopeful about peace in the Middle East in my lifetime.

But yeah, I would love to see something actually work out for once.

And talk about some of the great things that unite personal development with diplomacy.

Okay.

So I talk about ordering the disorder.

And ordering the disorder is bringing my interests and my adversary's interests.

into some sort of alignment.

And when you talk about personal growth, you're frequently talking about understanding certain things psychologically and then changing my behavior pattern.

And I love the way that you frame that.

The disorder that I want to order is to get Iranians and Israelis, Gazans

and

Lebanese and Europeans and Americans and Saudis and Qataris to realize I may disagree with you on this, but 80% of our interests are the same.

We want our kids to go to university.

We want to have a better livelihood.

We don't want the planet to be blown up by nukes or to have so much climate change.

And in that region, it's a little bit different than with Russia.

The Russians do have a genuine interest in spoiling at the global level because they're a declining power.

They're constantly going to be weaker because of where their economy is at.

This is different in the Middle East.

I think that we have so many rising powers and people who are going to say the future is ours.

Hey, we can actually put aside some of these grievances so the role here for diplomats is actually like the role of the marriage counselor to get people to see these shared interests put aside all that bs it's been weighing you down buddy yeah i look man from your lips to god's ears i suppose with this middle eastern peace deal potentially happening i mean it would be absolutely mind-blowing if something like this would actually work out for once.

I think all of us share that.

Hey, Steve Witcoff, you can call me.

I'm willing to go to Doha for you.

Starmer, I live only eight miles from you.

See you in Westminster.

Knock on his door, man.

See how that goes out.

That might get his attention.

Man, thank you for coming on the show.

I really appreciate it.

I know this is short notice.

I know it's like the middle of the night where you are.

No, this was really great, Jordan.

Thank you.

Man, I hope the Europeans pick up the ball on this one.

The next few weeks will really be a good indicator of how serious we are about solving this issue.

I'm not going to hold my breath, but man, would it be nice to see some change in this world?

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