>>Good morning an welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke.

We're joined today by David Welch, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt among other posts.

Assistant secretary of state for Near East.

Yet another assistant secretary of state position as well.

Thank you for joining u today.

>>Nice to be here, David.

>>So there's always things going on in the Middle East, but this is particularly dangerous moment.

I want you to kind of give your assessment on where things stand today with Israel and Hezbollah battling along the border in Lebanon with Gaz going on with fear of escalation into a broader war with with Iran.

>>Well, we're we're a year and nearly a year into the conflict in Gaza as well.

And I honestly, this is, for me, a very troublin reminder of things of the past, an extremely difficult and volatile situation today and a very unclear path as to what tomorrow will look like.

There's enormous risk, for course, those living in the area.

But also it comes in the context of, I think, global challenges to US national security interests that form part of the background and context to the Middle East events, including a war in the heart of Europe and a tense relationship with a very nationalistic, emergent China.

>>You worked as a diplomat from the years, Jimmy, from Jimmy Carter to George W Bush.

So you saw a lot of you saw different administrations come and go.

But you seem to see a lot of consensus on the bigger issues of foreign policy.

Do we still have that consensus in the United States?

>>Well, very good question, David.

I mean, and part of the reason I'm here is because you you see if you're leading an effort to engage the university community more generally in global affairs, which I think is enormously healthy, because it comes at a time when Americans seem to have been distracte a bit from what's been going on outside of our borders.

And we need that civic engagement because only on that basis can you build a more solid bipartisanship, bipartisa approach to national security, which is also been challenged in recent years.

I do believe that the challenges that we have these days are going to be there for the next administration, whether they're Democrat or Republican.

And I do believe prio administrations, either Democrat or Republican, bears some responsibility for how we got here to this situation, both positive and negative.

And, you know, we can go back as far as the Carter administration if you have questions on that.

So I could explain what I mean.

We really do need a stronger sense of common purpose, and I think that can only be buil on having an educated population who also wants to be engaged with with global issues.

>>Somethin you said about President Carter last night, actually about taking on tough decisions.

And I'm not asking for an assessment of his administration.

But the point you are making is that's a president who took on issues that were very difficult and didn't necessarily have a lot of a domestic political benefit of doing so, whether it was Camp David or the Panama Canal Treaty specifically.

There were other ones as well.

Do we still have leader who are taking on tough issues or are we kind of just managing problem and kind of wishing them away?

>>I have faith in our leadership that had we have we have strong institutions in America, and all we have to do is look outside our country right now to see that others do not.

We should take confidence in those institutions and pride in them.

You know, Carter was, in a way, in foreign policy, a disruptive president.

You know he came after the Vietnam years, but as our countr was kind of recovering from that extremely difficult, bloody conflict, which didn't go very well for us.

And he he tried different things.

Engagement with China, turned over the Panama Cana to Panamanian sovereignty again.

And of course, the Camp David Accords, which he personall had a heavy hand in negotiating.

These are really pathbreaking initiatives.

Now, there were other things that didn't go well in the Carter foreign policy.

I was in universit then, like many of your students here at UCF, and when I looked at the Carter administration, this i this is pretty cool, actually.

And they're doing and trying different things.

And I really wanted to be part of that.

I that's where I got my interes in being an American diplomat.

>>You ended your your time i State Department under George W. Bush as assistant secretar and you were assistant secretary for the Middle East region at the time of the Iraq war.

What was that experience like for you?

>>Well, you know-- >>Both professionally and personally, I guess.

>>I had worked on Ira for many years, going back into the Gulf War, basically to the liberation of Kuwait.

You know, for a period of time afterwards, we'd contain the menace from Saddam Hussein's Iraq with a very complicated array of sanctions.

But it had been contained.

During the latter part of the Clinton administration, second term, there were challenges to that sanctions regime and which rested on us using the threat of weapons of mass destruction to maintain the sanctions.

Unfortunately it evolved to such a point where Saddam's resistance to a complete disclosure led us to military action, and that closed down U.N. inspections for a number of years.

The reason I mention tha history is because that glided into the beginning of the first term of the Bush administration.

You had no inspections that regime was reimposed.

The Bush administration really never had faith in it either for performance a search, the search for weapons of mass destruction, or for wha that might mean in terms of what American options were.

The decision to go into Iraq was contested publicly.

As you know, it was a war as as Richard Haass has said, of choice, not necessity.

And that, of course, was caused a lot of frictio even within the administration.

I was in Egypt at the time.

If you read Secretary Rice's memoirs and in retrospect she notes that I had different views on Iraq, bu a diplomatic way of putting it, you know, I guess you could say I kind of lost that argument.

And of course, Egypt being a very strong supporter of stability and security in the region and a decent friend of the United States over the years.

I mean, they had their own views.

And, you know, when you're sitting as an American ambassador in the Middle East, in those days, you're being bombarded from left and right and with views on this.

And of course, every Egyptian right up to and including President Mubarak had an opinion.

>>They weren't shy of sharing-- >>Oh no.

>>They weren't afriad to share with.

>>You have a lot of experience with Egyptians.

So you know exactly what I mean.

They are not shy at all about expressing their views.

President Mubarak cautioned against going to war against Saddam Hussein.

He was not the only Middle East leader to do it.

There were others, though, who encouraged it.

The president, in the end, did what presidents are supposed to do.

He took a decision.

It was a very firm one, I think, in retrospect it introduced two things that we had not intended and you could say it was flawed in execution.

I think that's a bit of a cop out, to be honest.

But the strategic results have been, at best, uneven.

We did remove Saddam Hussein, who was an enormous threat, mostly to Iraqis.

For ten years.

He had been essentially contained, as I mentioned earlier.

But we introduced a lot of other problems, some of which are very manifest as we speak.

Iranian influence has dominated Iraqi politics in the last ten years, and I think we're not done with that.

>>So after the Iraq war, it kind of led directly into couple a couple of other areas.

One is, is war in Lebanon, which you helped broker a cease fire as I understand.

So that was one thing.

And then you had leader across the region with what is now called the Arab Spring fall one after the other.

Was that a consequence of an outgrowth of the war in Iraq, or is that just something that was going to happen by evolution?

>>Well, you know, it's certainly in terms of what's been called the Arab Spring, I think that was a bit of a separate thing.

But let's recall that Islami Iran's influence into the Arab heartland has been there i Lebanon since the early 1980s.

And in 2006, and, you know, we saw that the point of that Persian spear, Hezbollah, undertook a military action against Israel.

I think Hassan Nasrallah's intent at the time was to capture some Israeli soldiers and then trade them later o for people in Israeli prisons.

We've seen a cognates of that last October with Sinwar in Gaza.

Interestingly, after the 2006 war was stopped.

Nasrallah, whose public statements I always watch because he he does usually speak his mind.

He admitted publicly that if he'd had to do it all over again, he would not have done that because of the damage it inflicted on Lebanon.

But we need to ask ourselves i this: Why does an organization like Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, have the authority and the power to do these things?

They essentially control a state.

They are a non-state actor, but they behave like they're in charge.

It doesn't matter what the majority of other Lebanese think.

>>They certainly have a veto power.

And everything.

>>They do, they have more than a veto power, as we see even today.

They have the authority to independently d what they think they want to do.

And it bears an enormous cost for Lebanese.

But that is the threat now in today's Middle East.

It is not Arab Israeli state on state war that went away with Camp David and it has been solid for 50 years.

The conflict is dominated by non-state actors fighting on behalf of causes, in some cases faith, in other cases behaving as if they're the states themselves and undertaking decisions abou the exercise of military power.

>>Let me ask you about the danger of dealing with non-state actors negotiating.

Obviously, you know, the goal of one of the goals, the United States and certainly international community, is to minimize violence in the Middle East.

One of the ways it's done that when there have been fighting is you have to get a cease fire first, deal with the bigger issues later.

But in negotiating with Hamas or Hezbollah, you seem to undermine the authority then of Lebanese government or the Palestinian authorities and others.

Have they essentially then replaced the recognized governments of the Palestinia people and the Lebanese people?

>>Well, yes, but imperfectly, of course, because they have the power independently to do those things.

But the accountability for them gets diffused, especially in the passion of the moment.

Let's remember who started this.

And let's ask ourselves, does it serve the cause, which they claim?

Are we building a stronger Lebanese state with this?

Are we getting closer to a independent Palestine?

I think the answer is no.

And I think the damage to innocent life as they do, this is huge.

Look, this is, I think, a struggle that is not going to be resolved easily or soon.

We might as well.

I don't mean to be cavalier about this, but we got to understand that we need to accompany our diplomacy with means.

We have to have a vision of where we want to go.

That is not just declarative but is has something behind it.

I don't think we're going to see a secure, stable, prosperous and peaceful Middle East until you change this dynamic with the non-state actors governing events right now.

That's true from Lebanon, true from Gaza through from Yemen and then other areas, too, in the Middle East.

It's one of the most trouble regions of the world right now.

And the Biden administration has for the last year has has tried to cop with the fact that you have this accompanie by a war in the heart of Europe, a really dangerous an damaging war in and of itself.

Now, when's the last time we had two raging conflicts like this?

It's really an enormous challenge to our national security interests.

>>You know not knowing what we want to do, though, in terms of policy in a unified position.

I mean, you've you've had a number of posts, obviously, in the Middle Eas region, I think, including Syria and Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

And you also oversaw the whole region.

Did we have purpose then?

And how did we lose that purpose?

>>Well, we had we had some successes, some mistakes.

And sometimes our Band-Aids were effective and sometimes they weren't.

Look, I know I'm not going to second guess those who are making polic for the United States right now.

And I they face a really hard set of issues.

I think that we nee to support them in the effort.

I would have if they were to ask me a few suggestions.

If your goal is security along the Israel-Lebanon frontier, I would talk more about that and less about ceasefires.

We're not we're not going t have a cease fire soon in Gaza.

I don't I don't expect we're going to have one in Lebanon.

Really these conflicts will smolder on.

But we do need security.

We need security for the Palestinians.

We need security for Israel.

We security for Lebanese.

We need security for Israelis along that frontier.

And somehow that's got to be done.

And I believe it will be done, by the way, in 2025.

I would expect on Ukraine and on the Middle East, it doesn't matter who's elected.

>>Some decisions have to be made.

>>Decisions will have to be made.

People are going to be workin on this day and night.

This is, I think, going to be a very, very demanding period for those who are in charge of our foreign policy.

If I were starting all over agai in the Carter administration and I was dealing with the Harris or the Trump administration in next year, rathe than being alarmed by all this, I would say let's get back to work on this.

We have got to do something about these problems.

>>It seems there's opportunity in the chaos we're talking about-- >>Yeah, but opportunity sounds like a positive word.

>>Right.

Right.

>>Yo want to be careful about that.

>>Right.

Right, right, right.

But one point you made, particularly in the Middle Eas region, but it's beyond that is is is is Iran how you deal with Iran?

So, obviously, you know, Iraq war happened, their influence expanded in the region.

So Saddam Hussein threat was eliminated.

But you had this Iranian expanse and throughout the region, it would it seems to be very hard to pu that genie back in the bottle.

>>Yeah, and it's most obviou where there are Shia majorities or pluralities in in Arab states.

>>But you know, even like Hamas is not Shia and still aligned in many ways with Iran.

It's something that's going to have to be dealt with at some point.

So is a containment polic still viable, which is the U.S. is pretty much pursued on and off since the shah fell or, you know, some in the past talked about regime change.

No one serious really talking about it in Washington right now.

But what do you do with it?

I mean, you've also had an opportunity to engage, and that hasn't quite worked out either.

>>I, I, this is a reall this is an interesting problem set, but is the one you're quite right to ask about it.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is the head of the snake.

The snake has bitten in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria and Lebanon, in Palestine.

Without an effective Iran policy, we are not going to be able to address any of those conflict areas successfully.

Revolutionary Iran has presented us with three problems over the last generation.

They haven't changed.

They're not going away.

There are still their number one irredentism and terrorism.

Number two, missile proliferation.

Number three, their nuclear ambitions.

Those have to be dealt with as a bundle, not separately.

You cannot count on hope and change.

Negotiate a nuclear agreement that gives them a calendar for breakout and leave the other two issues unaddressed.

And they influence all of these battles.

The president of Iran, newly elected gentleman, is off telling the global community that they don't want any broader war.

He may be president.

He may have been elected, but I don't think he speak authoritatively for his country because they are deeply involve in each one of these conflicts and now are weapons providers to, of all places, Russia.

What a stunning reversal.

You know, something will be done about that.

>>In dealing with Iran or any major issue, but specifically Iran.

The U.S. also needs allies to do it.

Is there a concern that you won't be able that the United States will not be able to assemble a coalition to have an effective Iranian policy?

>>I, I think we have a ready coalition and look-- >>I say this because you just you just were mentioning that they're providing arms to Russia.

And, you know, in the past, the Iranian relationship with Moscow was not particularly warm.

Sometimes convenient but not not exactly an alliance.

But now it seems to be going that direction.

>>Well, I think it's it's probably more one of convenience and efficiency for these types of regimes.

But unless an alliance, there's just no natural link there historically or socially.

That said, it is a dangerous relationship for sure.

But I go back to your question about do we have friend in this matter?

Of course we do.

And most of our Arab friends are deeply worried about these problems.

All of our European allies are as well.

There are still there should be sanctions imposed on Iran for these activities.

I believe that it will it will not be hard to assemble a the principal Western democracies in support of further stricture on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I think that's that's got to be part of the bundle.

It's not the only answer.

But we don't we don't have that concerted pressure today.

And it it's there to be marshaled because look at the solving the problem in Ukraine.

I'm not an expert on Ukraine or Russia, but it's going to require assembling those pieces one by one without some some degree of of coercion.

And I don't mean just military.

I mean that sanctions is included in that package.

You cannot build a successfu path to a diplomatic solution.

It has to be there.

>>A comment that was made to me and one of my recent trips to the Middle East.

It was a criticism of U.S. policy.

And you've heard many of these over the years, of course.

But this one I found this interesting.

This is like we'd rather hav the US be strong and reliable.

Even if the policies are wrong sometimes then be weak and kind of accommodating and all everything.

Try to be everything to everyone because actually then you're unreliable and we can't.

We base our policy and where Washington's going to be.

Do you think that's accurate?

>>Well, I hear it myself that a lot of our of our Arab friends and some who are not.

I spent my professional career in diplomacy and in the school of hard knocks in the Middle East.

I'd rather have a situation where we're respected and feared.

But the perfect i sometimes not always attainable for certain periods of time that may waver.

The worst outcome would be where, you know, no one cares what we think.

We're not really trying anything.

And I think that encourages the worst behavior, not just on the part of our our adversaries, but even on the part of our friends.

Having certainty in your policy is helpful.

You can't always get thoughtful certainty and especially in a democracy, we have lots of views out there and there's often a big argument and struggl even publicly about such things.

But nations behave like people too, you know, they they watch behavior.

And most of our friends and adversaries, like it or not in this imperfect world, you know, revolve around the behavior of people.

So I'm convinced tha these authoritarian governments in particular are watching very directly exactly what our leadership is doing.

And they calculate, are these people sure of themselves?

Do I know what direction they're headed in?

Or maybe I can push them little way one way or the other?

>>Test?

>>Yeah, you could call it that.

Boy, have we got some tests.

>>Plenty.

So we just have a minute left.

So a final question for you, and this is kind of like big picture.

Do you feel that Washington has kind of forgotten you're, you're a career diplomat.

Has Washington forgotten that there are other tools to solving problems than just using military force or military assistance or economic assistance?

You can actually use different kinds of diplomacy.

>>Yeah, well, I don't know that we've forgotten it, but we've we've not appreciated its value in certain circumstances and and not properly assessed its risks too.

You know, you if you want to if you want to negotiate a peace, you'r dealing with your adversaries.

If you want to negotiate a ceasefire, you are dealing with your your adversaries.

And that requires you to make accommodations.

You're there.

You may not get all your goals.

You may not get them up front.

And politicians, especially in our democracy, have to make responsible judgment about what those tradeoffs are.

I think we've come around more, an I think the Biden administration has been willing to experiment somewhat with more risk taking in its diplomacy.

Unfortunately, the circumstances haven't rewarded them with with returns that they can demonstrate publicly.

I think, that the effort to try and renegotiat the JCPOA on Iran is an example.

And it was a mistake and didn't deal with the other problems.

The JCPOA just didn't deal with them successfully.

But I don't fault them for trying.

I do believe that's important and honestly, you know, we don't want a situatio where all you have is a hammer because in every problem's a nail.

And as we've seen, our hammer is big, it's powerful, but it's expensive, it's hard to deploy and doesn't always work.

And so logically you would try the alternatives, maybe even lea with trying those for a change.

>>David Welch, thank you so much for joining us today.

Great insight.

>>Thank you, David.

Thank you for having me.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.