The Sagacity Of Elliott Abrams

>> Andrew Roberts: Elliot, you've served in foreign policy roles in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, and Donald Trump. And you were the US special representative for Iran and Venezuela between 2020 and 2021. Tell me, you started life as a Democrat working for Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

First of all, what were they like? And secondly, what was it that brought you over from being a Democrat to a Republican?

>> Elliot: We could go on those questions for 3 hours, but Jackson, let me put it briefly. Jackson was in Norwegian, his parents were Norwegian immigrants. He was quite stolid, not very charismatic, but completely solid, tough, strong, reliable.

Pat was an Irishman. I'm gonna get in trouble for these national.

>> Elliot: But he was flamboyant, he was mercurial. He was a difficult man to work for, though it was rewarding, because he was also a very brilliant man and brilliant public servant. That was the old democratic party.

That was the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy and Johnson. And I believe, as so many others like in those days, Dean Kirkpatrick did, that I didn't leave the Democratic Party so much as the Democratic Party left me. And those were the days of McGovern and Jimmy Carter.

And I felt that party did not represent my views about world politics.

>> Andrew Roberts: If scoop, we're gonna be talking what is right at the end of the show. But can I give you a what if now? What would have happened if your efforts in 1976 had been successful and Scoop Jackson had become president instead of Jimmy Carter?

 

>> Elliot: I think we'd have had a much better foreign policy. I would not necessarily say the Soviets would not have invaded Afghanistan, but we would not have had a president who felt he had to change his foreign policy after that invasion because he had misunderstood the Soviets.

>> Andrew Roberts: And do you feel that what happens in one part of the world very much affects what happens everywhere else?

I'm thinking at the moment, of course, in terms of the withdrawal from Afghanistan leading on to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And possible lack of victory in Ukraine, possibly then leading onto an invasion of Taiwan, obviously thousands of miles away. But do you see the world in that interconnected way?

 

>> Elliot: I think so, reliability and deterrence relate all of those things to each other. And a country that, for example, abandons commitments in one place is gonna be understood to be an unreliable ally, likely to abandon another commitment. I think the opposite is also true. So while there's no automaticity here, I think the relationship is very strong between one crisis and another.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: With the events of 911 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan now over 20 years ago. How do you feel the overthrow of Saddam will be seen by history, by historians, maybe 50 or 100 years hence?

>> Elliot: I am more optimistic about that. President Bush has made the comment, George W.

Bush, that history is going to have a better opinion of him. I think if you look at Iraq now, they've had a whole series of democratic elections, imperfect, but democratic. And I think they would be, in fact, a peaceful, working democracy were it not for Iran, for the intervention of Iran, for Iran's support for the shia militia groups.

And I think that if one looks a few decades in the future, I hope that at some point the islamic republic will have fallen and the people of Iran will be governing themselves. And while there will be rivalries with Iraq, there won't be this kind of intervention. If one were able to look back at that point and say the beginning of a stable, democratic Iraq came with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the war will look a lot better.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You're currently a senior fellow of Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. What do you feel at the moment with regard to President Biden's statement that there's no clear evidence that Iran was behind the 7th October massacres in southern Israel?

>> Elliot: I think it's a bizarre statement if he means that we do not have the smoking gun, that is, we do not have an intercept in which the Ayatollah Khamenei or the head of the Quds force says, do it today.

Well, that's, I'm sure, correct, but not very meaningful. It's clear that Hamas, like Hezbollah, could not be the kind of well organized, well armed group. If it were not for Iranian money, training, weapons, it would be a wholly different situation. So to say that we have no direct evidence, I think in one way it's surely true, but in another way it's surely meaningless.

We have all the evidence we need of Iranian support for Hamas, it's curious. When I was in the Bush White House, it's 20 years ago, there was a debate among experts as to whether Iran would support Hamas because it is a sunni group, it's the Muslim Brotherhood. Surely the Shia in Iran would not.

Well, of course, we now know that that was a foolish debate to have, and we have had 20 years of significant iranian support for Hamas.

>> Andrew Roberts: And how do you think the Biden administration should punish Iran for the latest atrocity, the killing of three american servicemen and women?

 

>> Elliot: Well, I think I would take the words from your question, and the two words are, punish Iran. What we have been doing, and it's not fair just to blame President Biden for this. We've been doing it. We, the United States have been doing it for about 30 years, is never punishing Iran.

There was one exception under Reagan in 88, when we essentially sank the Iranian navy. And then there's the killing of Soleimani. But Iran has been killing Americans, really from the beginning of the islamic republic, through proxies, and we've let them get away with it. We've never, in a sense, laid down the law and said, if you kill Americans through proxies, we will go after.

After you, not the proxies. That is what I think President Biden should be doing. Now, I think the proxies are expendable from the point of view of Iran. So if you damage them or kill some of them, the Iranians don't care. That's what they're there for. Iran must be punished itself.

And that does not mean World War III and it does not mean bombing Tehran tomorrow, but it means looking at Iranian assets. Maybe you start with Iranian assets overseas, Iranian bases in, say, Yemen. Maybe you start with Iranian naval assets in the Gulf rather than Iran proper. But I think the point, the lesson that's been learned by Iran over the years is, that they are immune from punishment.

And I think we need to correct that.

>> Andrew Roberts: Some people in the Biden administration have called the Biden doctrine as involving calling for a Palestinian state. Now, you're a prominent opponent of the two state so-called solution in Palestine, and you've called it a magical incantation in a recent excellent essay in.

Was it Atlantic magazine?

>> Elliot: In the tablet, tablet.

>> Andrew Roberts: In the tablet, sorry. Yes, first class piece of writing and certainly doesn't pull any punches. But let's talk about the two state solution, which, as you point out in this article, seems to be a sort of shibboleth of the entire foreign policy establishment of pretty much every country in the west.

But you say it's the wrong thing to do. Why is that?

>> Elliot: First, I think just calling for the two-state solution as if it were merely a matter of three days of negotiations fails to recall the history. People have been trying to do this for a very long time, since Oslo 1993.

And there are many, many difficulties, such as what do you do about Jerusalem? What do you do about the division of Jerusalem? Are you going to divide it? Where are the borders of this Palestinian state? There are questions like that, but I think there is a deeper problem here, which is that people are paying very little attention to the nature of this state.

For example, what is its relationship going to be to terrorist groups or to Iran? People use the word deradicalization. What is gonna be taught in its schools? If you put a weak, and it will be, of course, almost by definition, if you create it overnight, you put a weak state there in the West bank.

It's a juicy target for Iran, which has pursued a policy in Gaza, in Yemen, above all in Lebanon, of creating anti-Israel proxies. If you do that in the West bank, the danger to Israel is even deeper. And I'm very struck by the fact that people mostly call people Joseph Borrell of the EU, Gutierrez of the United Nations, and most recently, President Blinken.

President Biden and Secretary Blinken call for a sovereign, independent Palestinian state. And the word that is missing in that phrase is democratic. So I asked in this article, why do they not call for a democratic Palestinian state? And I think the answer is one of two things. There is no democratic arab state.

There is no arab democracy today. So they think that it's unrealistic, and they fear that if you had an election, Hamas would win. And indeed, the best public opinion polls of Gaza and the West Bank suggest that Hamas would win. So wait a minute. You want to create a Palestinian state in which the majority of voters would vote for Hamas?

How is that supposed to contribute to peace in the Middle East? I think this has not been thought through. That's why I think it's in incantation.

>> Andrew Roberts: Don't you think also, it would be seen, especially if it happened at all soon, as essentially rewarding Hamas for the 7 October massacre?

 

>> Elliot: Absolutely. If you look at where this question of palestinian statehood was in 2023, before October 7 or the two preceding years under Biden, it was really off the agenda. And if Hamas is, as you say, rewarded for putting it back on the agenda, that is a terrible lesson to teach.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And how could it possibly be demilitarized? I mean, we've had a history of demilitarization in the 1930s, obviously, with the Rhineland, which didn't end up very well. I think you point out in your article, don't you, that if in a future palestinian state, the state wanted to upgrade its police force, for example.

And buy it various weapons that are very much on the cusp of an army, of being an army, it would become very quickly clear that Palestine was not another Costa Rica, for example, with no army at all. How could that possibly be policed by the rest of the world?

 

>> Elliot: Israel does the policing now, but once you've created this sovereign, independent state, any intervention by Israel becomes an act of war under international law. So the Israelis would not so easily be able to do it. There is now an enormous amount of smuggling of weapons across the egyptian border into Gaza, across the jordanian border into the West bank, and this is all being done by Iran.

So they would no doubt try this. It's easy to say, well, of course it would be demilitarized, indeed, Secretary of State Blinken said it yesterday. Of course, it must be a demilitarized state. But the reference to the Rhineland that I made in the article, I think was opposite, because all, well, all is too strong.

Many Germans viewed the agreement they had made about the Rhineland at Versailles to have been foisted upon them at a moment of weakness, and they opposed it. And you have the stab in the back legend and so on. I think that would happen in a Palestine. The conditions that had been agreed to to create the state would be understood as unfair impositions by foreigners, by the Americans, by the Jews, whoever you want.

There would be an effort to start eroding them quickly.

>> Andrew Roberts: I'm just going to quote you a couple of sentences from this article where you write, a peaceful Palestinian state that represents no threat to Israel is a mirage. It's an illusion indulged by people in the west who want to seem progressive and compassionate and those in the arab world who fear resisting the powerful anti Israel currents that circulate there and are now fortified by Iran.

The future security of Israel depends in good part on resisting the two-state formula for endless conflict. Do you feel that the one gets a sense that Trump, any future Trump Administration might understand that, will understand that. How could you persuade the Democrats of this?

>> Elliot: That will be very hard.

And I think it would not be smart to try to persuade them to abandon the project. I think the smarter way would be to try to discuss the conditionality. Lincoln said on February 7th when in Israel, that there must be a time bound, irreversible path to Palestinian statehood.

And that is, I think, exactly wrong, because it erases conditionality. I think what one might persuade them of is the need to impose a series of conditions before one would create and recognize a palestinian state. Many of those conditions would be ones that President Biden would agree with, security conditions, for example, to protect Israel, and, by the way, Jordan.

So I think the conditionality would be a key argument to make at this point, because if the conditions are quite sensible, you've got to end the teaching of hatred. You've got to end naming schools and public squares after terrorist murderers. You've got to have an effective and efficient government, etc.

If you set those conditions, then, I don't think they're going to be reached. It's one of the reasons palestinian state does not exist today. In the Trump plan, which did call for palestinian statehood, there was an elaborate set of conditions that had to be met about palestinian politics, about security.

And that is, I think, the argument to make to Democrats, even if the goal is correct to do it overnight, to recognize a Palestinian state without those conditions is, by the way, no favor to Palestinians. And that is an argument I would make, too, and I use the phrase in that article, if you had an independent palestinian state, you could say Palestine would be free, but Palestinians would not be.

I think that. Well, George Bush used to use the phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations. I think we need to impose some expectations on Palestinians, or we are helping those in their society who would not like to see these reforms. We should be helping the people who want to change palestinian society for the better.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, so you were Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, and there would be no human rights, essentially, in the kind of Palestinian state that was most likely to come about if it were to come about soon. Is that fair?

>> Elliot: I think it is fair, and I think we in the west are complicit in this.

It was the Israelis with American and European support who handed Palestine to Yasser Arafat, who crushed civil society very quickly and ruled as an autocrat. Now President Abbas rules as an autocrat. If you read the Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, these are left of center organizations, and they're not particularly friendly to Israel.

If you read what they say about life in the West bank over these decades, there's no respect for human rights, there's no freedom of press, there's no independent judiciary. Surely Palestinians have a right to expect those things in a Palestinian state. If one is ever created, let's move on to another country which doesn't have any of those things either, which is China.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: I know you were a friend of Henry Kissinger's, and obviously his legacy is something that's being discussed a lot at the moment in the immediate aftermath of his death. Do you think that the realpolitik that Henry personified, a former guest on this podcast, I hinted at, specifically with regard to China, is something that's going to be seen in the long run as being a positive aspect of his legacy?

Or might he be seen as the person who opened up the opportunity for the Chinese to essentially challenge America's superpower status?

>> Elliot: I think the latter. I think there will be a lot of criticism. I think that Henry's view, and more generally the realpolitik view, sees players on the international scene as countries, and they are black boxes.

There is a country called China, and it has a leader, whether it's Hu Jintao or now it's Xi Jinping. And in Russia, that's a black box and there's a leader, Putin, and you deal with him. This view, Henry's view, never really sees societies. It just sees the leadership.

And that is, I think, in the case of China, a great mistake. The Chinese have been trying for what, 125 or 150 years now to figure out how to modernize. They have figured out pretty well how to modernize their economy. They have not figured it out with respect to their political system.

And many, many Chinese want to. Henry was never really responsive to those questions, and I think it is a fair criticism of him and will be in the coming decades.

>> Andrew Roberts: One of the adjectives thrown about you and your friends and supporters is the term neoconservative. Is it a useful label?

Would it have been a useful label at the time, historically, for people writing about the present day? Does neoconservative actually mean very much? And if so, if so what?

>> Elliot: I think it was a useful label. There was a development in, I would say, the sixties and seventies of the so called limits of social policy school of Democrats who believed that more was being asked of government than it could deliver.

And that's many Democrats, including people like Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glaser, other sociologists, Daniel Bell, Erlene Kristol. And it had a foreign policy side too of Democrats like Jackson and Moynihan as opposed to George McGovern, Jimmy Carter. And it did describe a group of people who included those names.

I think it is not a meaningful expression now, partly because they're gone. And most of the remaining neoconservatives like me are pretty much now accurately described as conservatives. When I hear the term neocon nowadays, frankly, it is most often used. To mean warmonger or even Jew war monger.

I mean, it's a piece of invective these days. So I don't use, I don't run away from it. But there are very few of us left, I think, who are accurately described that way.

>> Andrew Roberts: You've been appointed by President Biden to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, chalking up yet another president who wants your advice, Elliot.

What does it do?

>> Elliot: Well, to be fair to President Biden, this is a bipartisan commission, so they have to appoint some Republicans. And on those appointments-

>> Andrew Roberts: And they thought you were the least bad one to appoint.

>> Elliot: No, they take advice from Senator McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate.

And as I understand the system, unless you have been personally abusive, that is, you've done tweets and blogs that are personally abusive to the president, then they take Senator McConnell's advice. What does it do? It is supposed to provide oversight for, first of all, broadcasting, Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, Radio Farda in Farsi, those activities.

And really, all the public diplomacy activities that used to be in the US Intelligence Agency, excuse me, US information agency, USIA, until it was disbanded about 25 years ago. The idea is to see if the State Department and other agencies are doing public diplomacy and doing it well, and we're supposed to do reports and we're supposed to hold hearings and do that sort of thing.

The commission's been quite inactive for about five or ten years. We need to get, it hasn't even had a full complement of commissioners and doesn't now. I hope that this year we'll get the full complement and then we shall see if we can have a beneficial impact.

>> Andrew Roberts: You advised President Reagan on foreign policy in South America back in the day, where Cuba, of course, must have been one of the countries that you were keeping a very close eye on.

What's your predictions for Cuba? I mean, of all the places in that area, it really should be a democracy now, shouldn't it? With Fidel Castro long dead and so on, how do you see the future of cube panning out?

>> Elliot: It's hard to be terribly optimistic because it's been, what, 40, 64 years of communist rule, and Fidel's death turned out not to be the moment when there was going to be real change.

It's still very much a communist system. One can only hope that over time, it evolves, at least in the direction of, God, what we used to call Hungarian communism back in the 1970s and 80s, rather than, say, Soviet or Romanian or East German communism. But it's hard to see why today, over the next, let's say, ten years, it would evolve toward real democracy.

It isn't evolving at all. That is, it isn't a less repressive form of communist dictatorship than it was under Fidel when he was alive. There is zero freedom of speech, media freedom. There is no independence for courts. There are still many, many political prisoners. So there's been no evolution at all.

And I think we're going to have to wait a while to see any happen.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tragic. Now, the questions that I ask every one of my guests. What book are you reading? I only really allow you to talk about history books or biographies cuz that's what we concentrate on in this podcast.

Have you got one for me?

>> Elliot: Yeah, I'm reading a book called President Garfield. This is a new book.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, yes, absolutely. I've been given that. Yes, I must get right to that. You're enjoying it, good.

>> Elliot: This is something I knew nothing about. I assume Garfield was one of these late 19th century hopelessly failed presidents.

He was the last president born in the log cabin. He was a civil war general. He was speaker of the House. There's every reason to think he would have been a very good, if not great president, but he was. I don't wanna give the story away, but he was fascinating.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, I think-

>> Elliot: Whatever.

>> Andrew Roberts: So you'd think that he could have been up there amongst the sort of, well, the captain of the second division, as it were.

>> Elliot: Yeah, second division, right.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, okay.

>> Elliot: Life.

>> Andrew Roberts: Fantastic, well, yes, I've been told how good that book is as well.

So this is the moment at which I should remember the author's surname, but.

>> Elliot: CW Goodyear.

>> Andrew Roberts: Good, that's right, thank you, good. I feel less embarrassed now. And the other question is your favorite what if, your historical counterfactual. What's the one that you enjoy thinking about?

>> Elliot: What if the debate among the ottoman reformers who had taken over had led them not to side with the Germans in 1914?

It was apparently a close run thing, and the British and French and Russians were making tremendous efforts to persuade the Ottomans to remain neutral, if they had remained neutral. So you have no Gallipoli, you have no Balfour declaration, perhaps, you have no Arab revolt. To me, it's a fascinating question.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You might also have got the russian wheat through the Dardanelles, giving them enough money to continue fighting the war on the eastern front as well. They were pretty much desperate to do that. And you certainly wouldn't have got the overthrow of the Caliphate in 1922. The fundamentalist Islamic, essentially fascism that we've seen so much of.

Yeah, that's a great one. I've never thought about that one. You're absolutely right. But I'm not sure Winston Churchill comes out brilliantly from this, not because of Gallipoli. My views on that are pretty settled. But he, of course, had two big warships that would be. Were being built in Britain that he essentially sequestered.

And then he attacked the forts in November 1914, the outer forts, which put the Turks on their mettle and probably did a bit more harm than good in the short run, at least.

>> Elliot: I think that's right. And the seizure of those two ships was perhaps the turning point.

So Churchill is a problem in this what if.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. But equally, we did get the warships, of course, which is totally useful. Thank you so much, Elliot, for this really stimulating and intellectually enjoyable time. I really appreciate it.

>> Elliot: It's been pleasure, thank you.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Elliot. On the next episode of Secrets of Statecraft, my guest will be Toby Young, the free speech advocate and founder of the Daily Skeptic.

>> Narrator: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.