Israel Is Not An Outpost Of The West

The Russians stand down when the Israeli Air Force attacks Iranian-linked targets in Syria. So despite the overt alliance of Russia and Iran, there's still military cooperation in Syria. It's also the case that when the Russian defense minister Shoigu, went to Tehran earlier this month, Asia Times reported exclusively, and I believe reliably, that he carried a letter from Putin to the Iranian government offering to mediate between Iran and Israel.

Glick: After the assassination attributed to Israel of Ismail Haniyah?

Goldman: That's correct. This is also a very interesting development. I doubt anyone will ever know the truth about how Haniyah got assassinated, but there are a limited number of possibilities. One is that the Mossad has the best deep infiltration operation in Iran that any foreign intelligence service has ever had with any country in history.

Another is that elements of the Iranian opposition assisted in the assassination. And a third is that the Iranian government itself, for whatever reason, was not particularly unhappy about getting rid of Haniyah It's interesting how limited the response of Iran and its proxies has been to the assassination. The papers were full of expectations that there would be a regional Middle East war, with massive attacks by Iran against Israel. Iran has done nothing from its own territory.

And the attacks by Hezbollah this week were clearly delineated and measured and almost entirely stopped by Iron Dome and Israeli airstrikes and other measures. So it doesn't look like Iran is spoiling for a major war with Israel at this point. It looks like Iran is taking the advice of the Chinese and being cautious.

Glick: It's also possible that they're using this time to advance their weaponization of their warheads and of their nuclear devices that they're developing, and that they have an intention of keeping it quiet until they can announce that they have independent military nuclear capabilities at one level or another.

But be that as it may, one of the things that I find exceedingly troubling is the rise of antisemitic propaganda that the Chinese are responsible for, both at home in China, which is apparently new, and also abroad throughout the world with TikTok. And you've seen the data on the propagation of antisemitic content on TikTok, and it's shocking.

And it's hard not to avoid the conclusion that China has decided that it wants to turn away from Israel and that it is at a minimum waging a major political offensive against Jews, which is more media offensive or whatever you want to call it, an information war against Jews.

Goldman: The Chinese are like iron filings on a piece of paper when you put a magnet underneath. They all stand up in the same direction. And when the line came out from Beijing that Israel was a bad entity, suddenly every poster on Weibo and other Chinese social media picked up anti-Semitic memes. It was disgusting to watch and very disappointing.

On the other hand, the Chinese are not idiots and they know that Israel isn't going to go away. And if you got into a real war, Israel reportedly has hundreds of nuclear warheads. Israel, without much difficulty, could destroy every city in the Middle East. And the Chinese know that. And I don't think they want that to happen.

The problem is that Israel is caught in a great power conflict. Israel never wanted to pick a fight with China. Netanyahu made several trips there. Trade was going very well. There was a lot of scientific cooperation, and a lot of Chinese investment in Israeli high tech. And then as the new Cold War between China and the United States intensified, Israel as an American ally was in the line of fire.

So I think the main reason the Chinese are beating up Israel is not because they're inherently anti-Semitic. They never have been, and they have no reason to be. They had no Jews to hate, and to the extent there were Jews there, they got along with them. I think the reason is the simple fact that Israel is an American ally and China and the United States are at daggers drawn.

And that's a rotten situation to be in. There's probably no remedy for it in the near term. But the Chinese have a very long view. And if you look at the long view, Iran and Turkey, who are the only Muslim countries that have viable high-tech industries and real economic potential, have grave problems.

Both of them have are subject to rapid demographic decline. According to the central United Nations projection, the most probable outcome, both of them will lose about half of their working-age population in the course of the century. Israel's working-age population will double because Turkey's fertility rate is one and a half children per female, Iran's is 1.6, and Israel's is three.

What that means, given the relative productivity, is that the economy of Israel by the middle of the century will be larger than the economies of Iran and Turkey put together. And by the end of the century, Israel will be by far the dominant power in the Middle East. I went through the standard United Nations projections in Asia Times a couple of weeks ago.

And a Pakistani commentator said, that's probably why the Saudis and the Emiratis want to link up with Israel; in the long view, Israel is the strong horse. And with economic power, of course, comes military power. You've written brilliantly and sharply on Israel's limitations

in terms of its order of battle and the quality of its armed forces and the quality of its military leadership. Israel certainly has challenges, but just in terms of raw potential, demographic and economic, Israel is gaining on its Muslim neighbors and will continue to gain unless some drastic change happens.

Glick: One of the things that you mentioned here that I think is the key is that because Israel is an American ally, China and Russia are striking out more aggressively against Israel than we've seen them do in the past. Because as the tensions between China and Russia with the United States increase, Israel is sort of the victim of that increase in tension.

So there are a couple of things to look at here from an Israeli perspective, and one of them is, you know, is there a way for Israel to improve our relations with these two powers to undermine their loyalty or whatever you want to call it to Iran, without alienating the United States?

Goldman: This is a tough one. Is, you know, fighting the war as if there's no White Paper and fighting the White Paper as if there's no war.

Glick: And by the way, that was a failed policy. We lost six million Jews and the White Paper went on uninterrupted until the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Goldman: Yes, sadly, yes, though our options then were limited. Let's assume that Donald Trump is elected president. RFK Jr said that the biggest single reason he joined the Trump campaign is because Trump promised on his first day in office to call up Putin and find a way to settle the Ukraine war.

That would immediately give Israel room to talk to Russia if that shooting war between the West and Russia were ended. In the case of China, things are more complicated because the United States is not reconciled to China's rise as a major power and the possibility that China might become a peer of the United States or even in some respects a more powerful country. We can't wrap our minds around that. We can't accept it. We don't like it. I personally don't like it.

China and Israel have interests in common. Dealing with China is difficult. What does China want from Israel? Technology, most of all. And the United States has done a pretty effective job of squelching Chinese investment in Israeli high-tech companies. Now, is there a way to get around that? Not really in the short term. But I think it's important to remember that China and Israel have long-term strategic interests in common in dealing with Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism.

China should be worried about Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood more than anyone else. That would be the main source of terrorism and destabilization that might be aimed at China itself internally or in the Belt and Road countries where China is making massive investments.

China has a gigantic commitment to Central Asia. The whole concept of the Belt and Road is to unify the Eurasian continent through transportation, digital communications, and other investments. Take the case of Bangladesh. I know that's very remote from Israel, but it's a major, it's a country of 170 million people, just had a coup.

There are many people in India who allege, and we've carried commentary on this in Asia Times, that it was the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood branch of Bangladesh and India, which ran the street riots that ultimately forced out Sheikh Hasina and put in a new government.

Glick: We certainly saw a lot of footage in the days following the overthrow of the president of Bangladesh of groups of Muslims going after Bangladesh's Hindus, particularly the women, but of mass killing of Hindus that were very reminiscent of the footage that we had here in Israel on October 7th. So there does seem to be a lot of that going around.

Goldman: And there are many Indians who will tell you that the coup was designed to put pressure on India. Sheikh Hasina herself said that if she had agreed to give the United States a military base that they had asked for, she wouldn't have been overthrown. So that's her accusation as well. I'm not in a position to judge these events. However, there are credible people in India and elsewhere making those allegations.

From China's standpoint, if you look at their whole southern flank, you have Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, which are critical for their trading relationships. You have a Muslim minority in the Philippines and Thailand. And then you have Central Asia, which is their Western flank and the bedrock of the Belt and Road Initiative, all of which were vulnerable to destabilization.

The first thing China did after the problems they had in Xinjiang was to pay off the Turks. The Uyghurs, of course, are a Turkish people. They speak a dialect of Turkish. For years, Erdogan denounced the Chinese for genocide in Xinjiang. And he's now he kind of likes what's happening in Xinjiang because he's getting a lot of money from the Chinese. But paying people off may not be enough. It may be necessary to suppress this terrorism.

The same enemies that Israel has in the region, basically varieties of the Muslim Brotherhood, are also a major worry for the Chinese. On the surface, Israel is a friend of the United States, China is an adversary of the United States and that's where the dividing line is drawn. But this is a complex world, and the Middle East is a complex place.

There are commonalities of interest, and I've heard this discussed for a dozen years in many trips to China by Chinese military and security people, and Chinese policy people. The first thing that any Chinese foreign policy expert or official will tell you in a conversation is, you're American, we're worried that the Americans are trying to destabilize us through Xinjiang using Muslim fundamentalism.

That's their number one concern. Now, exactly how this might work out in practice given the constraints that you mentioned that we all know, is beyond me. And if you ask me how Israel should proceed, I would say,“Very carefully.”

Glick: Qatar, you said, is the capital of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's the closest Arab ally to Iran. And yet despite their incredibly destabilizing position, they've managed to position themselves as some sort of a moderate country. We've seen this obviously with the United States, but it's true as well with China. So where do you see that going?

Goldman: Well, that's a tough one. I don't know. I blame Qatar for October 7th, at least to some important extent, because Qatar was sending the $30 million a month, whatever it was, to Hamas and assuring the government of Israel that they had Hamas paid off and Hamas was going to be quiet. So they played a significant role in arming and funding Hamas and probably in the deception. I think they're a very evil bunch of people.

On the other hand, they spread vast amounts of money around Washington. And Washington is a swamp with a deep state, which is corrupt. Qatari influence is enormous. Hopefully, a change in administration might present an opportunity to deal with that. But the fact that they have trillions of dollars worth of hydrocarbons and that they're crazy makes them extremely dangerous.

The same countries of the region, such as the Gulf monarchies, should try to find a way to deal with them. The Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia did try to shut down Qatar and they failed because Turkey supported Qatar.

Glick: Well, they failed because the Turks came in, also because even the Trump administration wouldn't take it up. The Trump administration had a leg in both camps until they finally just said, just make up. If that was the position of the Trump administration, you know, it makes it very difficult as a practical matter for anybody to do anything about Qatar.

When you look at Russian and Chinese relations with Iran, you're saying that, yes, it's worrisome, but no, it's not alarming because they're not that strong. They're not as strong as they look. What is it from the United States' perspective, though?

You were writing about what you perceived, I think rightly, as America egging Russia into a position that it wouldn't have necessarily chosen on its own, which is adversarial towards the United States and embracing America's enemies, including China, because the United States really left it with no choice, because the Democrats decided to present Russia as the evil one, as the worst force on earth.

They exaggerated the threat from Russia. At least that's how some people would characterize the situation. But you do think, so I think you made this point in a couple of conversations we had around the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is that you can only break so many eggs.

How much can the United States be provoking Russia and expressing deep enmity towards Russia without convincing the Russians that the United States is an implacable foe and that there's no deal to be made with him regardless of who is in the White House?

Say Trump is elected, and that he comes back into office in January. How much credibility at this point does the United States have with Russia that would enable it to walk back the hostility in a way that is advantageous to the United States as well as Russia? In other words, is it too late?

Goldman: Putin is a nasty piece of work. On the other hand, by the standards of Russian history, he's something of a moderate. No one in Russia talks about Ivan the Reasonable. Compared to Alexander Dugin and the ultra-nationalists. Putin is a fairly rational character. Putin has constraints.

Putin has four or five times the population of Ukraine. He's got roughly the same number of soldiers in the field as Ukraine. Why hasn't he done a massive national mobilization and overrun Ukraine? Because that would not be a popular thing to do, and he would be risking his political scalp by doing so.

He's been willing to keep the war on a fairly low burner with a relatively small number of men in the field, relying on aerial bombardment and so forth to try to slowly degrade the Ukrainian military. That kind of military posture does not bespeak a conqueror who wants to take over everything. That's somebody who's going to ultimately look for a deal because he's not willing to go all in. Now, what kind of deal would Putin take?

That would be, as you say, face-saving. The two existential issues for Putin are one, protecting Russians in Ukraine, which would probably mean the annexation of a few oblasts in Luhansk and Donetsk, and keeping Crimea; and secondly, some agreement that Ukraine stays out of NATO.

If that happens, Putin will declare victory and not quite go home, but at least stay home in the part of Ukraine that he wants. To occupy all of Ukraine, let alone attack Germany or Poland, would require a million men. Occupations are very labor intensive. And Putin is in no position to do that. So I believe, yes, Putin is willing to deal.

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And the person to watch in this respect is Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been acting at least de facto as an intermediary in touch with Donald Trump, in touch with Putin, in touch with the Chinese, in touch with the Ukrainians. Orban, from his recent public statements, is quite confident that a rational peace deal can be put together. So yes, I think that that's definitely a possibility.

That does not mean that we will wean Russia away from an alliance with China. The Russians are never going to trust the West enough again to give up their economic relationship with China. Remember, every leader of the West, everyone in Washington, everyone in Brussels at the European Commission was convinced that sanctions of various kinds would shut down the Russian economy and bring about regime change in Russia.

Biden himself tweeted that the Russian economy would shrink by half; it's actually expanded during the war. And that's because not just China, but India, Turkey, and many other countries took the opportunity to expand their trade with Russia. Russia will not give up those trading relationships. We're not going to bring Russia back into a happy family of the West.

There are people who've got the illusion that we can split Russia from China and make Russia an ally against China. I think that's a fantasy. What we can do is stop the killing and make possible a number of other diplomatic deals.

The other thing to keep in mind, Carolyn, about the Middle East is there is a new major player on the scene. We were talking about Qatar Saudi Arabia and Iran a few minutes ago. The big difference and perhaps a turning point came a year and a half ago in January of 2023, when China mediated the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That was completely new. Now the Chinese talk a lot about mediating. They've offered to mediate Ukraine. They have no serious intent of doing so.

Glick: They were mediating between Hamas and Fatah.

Goldman: They really didn't get anything out of that. They got some agreements on paper. Let the Chinese try to do their own version of Camp David where Yasser Arafat told Bill Clinton to go to hell. The Chinese are not stupid enough to commit their reputation to a mediation effort which is likely to lead to nothing and make them look bad. I think that was just a public relations ploy on the part of the Chinese.

But they did mediate the Saudi Iranian issue. And that's quite an important thing. Chinese are not a revisionist power in the Middle East. They've never been there. They have nothing to revise. Their main interest is economic. They have one base in the Middle East, at Djibouti, which has 200 Marines. If they put together another base anywhere, it might be in Cambodia, but I think another military base in the Middle East is out of the question. They don't want military involvement. They want economic and technological control.

The Chinese do not want to push things to a war. They want to exploit the stupid anti-colonial reflex against Israel in the Global South for propaganda purposes. They want to represent themselves as the friend and champion of the Muslim world. They want to have it both ways. But if you want to have it both ways, that constrains the amount of damage you can do.

Glick: If we were going to summarize a little bit about what we've been talking about, the rise of the axis of the Chinese with the Russians and the Iranians, you think that their national interests may outweigh their group interests or the group interests cannot satisfy their national interests?

Goldman: It's less an axis than a reactive set of deals under duress because of the Ukraine war and the US-China confrontation. There are many divergent interests among these different elements of it.

I disagree with the idea that Israel is the outpost of the West in the Middle East against a new authoritarian axis like Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan in World War II. Israel is a Middle Eastern country with divergent and convergent interests with every other country in the world. We have more convergent interests with the United States than anyone else, but our interests are not identical to those of the United States or any other country.

And Israel should look for opportunities to exploit divisions and disagreements and openings among these countries where it's possible, as it indeed does, for example, with military cooperation with Russia in Syria. I think those divergences may increase over time, particularly if the Ukraine war is settled and Israel can act as an independent power pursuing its own interests. It needs to look for opportunities to improve its strategic position wherever they come from.

Glick: I couldn't agree more with that. It has been an encouraging conversation with you because the headlines are scary. There were agreements that Iran signed with China, in which
China was going to invest an enormous amount of money over 25 years with Iran, and very little of that money apparently has been invested to date. They promised that they're going to do it, but they didn't promise that it would happen in our lifetimes.

Goldman: In fact, one of those deals was canceled after the United States left the JCPOA. Iranian-Chinese trade is very small. China's exports to Iran are a fraction, maybe a fifth of what they did 10 years ago. So it's important, but it's limited. The Chinese have no allies. They've got their territory, other people have territory, and they work out deals about who has which kind of territory.

They're communists the same way the mafia is Catholic. They're entirely pragmatic. They're not ideological. The Chinese always look for a deal, and always look for a negotiated solution as opposed to a violent outcome if they can get it. That's their default position. The main thing Israel should do with China is talk to China, understand its thinking, and look for opportunities. Right now, relations are horrible.

As you pointed out, the Chinese are spreading anti-Semitic propaganda. And that's a very good reason for Israel to be very angry at China. But even if anger is justified, you don't act out of anger. You act out of calculating self-interest. Israel has common enemies with China. That's Muslim fundamentalism.

Glick: And you think that China understands that?

Goldman: I know China understands that. That's been a subject of conversation between Israeli security people in China for a dozen years. I've heard some of those conversations.

Follow David P Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman

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