Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] To understand Middle East dynamics, I always count on Michael Doran, Director of the Middle East Center at the Hudson Institute.

“For the first time, Jan, in history, Israel and the United States have taken military action together. This is totally new,” he tells me.

We sat down to discuss what has now been dubbed ‘The 12-Day War’ and how Middle East political realities have been transformed.

“One of the most amazing things about the Israeli attack against the Iranians is that they totally took the Iranians by surprise. Scientists were in their beds. Commanders all got together, thinking they were safe. That is just remarkable,” says Doran.

How did the strikes on Iran change the geopolitical landscape? Was World War III ever a real possibility? And has the threat of a nuclear Iran been neutralized … for good?

There’s still a little lingering doubt that maybe some of the enriched uranium was squirreled away by the Iranians in some other secret site,” says Doran. “Right now, Iran is a nuclear power of indeterminate status. So, we have to wait and determine.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Michael Doran, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Great to be here.

Michael, tell me what you think is happening with Trump’s foreign policy. What is the actual reality of what he’s trying to accomplish over there?

I think Donald Trump is trying to establish a new template for the Middle East. And it’s between the isolationists on the one hand and, for lack of a better word, let’s say the neoconservatives on the other. He knows that we have to stay in the Middle East. We can’t abandon it, as some in the isolationist right are saying. It matters too much in the contest with China, for example. But on the other hand, the American public doesn’t want the United States to become engaged in large-scale military action, especially open-ended large-scale military action.

And so if the United States is not going to do the military work itself in the Middle East, but it’s not going to leave, it has to create new roles and missions between the United States and its allies. And so what we just saw between the United States and Israel with regard to Iran is the new model. Israel did most of the work, and the United States came in behind it and supported it on the big strategic goals.

Well, so explain to me these camps, actually, because it’s sort of the, it’s like, I don’t fully believe that this is sort of, you know, the rightist neocons and the… It’s not a Left-Right thing, is it? It’s something quite different.

On the progressive Left and an element of the MAGA Right, there are groups making pretty much identical arguments, saying that Israel is dragging us into a war that’s not in our interest. There’s a deal to be had with Iran. The goal of U.S. policy should be to reach a deal with Iran, stabilize the Middle East that way. Michael Dimino, who’s the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, is a restraintist, that is, one of those, you know, from the isolationist right. Just before he took office, he said that the United States has no vital interest in the Middle East. It’s only there because of Israel and Saudi Arabia, to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, and not because there’s something that we need to protect, but they’re using undue influence on us.

Well, and this is something that I thought was incredibly interesting in how the president chose his, let’s say, foreign policy community and even some of the intelligence community and so forth, because it seems to be a kind of a mix of people that tend to be more in this sort of isolationist, as you call restraintist gap, which by the way, you know, your piece, The King’s Foils, that I remember came out in April, I think has aged unbelievably well. I would recommend everyone to actually read that piece. And you use this term restraintist. It’s quite interesting, quite specific. So there’s these restraintists, but there’s also people that are, I think of it as realists, but I think the restraintists call themselves realists as well, so I don’t know what to call them.

Yes, I think Donald Trump is a realist in the classical sense. The problem is that in American foreign policy, the term realist has been hijacked by people like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and they’re anti-Israel. Realists believe in a balance of power over sentimentality. And Israel’s a powerful state. And it can help us balance the power of our enemies. So I think that’s a realist foreign policy. They don’t like Israel. They say it’s entangling us in conflicts with Iran, that Iran really has no conflict with us other than Israel.

This is, I think, total nonsense. Anyone who’s seriously studied Iranian foreign policy can see that Iran has an agenda with us first and foremost. That’s why we’re the great Satan and Israel is the little Satan. So the terminology gets all messed up. But they call themselves restraintists, these people who are arguing this way, that there’s a deal to be had with Iran and we need to distance ourselves from Israel.

And then there’s Donald Trump. And Donald Trump knows that the American public supports Israel and knows that Iran is our enemy and knows, as he himself said very clearly to Tucker Carlson, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s not in the American interest. Fortunately, the majority of Americans totally agree with him on that question. Iran cannot have it.

Mr. Jekielek:

But at the same time, I think they also agree with Tucker Carlson that they don’t want foreign entanglements.

Yes, there’s been a general climate since the Bush administration. There’s a backlash to the Iraq war. And I think a majority of Americans don’t want to see another major open-ended war, another regime change war in the Middle East.

But also one based on a false predicate.

Right. Yes. So they don’t want a repeat of that. And they’re skeptical about the use of American power in the Middle East. The restraintists, the Tucker Carlsons, the Steve Bannons, the Quincy Institute and so on, have a very particular ideology which is seeking to take advantage of this public mood and the ideology, as I mentioned, says Israel is the problem and Iran wants to deal with us. There’s a deal to be had there with Iran. If we will just ignore Israel and reach out to Iran, we can solve this problem that has been dogging us since 1979. I think it’s completely unrealistic.

Steve Bannon never struck me as being sort of negatively inclined towards Israel. Is he?

He is now. I didn’t notice it in the past at all. Didn’t sense it. But the last two weeks before President Trump ordered the attack on the Iranian nuclear program, Steve Bannon said that Israel was dragging us into this and went and very ostentatiously warned the president against it. The president met him in the, if not in the Oval Office, in the West Wing. It was very well reported.

To my amusement, the president used it as part of the deception about what was about to happen because it looked like by meeting Bannon, who was being very vocal about his claims that Israel was dragging us into a needless war, the president made it look like the distance between him and Prime Minister Netanyahu was much greater than it actually was. And I think that helped to deceive the Iranians so that when the Israelis attacked on Saturday night, I think if I recall correctly, Bannon met with the president on Thursday. And it looked like the Israelis and Trump were very, very far apart.

And it’s also interesting because there’s also all these different shades. Like there are people that seem to be just, you know, structurally, you know, believe that Israel’s playing this kind of negative role overall. Then you’ll have people, and maybe I’m thinking about, you know, this discussion, there are people that might believe, well, Israel’s generally okay, but they’re just kind of obsessed with Iran and stopping its nuclear capability, and we don’t necessarily need to be a part of that. There’s all these kinds of gradations, right, of positioning all the way up to, you know, we use the term neocon very liberally, but I guess that’s like, yes, let’s keep the wars going. That’s a position I don’t fully grasp, to be perfectly honest.

I think a lot of this really isn’t foreign policy at all. When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, his message about the Middle East was all based on the Iraq War. But it wasn’t really about the Middle East. The message was, your elite doesn’t care about you. Your elite is off carrying out these boondoggles, these crazy adventures abroad, lining its own pockets. We need to focus on the problems at home. And so the Middle East was just a screen onto which the president could make this argument.

And I think in a sense, Bannon and Tucker Carlson and others, they’re making the same argument now and saying that this is a distraction. This war against Iran is a distraction from what we should actually be focusing on, what the president promised us he was going to focus on. But if you followed Trump’s policy in the first term and everything he said on the campaign trail to get to this term and everything he said since he came into office, he’s been very, very consistent. Iran cannot have it.

Yet you also describe in The King’s Foils, and I think very astutely, his approach as a kind of a zigzag.

Yes.

And so just lay that out for me a little bit with a few examples.

So the president has a very diverse coalition, elements of which care a lot about the Middle East. He won Michigan, so he has Arabs in Dearborn who are not particularly well disposed toward Israel. But then, of course, he has lots of Zionist supporters. He’s got evangelical Christians as well as Zionist Jews who expect him to be supportive of Israel and hostile to Iran.

And he has these restraintists that he’s brought into his administration. These are mainly libertarians. They’re, I think, more a kind of online phenomenon than a deeply entrenched point of view. I think all the polling shows the majority of MAGA supporters are against Iran and against having a nuclear weapon. But younger MAGA, I think, is very much influenced by a lot of the new MAGA media that has appeared.

So he has to hold this coalition together, and he holds it together through this zigzag. One day he says, you know, maybe I’ll bomb Iran, and the next day he says, well, no, maybe I’ll have a peace agreement with it. And, well, those Israelis are pulling me in one direction. but maybe I’ll try to go in the other direction. And he’s riding two horses at once. And I think the important thing in terms of understanding what he’s doing is to follow the vector rather than any statement on any one day.

You know, some other examples, I mean, he came in about a month or two ago after he came into office. He said that he was going to hold Iran responsible for every attack by the Houthis. But then just before he went to the Gulf, he cut a separate deal with the Houthis, and he never held Iran responsible for it. So if you take him too seriously, too literally on what he says at any one given moment,he’ll look like he’s all over the place. But if you follow the trajectory, I think it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want Iran to have  a nuclear weapon, and if necessary, he will use force.

So it’s kind of a power projection with the minimum use of force or something.

Exactly. Force as a use, as last resort, and used very judiciously. But he will use it. And I think he learned the first time around that if he sends the signal to the Middle Eastern players that he’s totally unwilling to use force, then he’s just going to invite aggression from them.

Well, I just remember, you know, I always come back to this. I think it may have been in 2018 I remember the Wagner group made this kind of incursion into Syria right right and the way Trump dealt with that was he didn’t like call Putin I don’t think he did you know he just kind of bombed them and and there was and there were no more incursions of you know unclear Russian aligned paramilitary people?

They were marching on the American position, testing us. Actually, General Mattis, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, did call his Russian counterpart. There was a hotline. And it makes even more sense now that we know the whole history of the relations between the Russian military and the Wagner Group. But the Russian military did not take responsibility for what the Wagner Group was doing. And then we unleashed hell on them. And we killed, I don’t know how many total, but well over 100 for sure in about a half hour.

I find a lot of what the president’s approach is, I find it kind of breaks with a lot of the pigeonholes that all sorts of different interests have in trying to place them in terms of his foreign policy strategy.

Yes, completely. I totally agree. It’s interesting. In that particular case that you brought up, it went against all of the whole Russiagate narrative at the time, because remember they said that he’s in the pocket of the Russians.

And then he went and killed more Russians than any American. I don’t know if we’ve killed any Russians since the end of the Cold War. But the press quickly ignored that and just kind of moved on because it didn’t fit what they were trying to say about him.

Mr. Jekielek:

There was a lot of narrative breaking that was ignored, let’s just say.

Sure. Also on Nord Stream 2, because remember he prevented the Russians from exporting their gas to Germany. And it didn’t break the narrative that his opponents were trying to build on. I think prominently the German UN mission were laughing at him, I think, about this.

If it does not immediately change course.

Trump has a little bit of a problem explaining himself. I mean, I think there’s this challenge that there are always very large vocal interests, especially in the media, that want to depict him as incompetent or nefarious or some kind of mix of incompetent and nefarious. It was absolutely true, but I think he’s also this zigzag that he does. He doesn’t help himself because he often, I think, fails to articulate what he’s trying to do in a big picture sense.

He clearly wants to maintain personal relations with all the major leaders,

Xi Jinping, Putin, even Khamenei, and so on. So he avoids attacking them personally. I think this is just the guy from a New York real estate family, because in New York, you’re competing against all the other families, but there will be projects where you’ll actually be partners, even though you hate them and want to compete with them.

And so you always keep the personal lines open because you never know when you’re going to actually be partnering on one thing or another. It’s kind of a – New York real estate is probably not a bad way to learn how to conduct diplomacy on the international stage. But he needs people around him to explain this so it doesn’t look like he is actually somehow enthralled to these personalities.

You mentioned China earlier and how the U.S. involvement in the Middle East is actually necessary to deal with China. This is actually quite interesting because there’s a whole different school of thought, right?

I mean, something that’s just obvious to me, for example, and maybe it’s not obvious to everybody, that it has indeed been the Chinese regime’s policy to, as much as possible, keep the U.S. fixated on other projects, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, terrorism in various places. It’s very convenient. Keep the gaze away and watch China’s, quote-unquote, peaceful rise. Let it continue until you can unleash the unpeaceful aspects.

I think that’s totally the case. And I’d also add a couple of other elements to it. Let’s think about it in terms of the Houthis. There are two countries in the world that have, or two actors in the world, that have developed an anti-ship ballistic missile. And they are China and the Houthis. The anti-ship ballistic missile is for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s to take out a U.S. aircraft carrier. I think the Chinese are using support for the Houthis as a way to gain intelligence and information about how the United States can respond to an actor that’s shooting ballistic missiles at them.

The Houthis get targeting data for tankers and for American naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea from the CCP. CCP passes it to Iran, which passes it to the Houthis. The Israelis took out, in the exchange that they had in October, exchange of fire, the Israelis took out the air defenses of the Iranians. They also took out the missile production facilities for medium-range solid fuel propellant missiles. The Israelis thought that they had taken the production of those offline in Iran for a year.

But what happened was the Chinese moved in immediately and gave the Iranians the components that the Israelis had taken out. So they were able to get their production up right away. And the Iranians developed a new strategy to double or triple the total missile arsenal that they had within the next five years. And that would give the Iranians a conventional military equivalent of an atomic bomb. And that’s what, if you listen carefully to the Israelis now when they’re talking about fighting the Iranians, they’re saying we have two goals.

One goal is the nuclear program, but the other is the ballistic missiles. And the Chinese definitely have a hand in helping the Iranians and helping through the Iranians the Houthis in developing all of these ballistic missiles. Not only is it great for the Chinese to see how the Americans and systems deal with these threats, but it also brings, look, we have three carrier groups in the Middle East. So it’s a way of moving American assets out of East Asia. It’s a practice run.

If there’s going to be a war for Taiwan, you want to try to move as many assets as possible to the Middle East. I think Donald Trump helped us in that regard too, though, because by allowing the Israelis to weaken the Iranians as much as he did and taking their nuclear program away from them, I think it’ll be hard if, let’s say, Xi Jinping wanted to attack Taiwan this year. I think he won’t be able to use the Iranians as a mechanism for moving American assets away from East Asia.

Did I hear you correctly that the Chinese are actually providing targeting data to the U.S. for civilian vessels as well, in addition to the military? Did I

understand that correctly?

I know that there’s a Chinese company that through the Iranians is providing targeting data and the U.S. Treasury has sanctioned them. I assume that’s targeting data for anyone. But clearly, the major interest that the Chinese have is the American military.

That was just interesting because I would also, you know, some other people might have issues with, hopefully would take issue with this. But this also highlights, I think, just in case this is sort of the unspoken reality that any such company, of course, is under the auspices of the regime. It’s not some private company doing its own thing, as many people believed for some time. Oh, yes, it’s this rogue company giving targeting data.

Yes, a rogue company giving targeting data to the Houthis—I don’t think so.

Right. Okay. So let’s discuss what has actually happened in the Middle East since this, what’s been dubbed now the 12-day war. Clearly, the political reality has been reshaped substantially.

So Iran has been taken down two or three notches. I mean, if you just go back to 20 months ago, Hamas attacked Israel. And the next day, Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, opened up on the Israelis. A few weeks after that, the Houthis opened up on the Israelis. If I’d have told you then that within two years, less than two years, Israel was going to have an unimpeded air bridge to Iran, was going to control the Iranian airspace, and was going to take out 30 top military officers in the Iranian regime and nine or ten nuclear scientists, you’d tell me I was crazy.

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