Theology in the Raw - Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran: What Is Really Going on in the Middle East? Dr. Autin Knuppe

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Dr. Austin Knuppe is an assistant professor of political science at Utah State University. For AY 2024-25 he is also a Newbigin Fellow through a joint initiative of the Carver Project and InterFaith America. Prior to Utah State, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. He received his Ph.D. in political science from The Ohio State University in 2019. His research interests include civilian survival during wartime, Middle East politics, and the role of religion in international politics. His first book, Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome to this unique theology episode. This is sort of outside of our normal schedule. I wanted to record an episode with my friend, Dr. Austin Nuppie, who is an expert in the middle East in terrorism and all the things going on right now in the middle East. I know a lot of people are thinking through this and are maybe confused at what's going on. So I wanted Austin to come in and talk to us about what is going on between Israel and Hezbollah and Iran and all the things that just keep escalating. So Dr. Austin Nuppi is an assistant professor

of political science at Utah State University. Prior to Utah, he, prior to his position at Utah State, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in political science from the Ohio State University in 2019. And his research interests include civilian survival during wartime, Middle East politics,

and the role of religion in international politics. His first book is titled Surviving the Islamic State, Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq, published in 2024. So we talk about all things related to the current conflict in the Middle East. I found his perspective to be incredibly wise and fair and balanced and well-researched. The guy knows so much about the Middle East, much more than I do, or I suspect many of you do. So please welcome back to the show. The one and only Dr. Austin. Hey Austin. Thanks so much for being part of this. I don't know, like an emergency or last minute, the Algenon podcast. This is outside of our normal schedule. And, uh, I'm having you on just cause gosh, there's so much going

on in the middle East and it's hard to know with all the various news sources, which ones to trust what's going on, how much is propaganda and really just, what do we know? You know? I mean, who is Hezbollah? What is going on? Are we on the brink of World War III? Who started this is one that, not that as a Christian, that is the ultimate question, but I think it's important to kind of get our arms around everything. So let's jump in. Who, tell us about Hezbollah. Who is Hezbollah and what's the relationship with Lebanon as a country? Yeah. So Lebanon is a state that has a government where there are political parties that also

have armed wings. And so it had a really nasty, devastating civil war between 1975 and early 1990s. And what happened is some of these militias or militant organizations demobilized or they formed political parties. So Hezbollah as a militant group resistance organization started before Hamas, this is the 1980s. And nowadays it's a political party that has representation in the Lebanese parliament and it has an armed wing. And so for the past 30 plus years, it's been committed to resisting the Zionist occupation, the Israeli government and the state of Israel and it does through militant wings.

It also receives military and financial support from Iran. So, Iran has something like five or six different proxy groups in Yemen, in Syria, in Lebanon, in the West Bank and Gaza, which they use to provoke the Israelis because they don't have the same military strength as the state of Israel or the United States. So, it's a proxy war. It's a political party. It's a resistance organization all wrapped in one. Is there tension between Hezbollah and the rest of the Lebanese government? Is that even, again, I might ask questions about it, I'm going to betray a lot of ignorance here but is that, yeah.

Yeah. So what happened was during World War I, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the French colonized Lebanon and Syria. And it's one country called the Syria Mandate. After World War II, the French leave and Lebanon becomes independent. But what they do is they form a constitution with ethnic power sharing. So they said the only way we can diffuse these ethnic tensions is by having quotas for each of the main ethnic groups in Lebanon. So you're going to have the Sunnis control one branch

of government, the Christians control another and the Shia another. And so they have sectarian and ethnic power sharing. And the problem is that these political groups also control key aspects of industry, education, hiring. So you have these massive patronage networks that also have armed militias that come out of the civil war. And so you have economic fragility, you have ethnic tension, it's part of the wider Israel Arab wars in the region. Yeah. Okay. And I have to apologize to you and my audience. I'm battling a severe allergy attack for the last 24 hours, which is why I look like I

just woke up. I did just wake up, but I look like I woke up at two in the morning right now, but it's not. It's eight o'clock. So I apologize for the sniffles and also my dog who's really clinging to me right now. You can't see him, but he's down here. So if he said my arm, I'm petting my dog. Oh, a little hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is Hezbollah a terrorist organization in your, in your opinion? I know the, I think the United States and other countries have designated

them that others might say it's a resistance movement or simply armed militia, just like the IDF or the Navy in the United States. How should we think through Hezbollah? Yeah. So it's a political party. It is a terrorist organization. It targets civilians as well as uniformed soldiers. So it targets the Israel Defense Force and Israeli civilians. The predecessor to Hezbollah was the group responsible for the Marine Barracks bombing in 1983 that caused the Americans to pull out. So that's kind of a predecessor to Heads Below was the group responsible for the Marine Barracks bombing in 1983 that caused the Americans to pull out. Right?

So that's kind of a predecessor to that organization. So they're involved in terror. They're extraordinarily effective among Shia Lebanese communities because they also engage in social service provision. So they're a political party in an armed group, but they're also, they run schools and provide medical care and all the basic governance services that people need when the government's absent. So they're kind of all three or four of those functions wrapped in one. Have you ever met anybody from Hezbollah? I know you spent a lot of time out there.

I'm not entirely sure. Okay. I spent time in Baalbek in the Baka Valley, the places that were attacked in the last two weeks. Some of those communities I've spent time in. I'm guessing I've met folks that are sympathetic to Hezbollah's wider wider ideology or mission, but I tend when I'm in that part of the road, and not to ask people. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, is that you mentioned in passing it is a, or it is involved in terror in that it targets civilians. Is that kind of the base, one of the base definitions of to qualify as a terrorist organization, you target civilians, is that?

So yeah, so terrorism is one of these really fraught terms, right? We tend to think about it consisting of a couple of main components, right? Or attributes. It's a non-state group that targets civilian populations for some political goal in order to scare, intimidate, coerce population to change course. So some folks talk about state terrorism, the Israelis targeting. I tend to think of that simply as indiscriminate violence or victimizing civilians. Terrorists are typically non-state groups. They have a political goal.

And the goal is not just to kill people and break things, it's to scare, intimidate, and change, force the target to change their behavior. And so that's what makes it different than mass murder, right? Mass murder or domestic violence, it has those four or five really key components. So the result might be the same. 10 people are killed, but the goal is maybe different. I read somewhere, it might've been in Mercheimer, that terrorist groups are typically those that lack the military power of a more dominant group that they're trying to terrorize. Like if Hezbollah had, you know, tons of fighter

jets and aircraft carriers and all these things, like they wouldn't resort to the kind of terror that they do. Would that be accurate? Most terrorist groups, they would see themselves as an oppressed group with a more powerful country that they see themselves being oppressed by? That's right. We had a colleague that recently passed away at Yale named Jim Scott. And Jim Scott's, one of his famous ideas was that terrorism is a weapon of the weak. It's what people mobilize to resist when they are a highly outmatched, militarily, politically, economically. And so you see a lot of national liberation movements,

including the State of Israel, the Haganah and Irgun and the militias that resisted the British mandate, engaged in terrorism toward independence, national liberation. So it's a pretty common tactic that non-state groups use when they're trying to achieve a goal, whether that's self-determination, independence, ending an occupation.

Ukrainian resistance is targeting Russian civilians in Russia, right? In order to expel the Russian occupation of their country. So it's a pretty common type of typically you use it when you're outmatched militarily. Now the recent explode, the, the, the pagers that were all detonated, would that in and of itself be a terrorist act? Cause that does seem to be like kind of a frightening thing or what's the goal of that? You just want to blow off body parts, but that, that would produce a lot of fear in me. Like what, am I carrying something

that's going to blow up? Yeah. It was, it was a highly sophisticated effort at targeted assassination. So what the Israelis are highly effective at is identifying targets, whether they're high value targets leading the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or Hezbollah or Hamas, and they engage in precise strikes. And so the pager in walkie talkies was this elaborate multi-year plot to target not only the leadership of Hezbollah, but the everyday rank and file fighters

who adopted pagers because they realized that the smartphones the Israelis could track them. So they thought an analog technology like pagers would keep them safe. Turns out that was not the case. Now, highly terrorizing and the attack ended up killing civilians as well. But it was a discriminant, precise attack. That doesn't necessarily make it just or ethical or proportionate. But it was not,

it was not an example of indiscriminate violence of blowing up a bus and so on, or coupling an apartment building in Gaza. Right. Because the assumption got it. The assumption was for strategic reasons, only militants are carrying pagers. Okay. Can you take us back to and we're recording this on Thursday, October, what? Second, second, the third. Yeah. The third. I'm sorry. October 3rd. And I think we're trying to rush this to be released. I think Saturday the fifth. So people might be listening, but we're just a couple of days behind. So we could, by the time people listen to this, things could have, there could, many things could happen in the next 48 hours. So, so, you know, we just had a barrage of, I think 180 missiles launched from Iran to Israel. That's a big deal. I

don't know if there's been that extent of that kind of direct Iranian attack on Israel at least in a while or ever. I don't know. Can you take us back? where did this start? And you, you might want to go back to like 1953 or, you know, like, um, or even farther, um, maybe take us back to the last year. Um, is I understand it. And there's, here's the extent of my knowledge that, you know, Hezbollah is on, is, is, is, uh, upset at the way Israel is responding to Gaza, killing tons of civilians. And so they start kind of skirmishing and shooting rockets and everything. Israel retaliates, and it's just kind of been a back and forth the last almost year now. Would that be accurate? Or how would you set the stage for

understanding where did this thing start? Yeah. So I think to tackle that, you can think about a couple of different levels of analysis. You can think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can think about the regional war where you have states like Israel and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Iran. They're all great powers aspiring for hegemony or influence in their region. And so what the Iranians have done, particularly since the revolution, there's a political revolution in 1979, which led to the creation of a theocratic government. And they realized because they were outmatched economically, politically, militarily, they bought the oil and gas, nonetheless, they were outmatched by the Americans, that they

needed to develop a foreign policy that uses proxy forces to exert their influence in neighboring countries. And so they had a pretty weak conventional military, army, air force, navy, et cetera. They have a nascent weapons of mass destruction program. We're not sure if they reach breakout capacity, if they can actually deliver warheads on this missile technology, but they're certainly close. What they've opted for instead, especially how they compete with Israel, is by supporting non-state groups in Iraq and in Syria

and in Lebanon and in the West Bank and in Yemen. So all these non-state groups that were attacking Israel, not unconventionally, receive financial support, military support, intelligence support from Iran. And this is how Iran has tried to exert its influence. And what the Israelis figured out was, the assumption was that the Israelis are gonna discriminate or differentiate between civilian and military targets. the Israelis figured out was the assumption was that the Israelis are going to discriminate

or differentiate between civilian and military targets. And at some point, certainly in Gaza, and we've seen this in Lebanon, they said, well, no, we're going to terrorize the civilian population as a form of punishment for supporting Hamas or supporting Hezbollah. And so as soon as the Israelis decided that there was an acceptable level of civilian casualties that actually undermined Iran's strategy of using these proxy forces, and As soon as the Israelis decided that there was an acceptable level of civilian casualties that actually undermined Iran's strategy of using these proxy forces. And that's how we've seen it escalate.

We've seen over 40,000 plus casualties in Gaza. There's violence down in the West Bank and in southern Lebanon, one million people displaced, massively heartbreaking consequences for civilians as the wars escalated. Right, right, right. If I, so if I asked who started it, is that, how would you, how would you answer it? Would you say that's just impossible to answer? What does that even mean? Or? So it depends on where you start the timeline and it depends on how you interpret key events in history. So if you read politics of the Middle East through a post-colonial lens, you think that

the British and the Americans and the French involvement at regime change and trying to engineer different state governments after World War II wound up, increased tension kind of was the fuse that started these conflicts. If you think it's primarily about revolutionary ideologies, if you're strongly against the Iranian theocracy, you read the conflict through, well, this is a revolutionary regime committed to exterminate the state of Israel, not only exterminate the Israelis, but kill the Jews, either in the state of Israel or overseas. I'm a political scientist, I think more in terms of great power politics and the regional

balance of power. And I read this as an attempt for regional hegemony. You have states competing for influence in a region where the American influence is waning. We don't see the Russians or Chinese intervening to restore order. And so there's what seems to be a power vacuum and regional states competing for influence. Obviously, it's still going to be important to the Americans and Europeans and Russians and Chinese because of the oil and gas in the Gulf. But one can imagine the Iranian response being predicated on fear, uncertainty, and mistrust. They are highly

threatened by the American presence, the Israeli military superiority, and they're doing what they can to defend the state against calls for a regime change in Iran. So it, you know, who started it depends on what, what, what narrative you, you find most convincing in terms of the history of maybe the last 70 or 80 years, recent history. You're such, you're such a scholar. I need, I need to ask some of my friends without PhDs their thoughts and they give me something probably a lot more one sided, probably on either side. That means I, yeah, I'm not going to be on any major news channels soon. I do think, I mean, 1953 when, and if I say anything that you find inaccurate, please

let me know, when the United States was involved in a coup that overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran and installed a Shah who was Western friendly, or at least able to work with the West. And he was brutal towards his people. That took him through decades of terrible. I mean, the US backed leader, the US backed Shah was really bad towards his people, which led to the revolution, right? In 79, the kidnapping of American, were they soldiers or civilians over there. They were the, the embassy in Tehran and the hostage crisis in 1979, 1980. And that's when they American's like, Oh, look how all these people hate us. They're

kidnapping us. It's like, well, this is at the end of a 30 year us backed oppression in many ways. And so it was not right obviously, but it was a response. It was a kind of blowback. Am I, am I, are you, is that more or less correct? I think that's right. Yeah. So one of the, one of the classic debates, especially in this part of the world is are the responses of these governments, places like Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, are these responses to American foreign policy or are they responses based on some revolutionary inherently violent ideology? And of course, reality is not that simple, it could be both and.

But the US history with Iran is one where there are extremely negative unintended consequences that always tend then to destabilize the US Iran relationship down the line. I mean, the Mohammed Mossadegh, the leader that was elected in 1953, was at the very least a socialist. The worry was that he's going to be a full blown communist and he's going to ally with the Soviet Union. The Soviets are right there on the Iranian border. We can't have Soviet influence in the Middle East.

It's going to destabilize the region and they're going to control oil and gas in the Persian Gulf. So that's a non-starter. So the Americans and Brits conspire then to overthrow this leader. They put in a really brutal monarch who terrorizes the population for 25 years. And then you have an equally brutal Iranian theocracy that comes to power that is highly illegitimate in the eyes of everyday Iranians. Iran is a young, vibrant, highly educated, secularizing society with a really fragile,

archaic regime. And so the real worry is you destabilize this regime. Lots of people would love to see the mullahs go, but the Ayatollah fall, then what happens? How do states rebuild themselves in the aftermath of conflict? What we've seen in Iraq and Syria and Yemen, now in south Lebanon and Gaza and the West Bank is that states don't really have all that much control. External interveners can't really control how states fail to recover from civil wars and insurgency. It's highly irresponsible now that the same folks in Washington that discredited themselves

supporting the Iraq war are now calling for preemptive attack against Iran for the Israelis and Americans to finish the job. It's just this hawkish, yeah, it's historical amnesia to an atrocious extent. The rhetoric I'm seeing coming out of the White House is, I'm glad you said that because that's how I feel. I mean, and you're the expert. I'm just the armchair reader. Maybe I've read too much John Mercheimer in the last year or so that he's kind of brave, waved his wand over me. I absolutely think it's a response to American foreign policy, which when has that gone? Well, maybe there's

isolated incidents when the aftermath is good, But in most cases, regime changes, even if it's a bad leader or a potential communist leader, whatever ends up leading to a worse situation. I don't, maybe there's exceptions to that. External regime change. Yeah. Foreign imposed regime change seldom goes well. Internal revolution, they're kind of rolled a dice. Sometimes they improve the lives of people. All the times they don't. Very difficult to rebuild states. Yeah. Foreign imposed regime change. So, so going back to, uh, so I think, I mean, people listen to podcasts and hopefully they're familiar with the, the Israel Palestine issue over the last year. Um, I wish people would be

more, more familiar with it, but you know, we kind of have an idea of what's going on October 7th and then the response and the ongoing response. And, but I think we're less, a lot less familiar with at the North what's going on. So October 7th happens then October 8th is always starts their response at that time. Is that when has bliss starts? What, like just tell us the specifics. Like they start what shoot, just shooting rockets across the border. Are they, are they, are they killing people? How is Israel responding? What's the last year? Like the, the, the details of what w what, you know, the average person should understand what, what has happened that is this led to this kind of like really cataclysmic moment we're in right now.

Yeah. Well, the Israelis, the, they, ever since they've evacuated south Lebanon, they first went into 1982 during Lebanon civil war. They went back in in 2006, fought for about 35 days before the UN imposed a ceasefire. There's been 30 plus years of cross border skirmishes between the Israel defense forces and Hezbollah. Now, it's important. This is not against the Lebanese military. Tel Aviv is careful to say, we're not fighting the Lebanese state. We're not fighting Lebanese civilians or the Lebanese army.

We're fighting Hezbollah. The problem is, Lebanon's government has very little control over that southern border. And so what you saw after October 7, 2003, was some initial rocket volleys from Hezbollah, but displacing 60,000 plus residents on the northern border. And so Israelis had been displaced for the better part of a year, not able to return to their homes because of violence on the border. Nonetheless, the Israelis until recently were very, very wary of fighting a multi-front war. The nightmare

scenario, if it's the morning of October 8th and a multi-front war. But the nightmare scenario, if it's the morning of October 8th and you're in Tel Aviv, the nightmare scenario is that you're not only fighting in Gaza, but there's a renewed intifada in the West Bank, an armed resistance effort in the West Bank, Hezbollah gets involved in the North, you have the Houthis from Yemen launching rockets, the Israelis don't wanna have to fight

a three or four or five-front war with all the regional states. It now seems that they have accepted the risk that comes with escalation, and they're saying, okay, we've been extraordinarily affected at targeting these Hezbollah militants. We're going to continue that offensive and introduce ground troops into south Lebanon. Now, they're saying this is going to be a limited, incursion into Lebanon, only special forces. That's not, we're not going to occupy. But we've seen this story before, in 2006, 1982.

Before that, that once you get involved in a military occupation of South Lebanon, it does not go well for the Israelis. Very, very difficult to defeat these groups. Not to say that they haven't made progress, so they've killed the top three echelons of the organization. I mean, decapitated has beloved, they still have, has both still has tens of thousands of rockets of various capacity and effectiveness, but there's still a significant military threat.

Were you surprised at Iran sending 180 rockets over? Like was that, was that, cause that it seems like that's a really big deal. Is that a big deal? I mean, has that been done before? So we saw that last April, the first volley after the targeted assassination of a Hamas leader in Tehran, the response was a volley of rockets in April. Most of them did very little damage. There's a few casualties at this time. There seems to be casualties in the single digits, including a Palestinian in the West Bank who was killed by rocket debris. And Jordanians, the rockets have to go over Jordan. And so some of them intercepted that poses a risk to the citizens of Jordan as well.

And so what you see is this is a, I think, a calculated tit for tat kind of armed form of bargaining. This is all war, it's politics by other means. This is a political negotiation where there's a very calculated tit for tat between the Israelis and now Iranians want to respond in order to protect their reputation. They don't want to look weak, not only in front of the Israelis or the Armenians, they don't want to look weak in front of their own people. Because if you're an autocracy, you're worried about internal revolution or coup as much as your regional states or regional adversaries. And so there's a very difficult balance that the Ayatollah has to do in Iran to make sure

his regime isn't overthrown. At the same time, as you have this tit for tat, the real fear is not calculated escalation, but accidental escalation, right? That there's so many examples in international politics where you have these spirals, where neither state wants to get involved in an active conventional war with one another, but nonetheless, they wind up escalating, they wind up in a situation where neither state wants to fight, but yet they're confronting the reality of a war. So the security dilemma dynamics are all over the place. And that's really what worries me.

Not that there's a calculated walk up the escalation ladder, but something's gonna happen that where the war escalates, where it's actually beyond the control of Iran or Israel, to then deescalate. And so Washington, the Biden administration has been highly ineffective at restraining the Israelis, deterring Iran from further actions, rescinding aircraft carriers, morering Iran from further actions. We're sending aircraft

carriers, more military forces to the Gulf. I'm not sure that's actually going to deter further Iranian action. And for me, my read is that these are, these are examples or what we're witnessing is, is foreign policy coming out of Iran's weakness as a military power, not their strength. Is so many questions. Um, the guy that Israel killed in Iran, the, the Hamas leader in April, was he, was he like a negotiate? He wasn't like a militant, was he? Or was it more like their prime primary negotiator or something? Yeah. He was the head of the, of the political party, the political, the political, there's a, there's a political wing and the military wing, the political party, of the political wing of Hamas. Oh, the political, okay. So just like Hezbollah, there's a political wing and a military wing.

The political ring has been in exile in Qatar. They're supported by Turkey. Some of them have gone, you know, go to Egypt then to negotiate. And so typically the Israelis and Americans and regional states negotiate with the political party Hamas and not the armed party. The problem is, turns out the armed party, the armed wing of Hamas had their own political agenda. It's unclear to what extent the political leadership

of Hamas knew October 7th attacks were coming. We just don't know. But Sinwar and the militants in Gaza escalated. And then the Israelis had an opportunity to take out the Hania and the other senior political leaders and that undermined negotiations in Doha to deescalate the conflict. When you're killing negotiators among your adversaries ranks, that doesn't really bode

well for ceasefire negotiations. If there was, in your opinion, your educated opinion, if there was an actual ceasefire in Gaza, like permanent, like we're done, would that basically also end the conflict in the North and Iran? Would they be like, all right, that's exactly that's what we're wanting. And so no more rockets or is it hard to predict that? Yeah, there would certainly be a pause in fighting. I know who knows if it would be a permanent ceasefire. One of my basic rule of thumbs is anyone that came to you, a Middle East expert that confidently predicts the future is a fool. So, you know, you don't want to talk to those folks. I think

if I'm interpreting this point in an intelligently correctly, what's happening is the Israelis say, okay, we've done this time and time again, where we fight for a limited time, there's a ceasefire. Let's just puts a pause on an inevitable conflict between Israel and Iran. Now, they're on the offensive, we're securing some military victories, we need to just finish the job, because we're tired of this proxy thing back and forth,

decades long, kind of Cold War between Israel and these proxy groups, we need to go in and route the groups and finish the job. The problem is, it's very difficult to stomp out these organizations. And even when you do, the ideology is still around people's... My sense is that the ramifications of this war, especially the Israeli incursion into Gaza, this is going to be a decades long trauma for these populations, and it's going to motivate future generations of armed resistance.

And so I think the Israelis are trying to resolve a fundamental political conflict with military means in a way that secures some lasting victory. And I just don't think that's the case. I don't think these political problems are solved by preemptive war. And as you've read the situation with the, with the ceasefire negotiations that I think have happened, I mean, all throughout the last year between Israel and Gaza, right? I mean, and then there's different people involved. Why have, why hasn't that happened? Who is the one saying no to the negotiations? Who's, who's been the problem? Has it been

Israel has been Hamas is it a both and I imagine you're not going to give me a simple answer to that. Yeah. So what happens in any negotiation, this is one of the through lines of Israel Palestinian conflict in the last, since 1967, is that you have negotiating parties who are then undermined by folks within their own ranks that have more extreme goals. And so you have spoilers, both within, in the case of Palestine, you have the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah Party trying to negotiate a two-state solution during Oslo in the case of Palestine, you have the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah Party trying to negotiate a two-state solution during Oslo in the 1990s. Hamas comes in and

spoils that deal, right, that they want, they have more extreme political goals or expanded goals, and so they have a political incentive in the short term to undermine that negotiation. I think you've seen that both with Hamas and certainly the Netanyahu coalition, where the Americans and Qataris and other regional states bring both parties to bear to the negotiating table. And Netanyahu realizes that his only stake in political survival of staying in office and keeping the coalition together is to appear strong, defeat Hamas, and perhaps release the remaining hostages who are alive or I'm

not sure whether or not the Israeli, the Netanyahu government is committed to that. Right? And so you have leaders who want to stay in power. They look weak. They're guessing that they're going to undermine their authority. They're going to lose power. In that case, the Israeli coalition falls apart and Netanyahu loses power and then he's subject to legal prosecution.

He may find his way in jail for the corruption charges and other legal disputes that are ongoing. So Netanyahu thinks the best way to avoid that is to keep the government together and that those personal incentives of Netanyahu and some of the Hamas leaders, Yahuasin were included, undermine the public interest of the groups they represent. So Senoar wants to maintain control, he wants to continue resistance efforts. We're actually unsure if he's still alive at this point, we're not entirely clear. Those efforts to continue armed resistance undermine the protection of Palestinian people in Gaza.

So the private incentives of leaders clash with the public incentives of the people they're supposed to represent. Yeah. When I put my Christian hat on, that's, I think a lot of people see this in binary terms like Israel as an entity versus Hamas as an entity. And if you frame it that way, of course you get side with Israel. No one's on side with Hamas. I mean, a few people do.

But I'm like, what about the overwhelming majority of civilians that are just caught in the middle, you know, that are not, uh, there may be complex reasons for, you know, a Palestinian voting for Hamas, you know, what back in what, 20, 2005 or six, five, six, like, yeah. Um, but even that, like people hold the civilians responsible for that. Well, that that's, that's the logic of Osama bin Laden who bombed the twin towers because it was a population that put these, you know, hawkish militants and leadership of the white house. I, you don't bomb civilians because they voted for a government you don't like. I mean, that's just not, again, that's, that's, that's the logic of terrorism. I think. Yeah. So I mean, I, I, I, on, on

both sides of all the borders, all sides of the borders, we have not only Christians all over the place, middle East is one of the fastest growing evangelical Christian movements. And I ran the house church movement. I ran insane led by women led by women. I'm a friend who's a female, one of the early leaders of the house church movement at ranch. She said, there's no explanation. It is the most patriarchal society. It's the upside down church, right? Or the Brendan Manning idea. Like the God, the gospel will advance regardless of the foreign policy of great powers. And you've seen this revival

in Iran place where missionaries, Presbyterian missionariesaries 120 plus years ago were planning thieves. And now you have just the explosion of the church and you have really passionate Iranian prison diaspora believers in London and in Southern California witnessing the folks. There's a great podcast, Jesus Speaks Farsi, that has Christian, the folks that run that interview Christians both inside and outside of Iran, looking at the dynamics of the church, and just so encouraging. These folks will return to Iran to visit family, they'll distribute New Testaments, and inside the cover of these Bibles, Persian language Bible will be a Zoom link. And they say, hey, if you're reading stuff here and you have questions, every Monday night or whatever, we're going to be on the Zoom link, we'd love

to talk to you about what you're reading. And so, there's just this subversive evangelism going on of Persians outside of Iran. And that's, that's the greatest hope for the Persian people. Not, not a regime change, not a regional war, not a fall of the Ayatollah. All those things would be great, but the church is, the church is going to thrive regardless of who, who's, who is the head of state is talk to us. What's going on in Lebanon with the, with the church. I know Lebanon has always had a strong Christian population. Beirut has always seemed to have like serious Christian activity going

on. Can you help us understand what, what, what's God doing there? Yeah. So Lebanon is a really interesting place, right? It's has a strong kind of Mediterranean culture. It's so it's half Mediterranean, European, half Arab, middle Eastern. And it's a country that has the largest Christian plurality. So something like a third of the country are, at least by social identity, Christians. All of them are active churchgoers. But you have a lot of active denominations. The Marianite Church is an Eastern Catholic church, so they're in fellowship with Rome,

but also have their own liturgy. A lot of these places have visited these monasteries in Bacchus, the Central Valley, where you can go and visit and sit in and vespers that are in Aramaic. So, they're about the closest you can hear to the language that Jesus spoke, is this Lebanese Aramaic. It's an incredible experience. Lord willing, we'll be able to go back there in the years ahead and then listen to this. It's incredible, right? And so, you have the historic denominations there. A lot of folks don't know much about them. These are the denominations that kind of lost the debate over the Council of Chalcedon, these Eastern churches that the West kind of uses heretical because of some of their beliefs.

I think Fins Banthue, Fuller has a great book kind of sorting out the history of the Eastern church and recommend that book. But nowadays, you have a thriving evangelical presence in places like Beirut. So you have the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut that's training pastors within the country, Arab speaking believers, as well as those from Sub-Saharan Africa. It's easier and closer to get a visa to go to Lebanon than Europe or North America. And so they're training pastors throughout the region. And there's obviously other great non-denominational seminaries in Bethlehem and in Nazareth and Amman, Jordan.

And so these are, when we get focused on the great power of politics, the reason we forget, or we lose sight of the brothers and sisters in this part of the world that are barely hanging on, they're doing the Lord's work. And we tend not to visit these folks when we, you know, like when people go to Israel or maybe they go to Bethlehem for three hours. They go to the church in the Timothy, they have lunch and they get back on the bus and cross the checkpoint. They don't talk to Arab Christians in Nazareth. And so, we keep these folks in our prayer and really build relationships with them because this is the birthplace of Christianity. What's going to happen if we sit by and allow

politics to really erode or extinguish the presence of the church in these communities? These are churches that have been around since the first century. Pete I just looked up the fast, countries at the fastest growing Christian population. Saudi Arabia was top three or four too. I, I've, um, do you know Ferris, Ferris Abraham? He was on the podcast a month ago. Yeah. Okay. Gosh. He's doing amazing work. He, he sent me pictures of like in, uh, I think it was in Egypt. What was it? No, I think it was Egypt. This like massive auditorium filled with youth. It's like a youth event with like thousands of people gathering, praising Jesus in the middle of Egypt. Or maybe it was Saturday, it was someplace

where he's like, yeah, there's no explanation for this. There is, God is doing some crazy stuff. There's a fairly large Protestant church and center in Cairo. These aren't Coptic Christians, but they're Protestant Egyptian Christians, small minority, but it's a really thriving congregation in the middle of Cairo as well. Yeah. So there's pockets of this growth all over the place. And then there's examples of revival in Iran. I mean, it's telling that organizations like the Gospel Coalition here in the United States, they have a Persian language site. They're translating some of those resources into Persian, so that people can read it in their own language, right? That's what keeps me encouraged.

And these are indigenous or local pastors movements that are the legacy in part of Western missions. But they're also now training local pastors, folks that are going from Dearborn, Michigan, back to Lebanon or Iraq or Egypt, right, to witness to their congregations. And they inherently have more legitimacy because they're from the region, they speak the language. I'm just, I'm highly encouraged by that. As Christians, we just need to not turn off the news, but change the channel. You know what I mean? Like, we get so sucked into, yeah, the power politics and the narratives and the propaganda and different narratives want to suck you into their political side when God is doing some crazy,

amazing things in this very same region. And, you know, there's obviously an intersection here when this war is breaking out, who knows where it's going to lead. I mean, that could be devastating for our brothers and sisters in Christ, you know? And we treat it as entertainment, right? For the most part, Americans in particular have been insulated from the costs of work, especially the war on terror. And so we view these things through the lens of entertainment. We think this is some live action risk game where we can choose sides and follow on our Twitter feeds and get excited about all this military technology as opposed to reality. And this is really heartbreaking stuff.

We have the luxury of treating this as news because we're insulated from the effects of it. And that's just, I think it's spiritually poisonous for us to view this as entertainment. Is Iran any threat to America? If Israel was not America's ally, say Israel is just a country over there. You know, whatever is Iran, Lebanon, Hezbollah, blanket Hamas, you know, are they a threat to people living in America? It is Berkeley. They have been. So there's been global terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah, US embassies or Israeli embassies overseas,

American and European civilians in Europe and elsewhere. They said that historically, it's been a global terror threat. I think in terms of you think about the security of the American people, the vibrancy of our economy, the promotion of our values at home and overseas, Iran is not in the top five threats that the US faces in terms of foreign policy priorities. But the problem is we can't, just like similar to the North Koreans, the fact that they have

a progressing nuclear weapons program makes them a global security threat. And so the priority should be how do we contain, disrupt, negotiate with the Iranians in order to prevent this breakout capacity? The Iran deal, I think, was marginally successful. The Trump administration pulled out of that once he was elected in 2016, 2017. What are the alternative foreign policies? Very difficult to tell. My sense is that regime change or more military aggression is not going to deter.

In fact, if I'm sitting in Tehran and I'm advising the ISL, I'm saying, listen, the Israelis have been able to counteract all of our proxy forces. This motivates us all the more to develop and deploy an advanced nuclear weapon capacity. This is the only chance we have at life insurance for the regime. That's one of the lessons the Iranians learned from the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere is that nuclear weapons are the only form of life insurance you have against overthrow by foreign governments. I think it's the same strategy the North Koreans are pursuing. It's the only means they have of preventing foreign imposed regime change. I'm not morally justifying that foreign policy, but if you put yourself in the

position of these states in their foreign policy, you can, you can understand whether it makes strategic sense, morally tragic, but it, but there's a logic to it. Right. I like to distinguish between something that's moral and something that's rational or reasonable, you know, like something could be reasonable and be immoral too. Um, is that, I mean, our moral reasoning when it comes to these things, especially when we think about just war, just cause for war proportionate, we collapse these distinctions or categories because what we want is our brains don't like cognitive dissonance. We want some closure. We want some definitive answer. We don't like ongoing curiosity or

uncertainty and especially Christian, evangelical Christians have a difficult time with that curiosity or dissonance. And so that's one of my missions is to, is to train Christians to think well about these things, to be comfortable in that, that, that cognitive dissonance. As you said, we, we've, there's been ongoing skirmishes, conflicts, really intense things like the 1982 and second Intifada, you know, lots of things that have escalated and turned into really big deals. Do you see our situation right now as bigger than all of that potentially? I mean, people will talk about the potential of nuclear war, the way the hawkish people in Washington are talking about responding. I mean, could it, could it, what are the odds

this could actually do nuclear war? Are you at all worried about that? Or if not nuclear war, some full on big, big war in the middle East that we haven't seen at least in a long time. Like, are you worried? Like, are you, are you concerns particularly concerned right now? Well, it's already escalated, right? There's a war between Israel and Lebanon. Now the Iranians are involved proxy forces also. So the war is escalating in the Middle East context. I'm not so much worried about a nuclear escalation. I don't know if the Iranians are involved, proxy forces also. So the war is escalating. In the Middle East context, I'm not so much worried about a nuclear escalation. I don't know if the Iranians actually have the, I don't think they have the incentive

or the ability to deliver nuclear weapons. Israel has a secure nuclear deterrent, probably submarine based, very difficult to take that out. At the same time, I highly doubt that the Israelis and the Americans have the ability, the military capability or strategy in place to totally wipe out Iran's nuclear weapons program. They've built these facilities under mountains to be insulated from attack from the air. The folks that are calling for a strike, I think, are highly underestimating the unintended

consequence of that and probably overestimating the likelihood that a preemptive strike could eliminate the program. And so, what happens if you take out half the program? I'm far more worried about a collapsing Iranian regime or a weak regime, the types of things that a weak Iran's going to do than one that feels secure. Not to say that Iranian foreign policy is not pernicious and they have their own goals and it's against the US national interest in a lot of ways, but I think it's highly strategically and morally callous or reckless. Brent Stevens

in the New York Times yesterday, this is the time now to strike the regime and it's terrifying to me. And it's, it's terrifying to me. How could you be so stupid? I could just, I got who, I'm not an expert in this stuff, but it just like, it's like, he said like historical amnesia. Like yeah, we've tried that many, many times. Hasn't gone well. Like what do you, what makes you think that overpowering power and more power right now or preemptive power is going to do anything positive. Anyway, you know, what we need is Tom cruise, jump in an airplane and go take out nuclear weapons being built. How do you think last question, how do you think Israel, like right now Israel's going to respond. Usually they respond with a lot more power than what was, you know, than the attacked on them. That's a little scary because that was a pretty big barrage of missiles. How do you think Israel's going

to respond? They might've already responded by the time this podcast comes out. Yeah. So they're, they're continuing the incursion into South Lebanon targeting has bullet assets. I would suspect that they would want to avoid a prolonged military occupation of South Lebanon. Though we know how these things escalate. A lot of times foreign militaries go in expecting to leave sooner rather than later and that's not the case. And think about Vietnam, right? It's early 1962, 1963, the Americans go in and they wind up stuck there.

Israelis have experience with that 2006, 1982 beforehand. There seems to be relative pause in the fighting in Gaza. I don't think that's by any means a permanent ceasefire. Time will tell. To be totally honest, I'm not entirely sure of the path forward. It strikes me at least the public presence of the Biden administration is not reassuring. I'm not sure entirely who's doing the negotiating behind the scenes if that's the Secretary of State, Tony Blanken or perhaps Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor.

But the sooner that the Americans, Europeans, Hotsuris can get to the region and figure out a sequential de-escalation, the better. And that includes bringing the Israelis to the table. To date, the American approach of where we're going to give the Israelis a bear hug, prevent them from hurting themselves or other people, that foreign policy approach hasn't worked. And I think Netanyahu is basically immune to that. And he's fighting, much like what we see in Russian Ukraine, they're banking on a favorable U.S. election

in the next five weeks. That both Netanyahu and Putin think they're going to get a better deal if the Trump administration comes back to power. So if they can hold comes back to power. So if they can hold out until the US election here in the next month, their prospects in terms of negotiating with the Americans will improve. And so that's what's really concerning at this point is the incentive to keep fighting,

at least low level fighting until the US election in Washington, the US elections, the results are clear. That's, that's, that's bad news for the Palestinians, bad news for Ukrainians and Israelis elsewhere. Now, sorry, one more question. I love to get your read on this. Cause since you brought up the election and everything, it's, it's shocking to me how hawkish the Biden administration it's shocking, but not like it used to be just Republicans that were the warmongers and everything. And I think since Clinton, it's kind of pretty bipartisan, it seems like, but what's shocking to me is, um, and this is the election so volatile. So if people could just set aside, just, we're just talking about foreign policy right now. It is shocking that Trump is said he's surrounding himself with some pretty anti-war people like

a Tulsi Gabbard, even RFK, like these guys are openly kind of speaking out against the military industrial complex, not getting involved in proxy wars, pulling fundy funding from, you know, different wars were involved in depending on your view of foreign policy, you can think that's good or bad. I tend to think that's good. So if, if Trump gets elected and he actually does put say Gabbard and, and, and RFK and positions of power that are very anti-war, at least verbally, they've been that way. Could that in and of itself, do you see that as being a potentially good thing or do you just not believe anybody? Anything? You saw that. Yeah. You saw the other night with the vice president, which will

debate on October 1st, just a few nights ago, the first question out the gate was on Iran. J.D. Vance, he typically portrays himself as a non-interventionist, comes out strongly pro-Israel. I think that Trump likes Netanyahu because he sees the fellow wheeler and dealer as someone he can negotiate with. Now Trump is also mercurial enough to not want to be slighted, right? If he's a narcissist, he doesn't want to be slighted. He actually may be far more unpredictable when it comes to Netanyahu.

And that's kind of the dark counter argument is that Trump would actually be better for Israel, Gaza than Biden. Because if he feels slighted, he might just end up changing his mind. I don't really think Trump has foreign policy priorities. I think he has personal priorities that are highly transactional. And if those circumstances change, he doesn't

really have a commitment to backing Israel any more than he had the commitment to saying in NATO. So, you know, that's kind of the dark argument is that Trump gets in power, there's actually a better chance that we strain the Israelis than with Biden or Vice President Harris. I think that uncertainty, that instability is not good for the American presidents in the world or the region. But the fact that Biden and Harris, they've been highly ineffective in the war. And you're seeing this in terms of Michigan, American voters in Michigan, there's a high chance that 10, 20, 30,000 folks in Michigan are going to stay home. I don't think either Americans are going to vote Trump, they're going gonna stay home. I don't think either Americans are gonna vote Trump, they're gonna stay home.

And then if Michigan goes to Trump, if it's a close election, that lack of turnout could be one of the very few examples we have where a foreign policy issue actually decides elections. Most of the time foreign policy is not even in the top 10 issues, right? Unless the Americans are at war,

once we don't vote on Middle East politics, let alone foreign policy writ large, we vote on the economy, if we're a red or blue team, maybe abortion or social issues. But this may be one of those, there's rare examples where this war actually will prevent Harris from, from winning in Michigan. Everything you're saying is exactly what I've been thinking, but I'm not the expert. So I'm glad to hear that because I'm trying to piece together stuff and like, ah, it seems like if this, then this and yeah, that, that you're, what you said, like the, the Biden slash Harris administration seems to be so deep in, you

know, people don't like to term deep state or whatever, but I just think they're too well funded by a pack and a lot of people, the billions of dollars. And you know, like I just, to me, it's like, they are going to be committed Zionists no matter, no matter what they had the whole problem of their, the far left. It's, you know, sympathetic with the Palestinians and they have to kind of navigate that on a voter level. But at the end of the day, they are a hundred percent committed to supporting Israel. Unconditionally. We've seen that over and over and over with Trump. His, his craziness is a role that it's a bit of a crap shoot. Like you said, I'm just kind of repeating what you said. Like, yeah, he's probably he's committed to

Israel. He says community is real, but I don't know. He's kind of unpredictable. And in, in, in, in, in most ways it's bad. His unpredictability this way. It could be good, especially if he has Gabbert and RFK and you know, people around it, but yeah, JD, JD Vance definitely sounded hawkish in that debate. Yeah, the very first question. Well, and he's incredibly clever. At the same time, I can't, he knows how to speak to different audiences. So I'm not actually sure what his political or foreign policy priorities are because he's

very effective at switching tones and tag-tebing who he's talking to. So the JD Vance you saw on Tuesday night, the debate is not the one you see at the rallies. He has a, he tries to portray consistent non-interventionist ethic, but then it's strongly pro-Israel. Other than being an opportunist. I'm not really sure where those priorities in terms of foreign policy, what, what that would look like in January. Should they, should they, should they win the election? But, and then you have, I mean, he's not a politician, but he's got massive influence. Tucker Carlson holding these rallies where he's been very, and look people, I know when I say that's a trigger word and I just, I hate that all these names are, you know, people have all kinds of strong opinions about, you know, whatever. But like

he, despite what people might think about Tucker Carlson, and I'm not a fan. He's been very anti-war in his rhetoric, very anti-war. And when he says anti-war things in front of these massive far right audiences, they all stand up and cheer. It's weird, man. I mean, do you still have obviously the Republicans and the Blinkens and I mean, yeah, the other, these very hawkish people in positions of power, the Republican party, no doubt about that. And those people frighten me to no end, but there's this weird groundswell of right-wing populists that are now partly because of people like Carlson and Gabbert and RFK that are being anti-war, which is weird and interesting. Yeah. Yeah. The American history, there's a strong tradition of, of anti-intervention,

non-interventionism, and typically comes in populist forms. Sometimes that's rather pernicious. You think about Charles Lindbergh, the America First campaign to prevent the Americans from getting involved in World War II. But public opinion until 1945, and especially after the end of the Cold War, has been, traditionally, there's been a sizable percentage of folks that are highly skeptical of US empire of liberal hegemony. And that's, I think the foreign policy liberal hegemony, John and others have talked at length about this, that it is not a partisan issue.

You have the neoconservative or conservative version of it in George W. Bush. You have the progressive version of it under Clinton, Obama, now Biden. There is universal consensus towards this. I had an advisor in my PhD, a guy named John Mueller, really bright guy, he would go to DC and would talk about this and his joke was, he'd always, anytime he had a new book and would kind of push the non-interventionist line, he was always invited to speak in Congress

or think they once and he was never invited back because people didn't like to hear what he had to say. So he'd always, he would say, I'll come out and speak, but you know, this is not gonna, you're not gonna wanna have me back, but there's an elite consensus committed to liberal hegemony and there's a populist impulse, both on the progressive left and the populist right

against that. And I think you actually have more in common that non-interventionist groundswell has more in common. And it just shows that right. You can't really use the left, right. And sort of progressive thing. When you think about foreign policy, these issues don't map onto these domestic cleavages as well as they do when you talk about like abortion or immigration or taxes, right? There just doesn't make sense to think about foreign policy in terms of left and right.

Jeffrey Sachs has been saying this Columbia university prof, you know, he says when it comes to war and foreign policy and war profiteering, it's the two parties are on the same side. It's tweet. He says, tweedle D and tweedle dumb. That's been my read of it. I'm like, yeah, golly, if I, if I was a one issue voter, I might, I don't know. I think American foreign policy is not just one of many issues. I think it is one that is like a magnet. It controls so many other decisions again, from my very limited reading on the situation, the kind of war profiteering and you know, the intertwining of corporations that are making decisions in Washington and the war profiteering, the revolving door between people involved with, you know, Raytheon and all these weapons manufacturers and the government and everything. It's just, it's, I don't know.

It's a little eerie when you peek behind the curtain, just a little bit. Yeah. Eisenhower's speech on this, the, the state of the union glass, the last major speech you gave before he left office. It's a great, I signed, I taught on it last week or two weeks ago to my students and my foreign policy class. It's a great speech to go back and think it's highly present about what are the consequences of collusion between big business, big government and big military. I just read William Hartung, the profits of war. He traces, Oh, what's the company? Ah, blanking on a name. Anyway. Hey, yeah. William Hart telling the profits of war analyzes the military industrial complex,

the kind of from the roots all the way to present day. It's, it's, it's a decade old book, but yeah, super interesting and frightening too. It's an important part of what you guys are thinking about exiles and Babylon and political theology. I think thinking carefully about about that how does the political theology or foreign policy fit within this broader framework? About a lot of folks, the Harawas, et cetera, you have some of the anti-war line, but there's not a lot of folks that have carefully integrated that political theology into a broader framework of either pacifism or non non intervention or, or just challenging some of the just war that kind of the knee jerk just war. Yeah. Arguments in favor of what we're seeing. Obviously that you could have a just cause for reprisal or, or, or a response to October 7th. That

doesn't mean you're going to conduct the warning just in proportionate fashion. And so we confuse just cause with, with just conduct of the war. Austin, I've taken you longer than I was anticipating. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you and your wisdom and for coming on the show at last. Last, uh, the last second. So, uh, This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Greetings and God bless. This is Tyler Burns. And this is Dr. Jamar Tisby. And we want to invite you to check out our podcast, Pass the Mic, Dynamic Voices for

a Diverse Church. Pass the Mic has been speaking directly to the core concerns of black Christians for over a decade. On our show, we've got interviews from theologians, historians, actors, activists, and so much more. Not to mention heartfelt, open dialogue on some of the heaviest issues facing the church in the United States. Be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your

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