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Shashank Joshi is Defence Editor at The Economist, where he writes on a wide range of national security, defence and intelligence issues.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss how technology is changing warfare, the latest developments in Ukraine, and the future of Gaza.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You cover a lot of aspects of international and military affairs for The Economist. I don’t know very much about military matters, but I was really struck by the recent Ukrainian strikes on Russia, where they used very cheap drone technology to destroy incredibly expensive and sophisticated military equipment—including planes used to drop atomic bombs.
Can you tell me about the significance of those strikes in the context of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, and perhaps more importantly, how they reflect the broader transformation of warfare through new technologies like drones?
Shashank Joshi: It was an incredible incident, wasn’t it? Yascha, have you ever watched the BBC drama Rogue Heroes that was on TV the last couple of years? It’s based on a book by Ben Macintyre about the history of the SAS—the Special Air Service—Britain’s equivalent to your JSOC, your Navy SEALs. In the Second World War, this was a unit that would be sent behind enemy lines to covertly—and lethally—blow up, machine-gun, or explode a bunch of German planes on an airfield somewhere in North Africa, and later in many other places. This was good old-fashioned raiding. Military raids go back as far as military history itself, but they were incredibly successful. Maybe a dozen SAS members, plus the Free French, could smash up a few dozen German planes—with completely disproportionate effect. This is that kind of raiding in the modern age. But the key thing is, you can now do it without having to send people across borders—no parachuting a thousand miles behind enemy lines, no hiding under trucks. You can send drones instead. And you can send drones that are remote-controlled.
In this case, they were reportedly piggybacking off the Russian mobile phone networks. They zoomed in onto the airfield—really close—and destroyed strategic bombers worth ten, maybe a hundred times more than the weapons being used. This is basically old-fashioned sabotage prosecuted by modern means. It’s not a revolution in warfare, but it’s a great example of how new technology is now more democratically available to states that once didn’t have long-range missiles capable of reaching these airfields. It’s not the only example. If you look at the Houthis in Yemen, they’ve basically just fought the U.S. Navy to a standstill. They’ve taken down a dozen U.S. drones, fired missiles at merchant shipping—and at U.S. aircraft carriers. They forced F-35 stealth aircraft to dodge out of the way.
So I think the lesson we’re learning is that certain types of precision military technology—very advanced technology—are becoming democratized. They’re much more easily available to a wide range of states. That applies just as much to the US and Europeans as to anyone else. In the next conflict, it could be an American airbase. It could be a European airbase.
Mounk: Yeah, that’s one of the things people on social media pointed out right away—that there’s probably a lot of very expensive and important military hardware in the United States and other major nations that’s stationed in the open air at military bases. These places have air superiority over their own territory, so they’re not too worried about foreign nations sending major aircraft into those inland bases. But if you're able to smuggle a bunch of drones close to those bases, then suddenly those planes could become vulnerable in a really significant way.
Do you think the American military—or for that matter, the Chinese military—is looking at what happened in Russia and scrambling to rethink how they position and store this military apparatus? Are they really worried about something like that happening to them in the coming days and weeks?
Joshi: They should be, and some of them are. In the Pacific, look at Asia—if you look at the war games in which the American military and those helping them model these conflicts play out a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, 90% of American aircraft losses occur on the ground from Chinese missiles or Chinese attacks on the ground. There’s a huge problem. If you go back to 2012, Taiwan had 306 hardened aircraft shelters—big hangars that are extremely well protected against aerial attack. China had 297; it had fewer. In the intervening period, China has built 380 additional ones. The United States, by contrast, has only 15 hardened aircraft shelters within 1,000 kilometers of Taiwan, which is well within range of many Chinese missiles. So basically what we’re seeing, Yascha, is a problem that many people have identified—and where, frankly, the Americans are still astonishingly complacent.
This isn’t a case of, we’ve never experienced this before, it’s a completely new problem. During the Cold War, we understood this very well. If you spoke to European military officers running air bases in Europe, they’d tell you: we fully expected Russian special forces—the Spetsnaz—to come try to kill our pilots in their beds and blow up the planes on the ground before they took off. That’s much easier than shooting them down in the air. So we protected the airfields. We dispersed planes across many bases. But over the last 30 years, for the reasons you outlined, we’ve become complacent. We’ve shut down airfields to save money. We’ve concentrated planes at fewer and fewer bases. And we haven’t invested in hardening the shelters we do have. So yes, we recognize the problem. Are we fixing it? Well, not at the pace that’s necessary.
Mounk: You said earlier that this new technology is democratizing warfare. Now, in general, I’m a believer in democracy and think that democratizing many things is good. But I worry that democratizing warfare may turn out to be a bad thing—that it might actually be better for the safety and security of the world if a few major military powers are able to monopolize most of the world’s striking force, rather than having that ability dispersed. If the power to launch attacks—including not just against military forces but also civilian targets—becomes accessible to a much wider range of actors, that could be destabilizing. How will this transform the ability of small countries to wage war? How will it affect the ability of non-state actors—like terrorist groups—to inflict very significant damage?
Joshi: It’s a great question. Imagine you were speaking to a young U.S. military officer operating in Iraq in, say, 2005, and they were dealing with the problem of IEDs—Improvised Explosive Devices—being buried in the ground. This was a huge problem, as you remember. It killed large numbers of U.S. and allied troops. Now imagine telling them: by the way, soon the IEDs are going to be flying. They’ll be able to home in on you using object recognition—at $50 a chip—onboard drones made with cheap Chinese components. And by the way, you won’t be able to jam all of them with electronic warfare, because some of them will be wire-guided, using fiber optic cables that spool out from behind the drone, making them completely immune to your countermeasures. They’d be like, what the hell are you talking about? That sounds like science fiction nonsense. And yet—that’s the world we live in. That’s the battlefield we live in.
So you’re right. I think it depends where you stand. From a Western perspective, it’s not great that other countries now have access to precision-guided strike technology, surveillance technology and drone technology that would once have been the prerogative of the CIA or some multi-billion-dollar agency. But if you’re a middle-sized power like Pakistan, this is great.
To connect this directly to a recent conflict, look at India–Pakistan. We’ve just had major clashes between the two sides. Maybe we’ll go into more detail about that later. But in the past, the options they had were: we can shell each other with artillery—which is pretty common and not a big escalation—or we can use bombs and missiles dropped from planes, which is a very big escalation. What’s happened now is, these countries have access to what we call loitering munitions—basically one-way attack drones that can hover for long periods—or just very simple strike drones. Those were used extensively in the recent clash. And they blur the boundaries of escalation because they sit in this interesting middle space between shells at the low end and missiles at the high end. They give new options to countries like Pakistan, which don’t necessarily have the budget or resources to afford large numbers of sophisticated weapons. So what’s true of non-state actors is also true of middle powers.
The only other thing I’d add, Yascha, is that if you’re looking at this from the perspective of a NATO country—particularly in Eastern Europe, say Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia or Finland—you’d be delighted to see that Ukraine has been able to slow down and limit Russian gains using constant surveillance and drone technology because it’s slightly equalized the odds. So from a NATO—or small country—perspective, I think there’s a lot of good news here too. Maybe even for the Taiwanese, thinking about how to repel a landing on the beaches of Taiwan.
Mounk: What about the civilian population? You go back to World War II, and the extent to which the technology of planes had ripened over the preceding 50 years meant that you could have aerial campaigns that were far more significant than in the First World War. And, of course, civilian populations were targeted to a much greater extent than they had been in the First World War. This led to the bombing of London with V1 and V2 bombs. It led to the firebombing of Tokyo. It led to millions of casualties.
Presumably, in any major conflict today, the ability of either belligerent party—or all belligerent parties—to inflict heavy damage on civilian populations, even in countries that might have assumed they were immune to that kind of threat, has vastly increased. Should this raise our expectations of how many people are likely to die in conflicts over the coming decades?
Joshi: I’m not convinced of that, Yascha—and I’ll explain why. The bombing raids you described from World War II—many of them were explicitly designed to dehouse civilian populations, particularly industrial workers. I’m thinking of some of the attacks on Germany. They were meant to sap morale. The firebombing of Tokyo—you mentioned the V2 campaign—were explicitly designed to cause terror among civilians. I don’t think we see many campaigns like that today. If you look at the modern missiles being used, they’re generally too expensive and too scarce to be used just to blow up civilians indiscriminately. If you’re a military commander, you want to use those to hit a military target. Now, I’m not saying the Russians don’t attack civilians in Ukraine. Of course they do in some cases. We’ve seen, for example, in Kherson, something Ukrainians call a “human safari,” where Russian forces practice drone skills by attacking random civilians. It’s a horrifying practice. But it’s on a limited scale. It’s not the firebombing of Tokyo. It’s not Dresden. It’s very different in scale.
If you think about really deep strikes—the kinds of weapons you’d need to conduct strikes across cities—neither the Chinese nor the Americans have the capacity to do that to each other’s cities using conventional long-range bombers. And more importantly, I don’t think they have the appetite to do it either because this is the nuclear age. If you start wiping out cities and causing mass civilian casualties, you’re entering the terrain of nuclear escalation.
So the long and short of it is: while I am concerned about the impact on civilians from urban warfare—like we’ve seen in Gaza, with a horrifying death toll—I’m not as concerned about a return to World War II-style strategic bombing. Modern weapons prioritize precision as much as they can. You want to hit what you’re aiming at. You don’t want to waste your million-dollar missile blowing up an apartment complex if you can avoid it. Does that make sense?
Mounk: I think so, but isn’t that precisely where drones change the equation? Right now, the dominant technology is million-dollar missiles, and so you want each of those missiles to hit a target that’s worth a million dollars. But if you can have a $200 drone with a $100 explosive device attached, then suddenly it’s fine to hit $300 targets. And if you can produce those drones at a high enough volume, then the entire calculus you just described starts to shift very quickly. Any residential building with four, five, or ten stories suddenly becomes a target that, in this very cold-hearted military logic—of how much are we spending and how much damage are we inflicting—starts to seem worthwhile.
Joshi: I’d say two things about that. First, remember that these systems still tend to have short ranges. That’s just the nature of cheap systems—you don’t get huge batteries and big jet engines. If they’re going to be consumable, expendable and attritable, they’re going to be short-range. They’re not going to reach across, say, to San Francisco or something like that.
The second thing to bear in mind is what we’re seeing in Ukraine and Russia. We’re witnessing the commoditization of these systems. I heard Ukraine’s deputy defense minister the other day say that the country is producing 10 million drones a year. Now, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but even if it’s half that, or a third, that’s mass production. Both armies are prioritizing military targets because at the end of the day, even if the system costs $300, you’d rather take out an enemy soldier who’s actively attacking you than an enemy civilian. In general, that’s still seen as the better trade-off. But having said that, in a future fight with the Russians, if they’re in the Baltics, would they resort to attacks on civilian buildings in the Baltics? I think you’re absolutely right that that’s a possibility and a real risk.
Mounk: This is a really interesting way to try and grapple with this new technology because of which we’ve touched on a number of conflicts, since these drones are now being used in so many different theaters. I’d love for you to update me and our listeners on what’s going on in some of these conflicts. Donald Trump came in promising a rapid deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine. There have been some minor and temporary ceasefires, but evidently the war is continuing in full force. What’s the situation on the ground there? For a while, there were concerns that Ukraine might be close to collapse. I’ve heard a little less of that recently. Is there any likelihood that the lines between Russia and Ukraine will change significantly in the coming months? Will there eventually be a deal, if both sides come to realize that they’re just bleeding soldiers and materiel without making meaningful gains? Or is it imaginable that this war could drag on—or even come to a more dramatic conclusion, with one side breaking through?
Joshi: My gut feeling—and to put the bottom line up front—is that this war is likely to drag on into 2026. But I’m not sure what happens beyond that, because by then you start to get into much greater uncertainty around Ukraine’s weapons supply and Russia’s economy. To come back to the present: the lines are changing. Whether they’re changing significantly is a subjective matter. But to give you an idea, Yascha—if you look at May, for instance, the Russians occupied about 538 square kilometers of Ukraine. That’s not a huge amount of territory if you look at it on the map or in proportion to the size of Ukraine. But it is twice the amount they took in April, and it’s the second-highest monthly rate of advance since 2022. So that gives you a sense: the Russians are advancing at a significantly heightened pace. But they still don’t have the capacity to break through and exploit gaps in the line in the way we might imagine when we talk about “offensives.” Our minds go to traditional blitzkrieg-type movements—armies moving hundreds of kilometers in a day or a week. That’s not happening. The Russians can’t do that.
But the lines are steadily moving—and not just in the eastern part of the country. In the Donbas region, particularly around a place called Kostyantynivka, which is a very important logistics hub in Donetsk, and next door in a town called Pokrovsk, which many of your listeners may have heard of if they’ve been following the news—that’s the main thrust of the Russian campaign. They’ve also been making gains in the northeast, in a province called Sumy. They were pushed out of there in 2022, and now they’re coming back. I think they’ve made some modest gains in Sumy as well. These are still dismounted attacks. They’re not using lots of tanks or armored vehicles in a May 1940-style sweeping movement. These are small numbers of troops moving on motorbikes and quad bikes—because they have to disperse, avoid being seen by drones, and they don’t have the manpower for large-scale offenses. So the question now is, how long can this last?
This is a war of attrition. The Russians are losing extraordinary numbers of men—more than 1,000 a day are dead and wounded. But the important thing to understand about those numbers is that Russia is also recruiting 10,000 to 15,000 more men per month than Ukraine. And they’re doing that through large sign-on bonuses to Russian recruits—rather than relying on forced conscription or mobilization. By and large, most Russian recruitment right now is voluntary. The Russian gamble is that they can keep this up longer than Ukraine can hang on—particularly in terms of continued arms supply from the United States. The Ukrainian gamble is that they can keep going until Russia runs into massive economic problems—say, if the oil price falls or the Russian sovereign reserves run dry sometime next year.
So for me, a great deal still hinges on whether the United States maintains its current policy. Right now, the policy is: we’re not going to appropriate more money from Congress to Ukraine’s armed forces, but we will allow a trickle of largely pre-agreed aid to keep flowing into Ukraine. And we’ll keep selling things to Europe to give to Ukraine. If the United States walks away or cuts intelligence, refuses to sell air defense interceptors to Ukraine, or refuses to sell other kinds of ammunition, then I think there’s every chance Ukraine will run into a much more serious military crisis by the end of this year or early next year. And at that point, we’re looking at a very different picture. But the bottom line is that Ukraine can survive, it can stabilize the lines and avoid collapse if Donald Trump maintains a minimal level of at least acquiescence, if not active support, to Ukraine’s defense.
Mounk: When Trump first came in, it looked likely that he would refuse to continue even with that minimal assistance. He clearly saw support for Ukraine as a policy of the Biden administration. He has a longstanding relationship with Vladimir Putin, which can be contentious, but is also marked by a clear degree of mutual respect. I think he liked the idea of being the one to go in, impose a peace deal on the region and on Ukraine, and be hailed as a peacemaker. None of that has come to pass. Why is that—and where has that left Trump? In the last few days and weeks, he seems to have been more critical of Putin in some of his social media posts. He’s also acquiesced to some Republican efforts to impose greater sanctions on Russia. He seems disappointed, not just in his inability to secure a deal, but also in what he had imagined was a special bond with Putin. What explains that shift?
Joshi: I think we’ve avoided the worst case—and we’re also avoiding the best case. The European strategy, as you may recall, was to say a couple of things: we are willing to step up and provide more aid. We are willing to put together a coalition of those willing to deploy to Ukraine as an assurance force in the event that you agree to a ceasefire. And we are willing to encourage a ceasefire that the Ukrainians themselves are prepared to accept. So you, Mr. President, must now put this to the Russians and give them a deadline. If they don’t abide by it, you must finally start applying pressure to the Russians—something you’ve been unwilling to do so far, but something we still hope you’ll be willing to consider. That’s been the strategy right up to the present. In fact, shortly before we began speaking, Friedrich Merz was at the White House, and he essentially delivered the same message: Mr. President, it’s time to apply pressure on the Russians.
Now, that strategy rests on the assumption that the Russians will not negotiate in good faith without pressure. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump is unwilling to provide that pressure—whether that’s because of some delusion about his special bond with Putin, or because he feels an ideological affinity with the Russian president as a fellow “strongman,” or for some other reason that we can all speculate about—but which, for now, remains speculation.
But what’s actually more interesting, as you’ve touched on, is that we’ve also avoided the other extreme. We’ve avoided a scenario in which Trump completely walks away and repeats what he did earlier this year—shutting down the intelligence flow, cutting off all assistance. Let me give you a few pieces of good news. He’s still keeping the sanctions package on the table—even if I don’t think he’ll actually use it. We also saw the transfer of American F-16 planes to Ukraine, to be used as spare parts for Ukraine’s fleet. We saw the transfer of Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine—systems that were previously contracted under something called the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. And some of those contracts will continue delivering equipment through 2026, because they’ve already been agreed upon with U.S. companies. We’ve seen a limited amount of Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) funding, which is money appropriated by Congress that the president can use to draw down U.S. stocks and send ammunition to Ukraine. Although, to be clear, it was a very small amount.
These are minor steps but they tell us something. They suggest that Trump is detaching himself from the conflict. He’s not punishing Ukraine. He’s not coercing the Europeans. He’s not coming back with some cockeyed plan to sign a deal with Russia about AI and liquid natural gas in the Arctic—as Steve Witkoff was talking about after returning from Moscow six or seven weeks ago. But at the same time, he’s not going to put pressure on the Russians either. So what we’re seeing is Trump walking a middle path. He’s saying, this is your conflict. I’ll allow a little bit of aid to the Ukrainians, but I’m not going to lift a finger to help with negotiations. So now, the ball is in Europe’s court. It’s up to the Europeans to keep Ukraine solvent on the battlefield. I think we’ll have to come back to the question of diplomacy next year, either once the Russians have been softened up, once more pressure has been put on them, or—I hope we avoid this—once the Ukrainians have fallen further back, and it’s become clear that the Americans are walking away to an even greater extent. That would result in a more disadvantageous peace being imposed on the Ukrainians—one that, in my view, Yascha, would have grave consequences for the future security of Europe.
Mounk: Speaking of the future security of Europe—I think during Trump’s first term, Europeans basically decided to wait it out. They thought America had gone temporarily crazy, but that the country was sure to return to sanity. And when Joe Biden was elected in 2020, they got exactly what they’d hoped for. They were able to proceed for another four years under the assumption that they could continue to count on the transatlantic partnership—that the United States would, in the end, always be a reliable ally. I think Trump’s potential re-election and some of his fantasizing about taking Greenland, along with other things he said early in his presidency, have shaken the European establishment much more profoundly. You now see criticisms of America not just from the usual suspects on the political left, but also from many in the European center-right who used to be staunchly pro-American. At least rhetorically, Europe is now committed to becoming capable of providing for its own security.
To what extent is it actually taking the steps required to do that? To what extent are European leaders walking the walk—investing in military capacity, modernizing their forces, and building the public support that might be necessary for Europe to become a serious military player, capable of providing security on its own?
Joshi: They’re moving in the right direction. We’re about two weeks away from a major NATO summit in The Hague, in the Netherlands, where allies will likely agree to a new defense spending target—3.5% of GDP for core military spending, and another 1.5% of GDP for related expenditures. That latter category might include infrastructure, cybersecurity, and other areas that contribute to defense, even if they don’t count as core military capability. We’re also seeing a number of countries move seriously in that direction.
Above all, Yascha, look at the Germans. The changes in Germany are remarkable. In fact, at the end of May, we saw the first permanent German deployment abroad since the Second World War—a full brigade stationed in Lithuania. I was recently told by an official that, by 2029, German defense spending could plausibly reach twice that of the United Kingdom, and none of that would be going toward nuclear weapons, unlike in the UK. That is extraordinary to anyone who’s followed the German defense debate over the past two decades. Who would’ve thought we’d be in such a place?
So I do genuinely believe things are changing—and that the message has gotten through. However, as you know as well as I do, the capabilities Europe needs aren’t just things you can buy off the shelf with a billion dollars. You can’t just walk into a shop and say, I’ll have a heavy armored brigade and an air defense unit. These things take time to build because they require industrial defense capacity, and in many cases they’re simply very complex systems. Think about the areas where the Americans provide exquisite capabilities that make European forces viable. It’s not just troops with guns, it’s what we call enablers: airlift, sealift, air-to-air refueling, and geospatial satellites that help with targeting, intelligence and nuclear weapons, of course—the nuclear backstop. If you’re the UK or Germany or France and you say, we need to replace those American enablers, it’s going to take five to ten years. So even if you’re convinced that Trump is abandoning Europe, the timeline to plug those holes is much longer than Trump’s term in office. Indeed, maybe even longer than his time on Earth.
So yes, you can panic. You can worry. But there’s no point losing your head, because the timeline to fix this is about 10 years. The debate we’re now having with the Americans, as Europeans, is not, please don’t go. It’s: we understand you’re going to go. We understand you’re going to shift assets to the Indo-Pacific to prepare for a conflict with China. Let’s make sure that process is an orderly withdrawal and a negotiated transition in which we plug the gaps.
Just to conclude, I was in Tallinn, Estonia, two weeks ago, and I heard Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, speak. He’s a very “Trumpy” official—appointed by Trump, no professional experience—but he has Trump’s ear, which makes him valuable to the Europeans. And what he said was, we’re going to conduct a review of military posture in Europe. It’ll probably happen later this year. But we’ll make sure no security gaps open up on the continent. We’ll make sure you, Europe, are able to fill the gaps we leave.
Now, I think that’s a very pragmatic and sensible approach if the Trump administration sticks to it. If they genuinely follow through on that promise to consult with the Europeans rather than do what they appear to be doing in South Korea right now, which is unilaterally threatening to pull out 5,000 of their best troops, blindsiding the South Korean government, then yes, there is a pragmatic, grown-up path forward for Europe, NATO, and the U.S. But there’s no guarantee of that—not with this administration, given everything we know about its lack of discipline, its bureaucratic chaos, and the fact that the National Security Council, right now, doesn’t really exist as a coherent organizing entity.
Mounk: One of the other major conflicts in the world at the moment is in the Middle East—specifically, in the Gaza Strip. The declared war aims of the Israeli government are understandable in light of the terrible attacks of October 7th: to gain control over the Gaza Strip, and of course, to secure the release and return of all the hostages—whether they are, hopefully, still alive or whether they’ve tragically been murdered by this point. Nevertheless, there are two things I find both confusing and morally concerning about this conflict.
The first is understanding why it’s been so difficult for the Israeli military—which clearly has superior force in a variety of ways—to gain sufficient control of the Gaza Strip to prevent the return of Hamas, to destroy the tunnels, and to degrade Hamas’s ability to attack Israeli civilians.
The second is understanding what the true war aims of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government seem to be at this point. Why has the war dragged on for as long as it has? And does that suggest that the real purpose—whether in military terms or domestic political terms—is somewhat different than what’s being presented? Help us understand what’s going on in the Gaza Strip at the moment.
Joshi: I want to acknowledge some uncertainty here as well, given that I haven’t been to Israel very recently. So take my observations with a pinch of salt. I’m speaking as a distanced observer.
First of all, let’s look at this as a military problem. This is some of the most complex urban warfare on earth. From Hamas’s perspective, it’s one of the most entrenched military forces we’ve seen in terms of the extent and density of its tunnel network. I often think about ISIS—the Islamic State—in Mosul, in northern Iraq. The coalition tried to push them out of Mosul, and they did. But ISIS had had a year, maybe a couple of years, to dig in. Hamas has been preparing since 2007. That’s over 15 years of building a subterranean network in a tiny area. Think about how extensive it is and how many of Israel’s technological advantages, like aerial and satellite surveillance, electronic intelligence, and signals intelligence fused with AI, simply don’t help you in this kind of fight. They don’t help you find things underground. You can map every square centimeter of Gaza from satellites and drones but that won’t necessarily show you a tunnel entrance inside a building. Even once you find them, destroying those tunnels has proven extraordinarily difficult. This is why Israel has resorted to quite extreme—and in my view, in some cases horrifying—methods, including flattening entire neighborhoods en masse in ways that render them uninhabitable in perpetuity. That’s problem number one.
Problem number two is that Hamas is not just a military problem. It’s also a political and social movement. It has an armed wing, yes, but also a political wing, a social services infrastructure, administrators, doctors, and civil servants. If you treat all of that—doctors, lawyers, tax clerks—as part of the same military movement, you run the risk of repeating some of the mistakes the United States made in Iraq and to some extent in southern Afghanistan: misreading insurgent movements that are deeply woven into the political and social fabric. Just to be clear, this is not my making any excuse for Hamas’s ideology, which I believe is genocidal in intent.
Finally, on the politics—let’s be honest. You spoke about degrading Hamas to the point that it can no longer pose a serious threat to Israelis. That point was reached a long time ago. Many people in the Israeli security establishment—people like Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, whom no one would accuse of being a dove; former IDF spokesman Peter Lerner; former Mossad chiefs—have all said that this war could have been safely and responsibly ended a long time ago, while still keeping Israelis secure. Hamas was already on its knees. The problem is that this Israeli government—which is, politically, the most extreme in Israel’s modern history—is unable to articulate a political future for Gaza. Why? Because it depends on coalition partners from the far-right who are incapable of supporting such a vision. They don’t want a political solution. They want to colonize Gaza. They want to establish settlements there. They want to raze Gaza and, to put it bluntly, conduct ethnic cleansing so that Palestinians are no longer able to live there. I know those are very harsh words but I think they’re words that would be recognized by more than half of Israelis themselves, many of whom debate these things far more frankly and candidly in their own newspapers than we often do as outsiders.
So in that sense, I think the politics of this—the structure of Netanyahu’s coalition and his reliance on messianic, extreme partners—is a large part of why the Israeli government has been unable to articulate or execute a sensible political strategy, even after having imposed such devastating military harm on Hamas over the past two years.
Mounk: I think part of what I’m having trouble understanding here is the analysis of what it is that makes Israelis unsafe. There’s the immediate question of what renders them safe or unsafe from direct attacks by Hamas. And then there’s the broader strategic question of what is going to render Israel safe in the medium to long term. I have two concerns in this respect.
The first is that any democratically elected government will see it as its top priority to avoid a repeat of something like October 7th. But part of what made October 7th possible was that Hamas had clearly built up enormous strength in the Gaza Strip. They used a lot of international money that had flowed into the area to dig tunnels—under schools, under hospitals—turning Gaza into a giant base for attacks.
But part of it was also a failure on Israel’s side—a security failure that seems, in retrospect, preventable. Hamas seems to have convinced Netanyahu that they were focused on developing Gaza, on providing a better standard of living for its residents, and that they didn’t pose an imminent threat. A lot of what happened on October 7th could have been prevented if there had simply been more Israeli troops stationed along the border with Gaza. If that’s true, then presumably—after such a traumatic national experience—future Israeli governments would not make the same mistake. They wouldn’t take their eyes off the Gaza Strip or off Hamas in the same way. That in itself could help prevent a recurrence of October 7th. Of course, the case for degrading Hamas’s military capacities remains real. But as you’ve said, many senior Israeli security officials concluded some time ago that that threshold had already been reached. So it becomes harder to see how continued military action is still serving the immediate tactical imperative of preventing another October 7th.
Now, there’s also the broader question: what kind of political and strategic conditions need to be in place for Israel to be secure over the long run? That requires a strong political and military alliance with the United States. It requires staying on good enough terms with key European countries to ensure continued trade and military procurement. It also depends on Israel having a thriving economy, which is ultimately the foundation of its military superiority. And that, in turn, depends on Israelis being able to travel, to do business, and to form partnerships with people and companies around the world. Even if it were true that the ongoing operations in Gaza were serving some immediate tactical goal—protecting the country from further Hamas attacks, which, like you, I’m increasingly doubtful about—I think it’s clear that they are putting those broader, long-term foundations of Israeli security at serious risk. Not just over the next few years, but over the next 20, 50, or even 100 years.
Joshi: I think you’re right, Yascha. I struggle to disagree with much of what you’ve said. Better defenses, yes—but above all, good intelligence would have prevented this. The comparisons to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, where a rigid political conception of the enemy blinded Israeli leadership, are striking. The resonance between 1973 and 2023 is real. That’s one layer of the failure in Israeli security. I also agree that if you’re an Israeli thinking about the future—normalization with the region, building on the Abraham Accords, future recognition by Saudi Arabia, even the possibility of a better relationship with Syria, which is now, remarkably, under a government led by a former al-Qaeda figure who is pledging to build a multiethnic state—then these are remarkable days, full of real possibility. We’ll see how serious he is, but even the fact that he’s talking about Israel, not just “the Zionist entity,” is something new. To me, this Israeli government seems hell-bent on shutting all of that down with a kind of myopic, politically-influenced vision of its own security. So yes, I agree with you.
The only thing I’d add is that this could be a moment of great hubris in Israel. It has been so successful militarily—particularly in Lebanon, where it’s managed to severely weaken Hezbollah through a combination of extraordinary intelligence and bold action—without suffering the kind of retaliatory missile strikes that many, including myself, expected would be inevitable. And that success may be breeding a dangerous sense of invincibility. A belief that Israel can remake the region in its own image. That it can live by the sword and thrive. It’s a mindset that, in some ways, mirrors the post-9/11 mindset in the United States. And because of that, I could easily see things escalating from here. I could see Israel striking Iran's nuclear program. There is a real risk of that in the coming months, especially because they fear that a future Trump administration may strike a weak, inadequate deal with Tehran.
What underpins all of this is a volatile mixture: trauma—from October 7th—and hubris, from the lightning campaigns Israel has carried out since then, campaigns in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, and even, in some cases, in Iran, if you think about the missile strikes from last year. Trauma plus hubris is a very dangerous combination. I don’t need to point out the obvious: it’s the same combination that led the United States into some of its biggest strategic mistakes in the 20 years following 2001.
Mounk: I sadly share that fear of hubris. The whole conflict—as it has for many decades—just looks like a terrible tragedy. A tragedy in which the understandable fears and resentments on both sides are leading to ever more suffering and ever more civilian victims. It seems really hard to see a way out. Do you have any sense of what the endgame here might be? Is this going to end with Gazans being forced to flee from the Gaza Strip and Donald Trump opening “Trump Gaza”? That seems rather unlikely. But it’s also unclear at what point Netanyahu would decide to declare victory—maybe fly to an aircraft carrier, unfurl a banner that says Mission Accomplished, and return to business as usual?
Joshi: The problem, Yascha, is of course that, unlike George W. Bush unfurling that banner, for Netanyahu, declaring Mission Accomplished would reset the political clock. It would put his coalition at risk. It would put him back in the hot seat. So there are powerful incentives for him to avoid that moment. I’m afraid this is combined with a broader American impulse of detachment. I talked earlier about Trump detaching himself from Ukraine. But this administration also has two competing impulses.
One is the Reaganite idea of peace through strength—assert American power on the world stage. The other is more in line with Steven Miller, J.D. Vance, and others—veterans of the war on terror who are scarred by it—who say, keep out of this. This is someone else’s problem. You can call it neo-isolationism, though I think that’s a bit emotive. I might call it the restraint impulse or the retrenchment impulse. And those impulses are in competition. But to my mind, right now—especially with the loss of Mike Waltz as national security advisor—it’s the restraining impulse that’s winning. America is pulling back. It’s detaching itself from these conflicts. It’s willing to maintain a military presence, but it’s not eager to use that presence. We saw that in the Houthi campaign, where the United States bombed intensively and then said, this isn’t working, we’re pulling back. In some ways, that’s a sign of strategic prudence. That’s a sensible capacity: to recognize when something isn’t working and recalibrate. But when it comes to Israel, I’m afraid I see no clear path by which meaningful external pressure is going to be applied to this Israeli government. I also see no coherent Palestinian political movement on the other side that is capable of negotiating.
Now, to be fair, part of that is due to Israel’s success in keeping the Palestinians divided. In Gaza, today, we see the arming of anti-Hamas criminal gangs who, in many cases, are responsible for more of the looting of aid than Hamas itself. In the West Bank, we see an aging, corrupt, kleptocratic Palestinian leadership that is in political freefall. So I’m afraid I see a very bleak future for Gaza. I see Israelis creating and maintaining buffer zones, destroying buildings to keep areas clear, and quite possibly establishing permanent occupations of key locations. I see Gazans squeezed into ever smaller zones, facing ongoing humanitarian disaster—only occasionally alleviated in small bursts, only to collapse again in subsequent weeks. It’s a horrifying vision. But I think it’s one that could persist for many, many years. I don’t believe we’re in a situation where either side—especially the Israelis—will be willing or able to make political concessions toward a real solution unless the internal politics of Israel fundamentally changes.
Mounk: Moving a few hundred miles away to a topic that’s not much less concerning, what is likely to happen with Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear bomb? Here, we seem to be in a rather rare scenario in international relations; one where there are two very clear paths ahead. But those two paths are radically distinct.
One, in which Donald Trump comes to some kind of deal with Iran—and presumably uses his leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu to force him to acquiesce to that deal in some way. Or another, in which the deal fails, and we’re likely to see attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, perhaps with U.S. involvement, though most likely spearheaded by the Israeli military.
What are the stakes in these negotiations? Which of these radically different outcomes do you think is more likely? Or, have I mischaracterized the clarity of the choice set here?
Joshi: I think you broadly get it right. I think we probably will see a deal. I think that the Americans have set these red lines saying Iran can have no enrichment. But in a way, the nice thing about having an administration where they can say eight contradictory things before breakfast is that it gives them a certain diplomatic suppleness that more coherent administrations may lack. So I think we can already see movement towards a compromise. According to some of the reporting, the compromise may involve a regional enrichment consortium, in which a number of regional countries like the United Arab Emirates and Iran enrich together—perhaps on an island in the Persian Gulf.
In fact, if you do it on a disputed island in the Persian Gulf, you could even say Iran and the Emiratis are both claiming that they are enriching uranium, which would satisfy their own domestic audiences but would keep the proliferation risk more limited. Anyway, the point is, I think we have a good chance of seeing that kind of deal. The Trump administration, for reasons I’ve just spoken about, doesn’t have the stomach to militarily enforce its terms. So if Iran walks away, I don’t think the Trump administration wants to bomb Iranian nuclear sites and trigger a new war in the region. I just don’t think it has the stomach for that. So we’ll probably see a compromise deal—more likely than not. I’m kind of at 55%, 60% at this stage, which still leaves room for worse outcomes. And if that happens, they will say to the Israelis, right, you are swallowing this deal, and suck it up. We know you don’t like this, but we’re going to throw you under the bus—which is what they did with the Houthi deal to end the U.S. campaign against the Houthis. They said the Houthis have agreed to stop attacks on shipping; they never said anything about ballistic missile attacks on Israel, which continue. The same kind of sidelining of Israel could take place on the Iran file.
However, this is where it gets a little bit more complicated. Does this mean that the Israelis then abide by that exhortation? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think you could still very plausibly see an Israeli strike on Iran in defiance of America, which would do limited damage to Iran’s nuclear sites because they don’t have some of the key airplanes needed to drop the most penetrating bunker-buster munitions. But they might anticipate—or hope, or gamble—that the Americans will have to then finish the job in order to prevent Iran from nuclearizing at that point. So, in other words, where I’m at right now is: we have a strong possibility of a deal—followed by a strike nonetheless.
Mounk: Speaking to the former topic, that could potentially also do tremendous damage to the Israeli-U.S. relationship. I don't know how Donald Trump would take telling Israelis to stand back from nuclear attacks on Iran and then having his wish defied.
Joshi: I think it would be really difficult for the Israelis to do this. I think it would be infuriating for Trump to watch an ally defy him in this way. But what he would then be told by the intelligence agencies is, Mr. President, we think that once the bombs have been dropped, there is a real risk Iran moves its nuclear program underground—and then accelerates its pursuit of a bomb. Let’s remember, Yascha, that this has been suspended for 20 years, thanks to Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. He halted the weapons program in a formal way back in 2003, and he hasn’t started it up again, even though elements of nuclear weapons research have continued. If you bomb Iran, there is every chance Iran would withdraw from the NPT—the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—and pursue a bomb. Just as, when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, Saddam Hussein accelerated his nuclear weapons program to the point where it was alarmingly mature by the time weapons inspectors arrived in 1991. So at that point, Trump may be confronted with the choice between telling the Israelis to stop it and cut it out—or saying, actually, I have no choice but to finish the job.
In the rest of the conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss Donald Trump’s foreign policy and how this impacts the world alliance structure now and in the future. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
