Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah: Good afternoon, and welcome to yet another very topical and very timely EMET webinar. Both of our guests today have been really wonderful long-term friends of mine and of EMET’s. I spent this weekend reading a very comprehensive, excellent, jam-packed book, I don’t know if you could see it, written by Barak Siner with contributions through discussions by Dr. David Wurmser. It’s called Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power. Barak Siner is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a founder of Strategic Intelligentsia and the Gulf Futures Forum. Barak also co-hosts the Geo-Godfather Wars podcast on geopolitical affairs.

Previously, Barak was a Global Intelligence Manager at HSBC and the Middle East Fellow at the Royal United Service Institute, RSI. In 2018, Barak published a book entitled Commercial Risks Entering the Iranian Market, Why Sanctions Make Investment in the Islamic Republic of Iran a High-Risk Proposition. Barak has been published and has provided analysis and expert opinion for a huge range of international broadcasters, including Fox News, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Chinese CCTV, Sky News, Voice of America, and has contributed to news outlets such as Bloomberg, Reuters, The Associated Press, The Evening Standard, Jerusalem Post, Sinoa, Newsweek, The National Interest, and Jane’s Intelligence Review.

He is not even halfway done yet in his young and very aspirational, wonderful life. David Wormser is the Executive and Founding Member of the Delphi Global Analysis Group, LLC. He has served as the Senior Advisor to Ambassador John Bolton, and he has also served from 2003 to 2007 as Senior Advisor to Vice President Richard Cheney.

David is also a Senior Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Foreign and Security Affairs in Israel and at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. So, let’s begin, first of all, with just a few minutes of what David Wormser had to say. This was prerecorded this morning. So, Lili, can you just put this on?

David: First of all, let me thank Sarah Stern and Emmett for putting this together, because at the end of the day, such a debate is only beginning about Israel’s strategy going forward for the next decades, really, perhaps longer. And Emmett’s always been at the forefront of talking about the truth, which is where the name comes from. And Sarah and I have gone back a long, long time, all the way back to Oslo days, when it wasn’t very popular to speak the truth, but in the end, I believe it was very important to do so. So, I really appreciate and am honored by being here and speaking to this forum.

Now, to the matter at hand, when Barak came to me a while back and he was discussing this concept of how Israel’s strategy realigns, the war was in full force that had been triggered by October 7th. And one thing was clear, was that October 7th represented a watershed. And Barak was thinking about what happens after the dust settles, which was really the right question, because the war itself was taking a life of its own, and there were some good people who were trying to work out how this war proceeds. And then we saw exactly, whether it’s Operation Grim Beeper or the attack on Iran last summer, we see that the Israelis rose to the occasion, turned around an initial defeat, and established themselves as what can only be described as a preeminent regional power in the Middle East. So, there wasn’t all that much utility in writing about how that would happen.

So, Barak was looking further forward, and he and I started these long conversations where we would try to figure out where things are going. Now, one key thing is strategy ultimately begins with culture and civilization. Strategy is a political animal, but it is also a military animal.

Unfortunately, in the West, we’ve sort of lost the art of strategy. We look at it as strictly a military question, which then reduces to tactics, or even grand tactics, but not really the core question, which is civilizationally how a society manages its future and emerges both safe and as well off as it can be. In that context, this is what this report, for me, really was about, and when you look at it, you see how really the roots of change were there before October 7th, but going forward, these changes will now really define Israel’s strategic realities.

Now, what are some of the main changes? The first one is looking at Asia, which is appropriate today, given that Prime Minister Modi is visiting Israel. We generally see Asia as alien to the Middle East, as not a major player, and it’s true. China is not a major power projection country in a traditional sense. They don’t have 15 aircraft carriers and are able to subjugate a country, such as, for example, the way the United States did with Iraq or hopefully will do quite soon with Iran’s tyrannical regime. But it does have, of course, a major role to play.

But moreover, the Middle East has a role to play in Asia. Asia is tilting. The balance in Asia is really dividing up between an Indian, Korean, South Korean, Japanese bloc, which fills the void left by the United States under Obama and Biden, both because of American retreat from its power of resilience and unapologetic strength, but also because the United States under Obama did away with the concept of special relationships.

America was as close in trying to court Beijing as much as it was Tokyo or Delhi. So, in many ways, Tokyo especially, having been such a close American ally, felt somewhat orphaned and security architectures were emerging that were designed to weather that storm and to replace American power while American power was in recession in order that the United States then can return and build its foundations to this more robust indigenous structure in the Asia Pacific. Israel emerging as a major technological power, something that Barak will really go and describe, is a tilting force here.

Sarah: Okay. So, actually, David spoke at great length, but I wanted to cut it off over there and pick Barak’s very fertile, very sophisticated brain and ask you, Barak, let’s begin post-October 7th, 2023. Prior to that, we had always seen Israel as holding on to the status quo, defensively restraining nations, and just managing geostrategically, but this, I think, might not serve Israel’s interest today. What does Israel now require to survive?

Barak: Israel, first of all, Sarah, thank you so much for hosting me. I’ve known you forever and I’ve always benefited enormously by just brainstorming with you and sharing ideas with you and learning from you. So, it’s a great privilege to be on your forum, a map which I remember you single-handedly built, so it’s quite remarkable.

I saw, after October 7th, Israel’s security doctrine shifted from merely reacting to threats that were emanating on its borders to that of preemption, if not even prevention. It became evident that while in the past Israel had struck Osirak in the early 80s that were thousands of kilometers away, suddenly now Israel was doing so at a more frequent basis. It was projecting power more broadly across the region and it was, for example, it was striking the Houthis in Yemen, it was achieving air dominance over Iran. These are not immediate neighbors of Israel, so it represented a doctrinal shift that Israel had undergone, and for me what was striking is the broader shift that was married with a lack of coherent strategy.

Sarah: So, do you see that Israel has been working just, what’s the word, in tactics as opposed to a dynamic geo-strategy, and right now you’ve employed the word, the golden triangle. What do you mean by this term to describe Israel?

Barak: So there’s two things. If, what Israel has always done brilliantly is, as an innovative nation, to use that cliche now, the start-up nation, Israel is marked by its ability to be innovative, and with innovation comes flexibility, and over the years Israel has been flexible to contend with imminent threats. So, for example, when Israel was, Israel had suffered from suicide bombers, and Israel then had to create a security fence to contend with the flow of suicide bombers, and that was very effective.

Now, when they had created that security fence, Hamas didn’t really have effective rocket capabilities to strike Israel, and so what Hamas did was it designed around, and it refined its rocket capabilities that became a lot more effective, a lot more precise, a lot more capable of inflicting real damage on Israel. So Israel then reacted to that by creating a missile defense system. So what you saw was Israel was continually reacting in a flexible manner, but you could arguably make the case that it was precisely the reactiveness of Israel’s approach that generated the crisis in the first place.

Israel was not able to think a couple of steps ahead and preempt future potential threats from emerging, and you similarly see, and this leads to a more broader ad hoc approach to culture. So when you see Israel having created settlements, it would create settlements in an ad hoc manner, but then it would bring Palestinian demography into its midst. So it created a conundrum, territory or demography.

By expanding Israel’s territorial expanse, it was undermining its Jewish identity as a state. And what ended up happening was this absurd political scenario where in the 1980s it was Israel’s far right that was speaking about the demographic threat. And if you would have spoken, nobody in polite society could have spoken about a demographic threat.

And the left was talking about territorial compromise. A few decades later, that came inverted, that it was Israel’s far right that was talking about territory and ignoring demography, while the far left was now speaking about demography. So it causes identities to become very overhauled politically.

So similarly today, you see Israel touting its operational successes as strategic victories. So a tactical and operational success such as effectively targeting Hamas leader Ismail Hania in an IRGC base in Tehran, that is an operational success. Decapitating Hezbollah’s senior echelon of its organization via a BIPO attack is ingenious, it’s brilliant, but it’s operational and it’s tactical.

Now Israel touts this as a strategic success. And then subsequently, lo and behold, Israel finds that its adversaries are able to reconstitute themselves at a far more rapid rate than Israel anticipated. And so Israel is then forced to continually strike to degrade them.

And it’s left in this type of status quo where Israel is projecting power in a manner that it never had done beforehand, but it’s not able to cement its operational and tactical gains in a politically strategic manner. It’s not able to shape the region according to its will. And in contrast to Israel, Iran for decades had created this, I forgot the name, ring of fire strategy that was surrounding Israel, encircling Israel via its proxies.

Now Israel had allowed Iran to shape the region according to its image, while Israel was back-footed and only reacting to crises as they emerged. But Iran created the context to this. Now Israel was able to roll Iran back much more swiftly than even Israel anticipated.

However, do bear in mind that Iran created a new landscape in which, while Saudi Arabia was willing to normalize relationship with Israel prior to October 7th, you remember MBS’s really groundbreaking interview with Fox News with Brett Baier, now Iran, despite flailing as a regime, it created a context in which Saudi Arabia is left to align itself with other powers that are Israel’s adversaries and doesn’t look to be normalizing relations with Israel any time soon.

So I used in this report the metaphor of the spear, the handle of the spear, and the tip of the spear. And at times the tip of the spear is going to be Israel’s military capabilities, but the handle of the spear must be Israel’s diplomatic, trade, economic, technological capabilities. But at other times Israel’s tip of the spear must be the technological, trade, economic tools of statecraft. That must be the tip of the spear in which Israel shapes its regional landscape for which Israel can subsequently conduct military operations in this new landscape that it created for itself.

Sarah: But from the 20,000 foot perspective, looking down at the state of Israel, you see that they have been fighting an existential war since 1948 and before that. And one has to think in terms of tactics to eliminate one’s enemies. Of course, on the drawing board, which we might not know of, there might be some kind of military geostrategic perspective with goals that they’re planning, but one has to survive.

Barak: I think you’re correct. Israel does have to survive and you can’t have strategies that are devoid of sort of day-to-day tactical requirements. However, just to have tactics at the expense of strategy will create for you crisis. And you’re right. The day that Israel was established, it went to war. Israel didn’t have the luxury of the United States that was shielded by two oceans to create its identity in which its sort of subsequent foreign policy strategies have emanated from that.

So, for example, whether it be, according to Clinton, to create a National Economic Council to rival the National Security Council and have a whole range of free trade agreements with NAFTA. And that way you would be extending America’s strategic reach economically. As you coined the term, it’s the economy stupid, right? You know, you did see a U.S. identity, you know, the U.S. being that shining city on a hill, its Declaration of Independence that embodied its exceptionalism. You did see that in terms of America attempting to project its ethos vis-a-vis Clinton economically. And then subsequently via George W. Bush, you saw it projecting in exporting democracy. You can have a debate of how naive these policies were in hindsight. But nonetheless, you do see strategies extending from identity. In Israel’s case, you just simply see a hunkered down mentality in which operational strikes are geared towards pure survivability, but nothing further than that.

Sarah: Okay, so let’s talk about the founding of the state of Israel versus the founding of the American project. When we have the Declaration of Independence, we talk about we hold these truths to be self-evident, these God-given inalienable rights. And then when David Ben-Gurion sat down to write his Declaration of Independence, it was godless and it was all about reaching out to the neighbors and to the other inhabitants of the state of Israel with a sense of dignity and equality. Can you reinforce these differences?

Barak: I mean, you know, the same type of manifest destiny in which America advanced across the West, you subsequently saw America advance itself internationally. There is a rational calculus to it. Now, even under this new administration, the rational calculus may be that transactionalism is the best way of effecting positive change. Let European nations, let NATO allies carry the buck and let them become more self-sufficient and that way they may be more effective strategic partners of the U.S. as opposed to an albatross. There is a rationale to that.

In contrast, Israel, you know, David Ben-Gurion refused to refer to God. While he culturally drew from Israel’s history and he made many references to the Bible, he was an atheist. He refused to refer to God in the Declaration of Independence. And at best, his entire vision towards the region was that he would be accepted by his neighbors. But there was no sense of how Israel would project itself to its neighbors to be accepted in the region. And it left Israel in a position that it’s been touting the wrong credential. It’s been touting its liberal democratic credentials in which it’s seen in the region as an alien colonial outpost, a Western colonial outpost in the region. Now, that might work. That ethos works in terms of a unique strategic partnership with the United States or appealing to anchoring itself strategically with the West. But it doesn’t appeal to the Middle East.

What Israel could have done and never did was emphasize its monotheistic credentials and really perhaps appeal to a Judeo-Islamic heritage. Because we have a Judeo-Christian heritage. But there is no reason, just like Israel is able to be that geographic central node that connects different continents via trade or technology, it could have been that connecting philosophical node that could appeal to the Middle East on its monotheistic credentials, appeal to the West because of its liberal democratic credentials, appeal to Asia being an ancient civilization that has embraced modernity. And it’s got such a rich, multifaceted, civilizational identity that Israel has failed to effectively tap into.

Sarah: Okay, so going back to the birth of the State of Israel, we had remnants of the Asian oriental countries, the Farhud. Remnants of the Holocaust. Not everybody believed in God. Do you think it would have been wiser to empower them with the belief of God from the very beginning when there were so many diverse populations streaming into the State of Israel?

Barak: Well, having a sense of identity would have served as a centripetal force in which these different populations entering Israel can actually rally around. And that’s what made the United States so effective. What was so unique, the greatest human experiment ever was the United States political system, in which it anchored itself as an institutional form of nationalism, not a territorial nationalism, not ethnic nationalism, in which European nations had fought for centuries around. The US founding fathers really sought to distinguish themselves from Europe’s failed history by creating this institutional form of nationalism, in which different cultures and ethnicities would rally around and integrate so effectively too. And it’s really striking when you meet somebody in America that has an Asian background, they will say, I’m American of Chinese descent, right?

You know, it’s quite elongated, but they’re American first. Now, the subsequent peace that Europe has had for over half a century, post-World War II, was a result of Europe, to a degree, seeking to emulate American-style nationalism via the EU. Fine, it became a lot more cumbersome, but this was an attempt to anchor identity, and even dilute identity, institutionally, right? So, there’s a lot to be said for that.

Sarah: Yes, but it’s a vanishing ideal. I mean, post-October 7th, we see that it’s been a historic inflection point, not only technologically, but militarily. But inside Israel, I think there is more, especially among young people, a return to basic Jewish values. Pre-October 7th, we didn’t see this at all. And here, in America, especially most of our college-educated students don’t believe in God. So, we’re kind of talking across purposes right now.

Barak: When you say talking across purposes, what do you mean vis-à-vis America?

Sarah: I mean, most Americans, I don’t think, except for Turning Point USA, where there’s a revival of religion there, and certain Chabad outlets and schools, most Americans are not really believers in God.

Barak: But I think that accompanies a whole host of other things, which we’ve seen historically, and will be in flux. Look, it was very much in vogue in the 90s to speak about globalization, and to create economic interdependence between nations that would dilute identity, and it would actually prevent conflicts from emerging. And this was, by the way, the central reason, the rationale to include China in the World Trade Organization.

So, all these people that thought, well, actually, we’re going to cause China to politically liberalize. So, political liberalization will follow economic liberalization. When they joined the World Trade Organization, they subsequently became China hawks, because they saw that supranational organizations, multilateral organizations, and economic ties don’t dilute identity. What ends up happening is that when you become more economically prosperous, you end up asserting and flexing your identity even more. So, look, Bin Laden came from an upper-middle-class background. You know, he was not impoverished.

China has, you know, started developing artificial islands in the South China Seas, and becoming far more aggressive towards Taiwan, as they became more economically successful. So, but you saw that in America, the attitude changed, that people that had subscribed to this deity of, you know, it’s the economy that matters, they ended up retreating and recognizing, well, actually, we need a far more multi-pronged approach towards mitigating any risk from China. So, similarly today, nobody would have anticipated that two decades after 9-11, that you would end up having this moral relativism by a whole woke crowd.

I mean, look how the pendulum has swung. The neo-conservatives were Democrats that became Republicans, right? And then many of them became never-Trumpers. And the Republican Party had become the party of interventionism under George W. Bush. Today, the Republican Party has the greater sense of isolationists, and it’s the Democrats that tend to be more interventionist by nature, especially vis-a-vis Ukraine, right?

Sarah: But I don’t think that they want to fight more long exhausting wars in the Middle East.

Barak: Of course, but, you know, when there will be another sense of existential crisis in America, I think that people will rally around their roots, and you will see that surge in religious identification. I think that the roots are there. I think that ignoring God is a luxury, right? When that luxury is taken away from you, right, then you return to God very quickly.

Sarah: It’s just so remarkable how many of the hostages who have survived the terror tunnels beneath Gaza ended up with a greater sense of spirituality and belief in God. So we, of course, at EMET, share the aspirational goals of Israel as a true Western liberal democracy and strategically a military and geostrategic superpower. My question is that we’ve discussed before, how is it when so much of the life cycle of the average Israeli is you go to high school, you’re recruited into the army, you spend many years fighting wars, and then the time has come where you want to have a meaningful relationship with a significant other, you get married, you want to have children, so you specialize right away in one field, and you don’t read Shakespeare, you don’t read Kant or Jung. How can you become a light unto the nations when your education is so limited?

Barak: Now, I think that that is a brilliant point, and you’ve made this point to me in the past that, you know, you can’t have, I mean, this document, Israel 2048, this report, somebody who specialized in the STEM fields would never have been able to have come up with this, right? It’s only people with a humanities background that can think strategically, right? You know, if you’ve got a STEM background, you’re thinking of making sense of data points and identifying these data points, so you do need to be more holistic and right-brained in order to come up with that, and I think that that is a big, big problem in that states are thinking in terms of technological competition in the new era, but it’s important to, perhaps for the government at least, to subsidize the learning of these subjects and subsequent institutes to hold these, you know, people who are practitioners of those various backgrounds to serve as a strategic asset for them. That’s going to be the next generation of strategists. You know, in the US, Henry Kissinger didn’t come from a lab, he came from a humanities department, and there’s a lot to be said for that, so just focusing on immediate competition is, again, it’s a very tactical reaction.

Sarah: So, how can you envision, first of all, Israel going from this doctrine of prevention in foreign wars to being proactive and Israel becoming a central pillar of civilization when you see all around us the geochristian heritage is rapidly collapsing?

Barak: I think the reason why the christian heritage is collapsing is not because of an implosion of belief or reassessment of its belief at a philosophical or cultural level, it’s because of having allowed huge demographic flows into your region, into your areas, without having the institutions to integrate themselves, without having the ethos to integrate them. So, that’s why christianity is failing. I’m not so sure that christianity is failing in the US in the same way as it is in Europe.

At the moment now, as we said beforehand, there’s a luxury to ignore God, but, you know, when there will be another crisis, then I think that christianity will reassert itself. Now, in Israel, you’ve seen the same thing, that post-October the 7th, there’s been a religious, if not traditional, revivalism, and people really seeking to reinvigorate their identities, but it’s, you know, as I wrote in the conclusion of the report, that states tend to undergo overhauls and re-evaluations of their identities at the 80 to 100 year mark, right? And the US went through that, and you’ll see, you know, it’s very, very likely that Israel will undergo this. It’s not about who is the political leader or what is the political platform. It’s far more systemic and cultural and civilizational, of which Israel will serve as the anchor for its Jewish diaspora.

Sarah: Let’s hope. I mean, right now, the Home Front Command has been alerting Israelis. We’re not exactly sure of whether or not the United States is going to go to war with Iran and, if so, US military bases in the region and the state of Israel will receive the fallout. So, on the one hand, they have to think geo-strategically and project power throughout the Middle East. On the other hand, they have to think in terms of tactics and in terms of survival.

Barak: You know, I mean, yeah, you’re reiterating this previous point. The two must go in tandem. You can’t do one in absence of the other. Look at this recent configuration of Saudi Arabia aligning itself with countries that they hate in order to compete with the Abraham Accords, to create a competing security architecture. So, they’re aligning with Qatar, Turkey and Egypt. Now, just a few months ago, you would never have envisaged that. Nobody envisaged that.

Israelis thought that history was linear and once you remove the Iranian threat, then all will be good. But what happened was that with the strategic downgrading of Iran, you then, you know, that cliche nature abhors a vacuum. Turkey has wanted to flex its Ottoman impulse. Qatar wants to assert its leadership. Saudi Arabia sees itself as a dominant regional power. So, by just simply reacting, you’re not actually increasing your civilizational role. As opposed to 1948 or 1967 or 1972, in the new era, which I’ve termed Zionism 2.0, to survive means you thrive, right? You can’t survive just tactically. You must thrive in terms of trade, technology, in terms of your energy independence, food independence, military independence, your military power projection. But that must be underpinned by a great anchoring and enriching of your Jewish heritage.

Sarah: So, how can you describe that Israel will survive and thrive, project power into the region when there are all these retrograde forces like the Moslem Brotherhood, like Erdogan, which is playing a huge role in Syria today? You know, they still, not to beat a dead horse, but they still have these very, very pressing powers that are regressive.

Barak: But I think that Israel’s shift in security doctrine happened at precisely the right time. So, it’s almost providence that Israel is projecting power at a much more multi-polar Middle East, right? You have not anymore an Iranian threat. You know, Turkey had been a nuisance. Now, Turkey is being upgraded. Qatar’s being upgraded. With Saudi Arabia, is the shift tactical or strategic? That’s yet to be seen. But the fact that Israel is able to project power, it’s also able to send a message to these nations that despite the international delegitimization that Israel has undergone, Israel is able to assert military dominance in the region.

I mean, think about it. Israel has been vilified internationally since October the 7th. It has just, it’s become the most vilified nation on the planet. And yet, it has increased its military prowess in the region and nobody anticipated that. So, that dichotomy and it’s become a defense tech nation in the process. This dichotomy emerged and Israel can leverage that.

Sarah: Right. And all of these nations that vilify Israel in international platforms, such as the UN, want to trade with Israel. And they want, yeah, I mean, it is so ironic.

Barak: I mean, Germany, sorry, Spain has had to embarrassingly backpedal after vilifying Israel. They need to quietly buy Israeli defense products from Germany, because if you want to have a robust defense system, you need to incorporate Israeli technologies. So, it’s very, very ironic.

Sarah: You see people like Mohammed bin Salman had thought that the road to acceptability ran through Jerusalem to Washington by signing the Abraham Accords, but now he realizes, wait, I can get my chips for my computers and I could get my F-35s without having to deal with Israel.

Barak: I mean, in a sense, America undermined its own legacy of the Abraham Accords by being transactional. You see the Saudi Arabia is willing to invest over a trillion dollars in the US economy and enhance America technologically by investing in tech and its great power competition with China. But then that is at the expense of your security architecture in the Middle East.

So, you know, there’s this great line in The Godfather Part Three when, you know, Al Pacino, Michael Corleone says, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. So, you know, America that really wanted to pivot towards Asia can find itself drawn back into the swamp that is in the Middle East because it doesn’t have a robust security architecture in terms of the Abraham Accords. So, you know, American strategists, Pentagon planners, they need to balance between pivoting towards Asia, being able to swiftly have a presence there, but also how to effectively maintain a light footprint in the Middle East and have Israel underpin the security architecture of the Abraham Accords. You don’t want to diminish that. And I fear that that has been undermined.

Sarah: Right. Can we speak a little bit about Qatar, which you mentioned also in your book? I have a very hard time understanding the reliance on Tabar Bin Hamad Al Thani. On January 31, 2022, President Trump nominated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally. Qatar has given over $7.6 billion to American universities. We don’t know how many billions they’ve showered on their kindergarten through 12th grade education, through the Qatar Foundation.

It’s provided over $8 billion to the Al Aduaid Air Base. And America has accepted in May of 2025 an economic exchange worth $1.2 trillion dollars with the nation of Qatar. Why? Is it just that money talks? Is it all of the money that they have? Why do we have this kind of relationship? And why do we have to rely on Qatar to negotiate our hostage exchanges?

Barak: I think that in the past, America’s strategy was very much formed by a purely realist approach of power dynamics. And how can we create a security architecture? And in that, economics was factored in. So if you look at the Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan was created in a framework in which there would be US presence in Europe. But America would actually pump money to sustain the peace there. I think that what you have here today is a more holistic approach of being transactional and at the same time thinking in terms of security dynamics. And I think they clash to a degree. If you want to have this more comprehensive approach to statecraft, you need to sequence it. America has to sequence it just like Israel has to sequence it in terms of the spear and the tip of the spear.

Sarah: Right, okay. My last few words are about Turkey. Okay, here we have Erdogan, who has never a good word about Prime Minister Netanyahu or the State of Israel. We’ve also called them, well, they are a NATO ally. And they’ve recently purchased the S-400s from Russia, yet they’re trying to purchase F-35s from the United States. And they’re occupying Syria. They’ve just almost massacred the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurds, and they had to relent. They’re releasing all of these ISIS prisoners that are overwhelming Iraq. Why are we letting Ahmad al-Sharaa have this strong alliance with Turkey right now?

Barak: I completely agree with you in your assessment of both Qatar and Turkey. I don’t think that America is recognizing, number one, the competition to the Abraham Accords. I don’t think it’s effectively recognizing threats posed by Turkey and Qatar, whose ethos and radicalization and strategic calculus is inimical to that of the US. And I think that what it could lead to is a greater reliance on the part of the US for Israel to keep these other nations at bay. But I don’t think that America has a crafted strategy towards the region as a whole. And it certainly doesn’t have a strategy towards what happens the day after the Iranian regime falls. How will it affect its surrounding states? What happens if there’s a vacuum of governance? Will malign sub-state actors, will secessionist groups seek to take the initiative?

Will this be at the West’s expense? Similarly, in Syria, I just don’t see America having a well-thought-out strategy. But also, I don’t see Israel having a strategy for Lebanon and Syria. Israel has taken the strategic initiative to strike at military facilities from falling into either Turkey or the new Syrian regime’s hands. But it’s not done anything to cement ties between the two. As I said beforehand, you need to have an operational and tactical approach to contend with your immediate threats.

But parallel to that, on a separate track, you need to be having these economic, trade, technological, political engagements. And I don’t see that happening on the part of Israel. I think that Israel’s statecraft is very immature. So you have this divergence between, on one hand, a new security doctrine in which Israel has been emboldened to project power more frequently at a more frequent basis across the region, while on the other hand, having an underdeveloped policy toolkits.

Sarah: So, Barak, you ended up your masterbook, which is really, really excellent. On an upbeat note, can you just share with us, after all of these depressing words, can you just share with us a bit of your optimism for the future?

Barak: I think that, if you can bear with me one second.

Sarah: I’m sorry,Barak just had to leave for one second.

Barak: Okay, I’m going to be my boy on my lap at the same time.

Sarah: He’s so cute.

Barak: Joining the event. I think that the optimism is that Israel’s power projection and technological advancement may force Israel to actually re-evaluate its civilizational identity during its 80 to 100 year itch. What is a great thing for Israel is that Israel is reaching its 80, 100 year itch, in which it will be overhauling its identity with increased trade, technological and military capabilities. It’s like you have the ingredients, all the most expensive and most wonderful ingredients to bake a Michelin standard cake, right? And the question is, are you going to stir the ingredients together in the correct manner and heat it appropriately? You’ve got all the ingredients and that is very, very exciting because Israel never had it before.

Sarah: Wonderful. Excellent. So please, I want everybody to download the book from the Henry Jackson Society, Israel 2048, A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power. It is an excellent read. I had a great time with it this weekend. And please, if you’d like to contribute to the Henry Jackson Society, it’s henryjackson.org and also emet, emetonline.org. Next week, we are going to have Dalia Zawada, who has already confirmed, who is a fabulous speaker from Egypt. And thank you so much, Barak Sinar. It’s been a wonderful, long relationship, and I hope it will continue for many, many years into the future.

Barak: Thank you so much, Sarah, for having me. And by the way, for everybody, if people want to follow me on Twitter, it’s at Barak Seener. Thank you.

Sarah: Thank you so much. Take care.

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