No More Hustleporn: Bibi Netanyahu believes in the "iron triangle of strength"
We pulled out the highlights from Benjamin Netanyahu's recent interview with Walter Mead at the Wall Street Journal. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu :-)
Highlights
Benjamin Netanyahu: And Herzl decided to help the Jewish people by giving them both a homeland and a refuge. He couldn't get the homeland he wanted, a refuge in Uganda that didn't work out. And he understood that. My grandfather, who admired him enormously, opposed him on this idea of Uganda because he said, we shed oceans of blood and tears for our homeland, the land of Israel. You could never galvanize a Jewish national movement for national independence in some place in Africa. It's just not going to work. Although when I had a conversation with my father, he said, it's not clear that Herzl was wrong because we might have saved a few million Jews and we could have worked our way back from there.
Benjamin Netanyahu: But in any case, Herzl's view was that what the Jews lacked most was power. Power. And unless you have power, you will not survive. It's a cruel world, but it's not only a cruel world for the Jews. It's a cruel world, period. But it's particularly cruel for the Jews because they were particularly powerless. They were boltin. Hebrew. My English boltin. They stood out. They stood out, and they often stood out alone or stood out more than others, but they were powerless. And to be in the position of standing out and being powerless is particularly dangerous. So he said, we must establish power and the ability to defend ourselves. We lost the ability to defend ourselves. So he concluded that we have to have a state of our own and the ability to have a government, an army. And he foresaw well in advance of others that the antisemitic fires would culminate in the Holocaust therefore and he was right. And the fact that we didn't have a state and that men like Aronson, who was a classic Herzilian, died too early. When you read his diary, you understand what we lost. He was an exceptional, brilliant man who had the capacity to do what Herzl did, which is to increase our power for getting power.
And how do you increase your power from getting power? By turning to - and now you have to buckle your seatbelt again, turning not merely to the Jews, but turning to the gentiles. This is how you create alliances. You create force multipliers. This is the jargon. Shoot me if I use jargon, because I try not to, but these are force multipliers. You have to create alliances. You have to ignite your own people with a fire, but you really turn on the turbo engine if you can get other powers to support your quest for power. And that's what Herzl began doing and was quite successful. Not completely - he didn't succeed with the Kaiser, didn't succeed with the Ottomans, but he was able to use the great sentiment, which you described so beautifully in your book, on the biblical story that began to flower, really, in the last few centuries, particularly in the Anglo Saxon world, but not exclusively. That was harnessed by Herzl for a worldwide movement that ultimately culminated in our state. But that happened too late for European Jewry, but not too late for world Jewry.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, I would say, first of all, it's shedding the Palestinian veto, basically, that's it. The Americans constantly believed, and many others, I mean, Europeans and Israelis believed that again, you can't make peace with the Arab world unless you solve the Israeli Palestinian problem. That was the Reginant assumption until just a few years ago. And it was an impassable barrier. You couldn't pass it because the Palestinians don't want to stay next to Israel. They want to stay instead of Israel. So you wait and wait.
You have successive prime ministers. And by the way, you should understand, there was always one obstacle to peace. You're looking at him. But if we get rid of this guy, you'll get an Israeli leader who will not be an obstacle to peace. And therefore maybe you twist you don't have to twist an arm. You could twist a finger and you'll get the concessions that will make peace possible. Basically. That was the theory. Okay, well, that didn't turn out well. Didn't turn out well with Rabin, didn't turn out well with Paris or with Sharon or Omar or Barack or all the, you know, the whole cast of characters didn't work out. No matter how much you offer them. They needed more. But it's not that they needed more. They could no more make peace, he Palestinian leadership, Arafat and Abbas, they can no more make peace with the Jewish state accepting that we're here in Jaffa, in the orchard, that we're here any more than they could fly to the moon. And you can keep trying and keep trying and keep trying. You'll be stuck. You can be stuck for a quarter of a century, a half a century, how long? However you want. Unless you break out of that mold. You can't do it.
Full Transcript
Walter Mead: It's great to be here with you. It's a little intimidating, especially intimidating because not only is this man the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Israel, even more irritatingly, he is the author of a bestselling and I hate to say it, but very good book. A little bit Churchilly in here, I think, out of office, that he wrote a memoir, as Churchill did. Churchill had longer to wait than Netanyahu, and so Churchill produced a five-volume history of the second world War. We have only one volume of Bibi. I suppose if there'd been another three or four elections, you would have had.
Benjamin Netanyahu: More of a memoir. Give me a break.
Walter Mead: But it really is a very good book. One of the things that I found myself thinking as I read it was that you've had a darker view of history than was fashionable or common for many of your years in politics and power, where the rest of the world was celebrating the end of history, our new era of peace and democracy, the end of great power politics. You consistently brought a kind of a more skeptical view of where we were. What gave you that view?
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, I read your book before you wrote it, and I have to return the compliment. It's a wonderful book. I just finished reading it. But it really plumbs historical depth with depth and a lot of wisdom and probing insights. So I much value the experience of reading it. And I think in your book, you really touch on at least the fount of my inspiration. I drew inspiration from my father, who drew inspiration from Herzl. You would think it's Jabutinsky, who was in between, but it's really not. It was Herzl all the way. And my father, in many ways, was influenced by Jabotinski, but also influenced Jabotinsky and persuaded him to go to the United States at the end of World War II, and they went there together. Joe Jabutinsky died, but my father's main source of inspiration in mine is Herzl.
And what Herzl said was that Herzl came to Vienna in the late 19th century, and Vienna was it. It was it. I mean, the Jews were beyond belief, so civilization, enlightenment, prosperity, the arts, soft power was at its greatest strength. It was magnificent. And very people know, and I didn't know, that in those years, Herzl met a famous American author in Vienna - Mark Twain. I just came on that reading some book, and I said, what couldn't happen? And it made sense to me because Mark Twain wrote an extraordinary essay about the Jewish people, and he said, you know, the Babylonians withered away, the Romans, the Greeks, but the Jew is here, one hand or two hands tied behind his back, and he's there, here and so on.
They said, Why did he write this? I mean, who did he meet? A Jewish trader on the Mississippi. Why did he do this? And of course, that's not why he did this. He did this after he visited Vienna and saw this extraordinary renaissance there and Mahler and Freud and Herzl, who were younger than him, but even took him to a play, I think, that Herzel wrote at the time on the walls of the ghetto. So Herzl didn't share Twain's optimism about the Jews. He didn't. And you say I have a dark foreboding view. Now. It's a realistic view. Herzl understood that antisemitism that he could identify, beginning with the rise of a virulent antisemitic mayor in Vienna and then following that, of course, the Dreyfus trial. He understood that if in the heart of civilization you can have this monstrosity developing, that ultimately it would consume the Jews of Europe, that these fires were too strong, and he suggested a way out.
So he differed from Twain. Twain said the Jews are guaranteed. Their future is guaranteed. History proves it. Some of our Christian friends believe that that's guaranteed. What I like to believe is guaranteed. But God helps those who help themselves. And Herzl decided to help the Jewish people by giving them both a homeland and a refuge. He couldn't get the homeland he wanted, a refuge in Uganda that didn't work out. And he understood that. My grandfather, who admired him enormously, opposed him on this idea of Uganda because he said, we shed oceans of blood and tears for our homeland, the land of Israel. You could never galvanize a Jewish national movement for national independence in some place in Africa. It's just not going to work. Although when I had a conversation with my father, he said, it's not clear that Herzl was wrong because we might have saved a few million Jews and we could have worked our way back from there.
But in any case, Herzl's view was that what the Jews lacked most was power. Power. And unless you have power, you will not survive. It's a cruel world, but it's not only a cruel world for the Jews. It's a cruel world, period. But it's particularly cruel for the Jews because they were particularly powerless. They were boltin. Hebrew. My English boltin. They stood out. They stood out, and they often stood out alone or stood out more than others, but they were powerless. And to be in the position of standing out and being powerless is particularly dangerous. So he said, we must establish power and the ability to defend ourselves. We lost the ability to defend ourselves. So he concluded that we have to have a state of our own and the ability to have a government, an army. And he foresaw well in advance of others that the antisemitic fires would culminate in the Holocaust therefore and he was right. And the fact that we didn't have a state and that men like Aronson, who was a classic Herzilian, died too early. When you read his diary, you understand what we lost. He was an exceptional, brilliant man who had the capacity to do what Herzl did, which is to increase our power for getting power.
And how do you increase your power from getting power? By turning to - and now you have to buckle your seatbelt again, turning not merely to the Jews, but turning to the gentiles. This is how you create alliances. You create force multipliers. This is the jargon. Shoot me if I use jargon, because I try not to, but these are force multipliers. You have to create alliances. You have to ignite your own people with a fire, but you really turn on the turbo engine if you can get other powers to support your quest for power. And that's what Herzl began doing and was quite successful. Not completely - he didn't succeed with the Kaiser, didn't succeed with the Ottomans, but he was able to use the great sentiment, which you described so beautifully in your book, on the biblical story that began to flower, really, in the last few centuries, particularly in the Anglo Saxon world, but not exclusively. That was harnessed by Herzl for a worldwide movement that ultimately culminated in our state. But that happened too late for European Jewry, but not too late for world Jewry.
Now, we established a beachhead with 600,000 people and we could have been wiped out. We weren't, because we had enough power to defend ourselves, but we had to build on that power. And that is what essentially guided me. I followed Herzl's idea of a world that seeks to go to the heights of human values, but you have to be able to defend yourself. If you can't, you won't get there. And essentially, my father's generation was tasked with forming the state and my generation was tasked with not merely preserving it, but enabling it to continue with a degree of you can't use the word permanence because, well, unless you're a great believer, what is permanent, but for the coming decades, to give it the security, prosperity and strength.
Now, to end this mini-lecture, and I promise you my next answers will be much shorter. But you asked a formative question. The foundations of power that I talked about and that I devoted in my life were basically for what I call the iron triangle of peace, the iron triangle of strength. It is, you'd think, and most Israelis thought was basically military power, right? That's the foundation of it. Yeah, it is in the beginning, but you lose out very quickly if you don't have another foundation, which is economic power. And you are not going to get economic power unless you have free markets, because there's no other way to secure that. So if you have and that's what I devoted a lot of time to change Israel from a semisocialist economy to a free market economy. So I could find, or rather fund a collective purpose, which is to fund our military. So I'm a capitalist anyway, but I'm a capitalist for collective purposes. That is. You couldn't simply keep up Israel's strength without having a strong economy. And once you have a strong economy, free market economy and a strong military, you can then have the third component, which is diplomatic power.
Initially, the military power enabled us to strengthen our alliance with the United States after the 6 Day War and our proven victory. And our economic power led to the ability to expand the fledgling peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan to the Abraham Accords. There are people here like David who helped us in this, and Mike Pompeo, who should be credited for many, many things following the footsteps of Elliot Abrams.
Walter Mead: But the right answer I look at with astonishment because this story was all new to me as I was researching my book. But to see how Herzel's concept of a state as the goal for the Jewish people allowed him to have alliances with sort of good philosemites like William Hackler, the clergyman, but also vicious antisemites, including Wilhelm II, who was not a nice person, but who started to see a connection between German state interests and the interests of the project that Herzel had. Putting the Jews on the political map enabled them to make alliances beyond the nice liberals and the nice philosemites who supported them out of their heart.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Because again, Herzel's key insight was that if you just depend on the nice people and the good people, you ain't going to make it.
Walter Mead: No, it's not enough. It's not enough. Which maybe gets us to the present day in some ways. This is not the happiest time in the history of the world. It's a time when your skepticism about liberal utopias and millennial glories seems almost second nature to people. Now, we look at what's happening in Ukraine, we look at the tensions in the Far East, and we certainly can look in the region as prime minister of Israel. Looking out on this troubled world, how do you see this world crisis that's emerging? And how does Israel chart a course through it?
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, the one thing that characterizes it is moving from a bipolar world to a monopolar world, and now we're moving back to a multipolar world with the rise of China, which I think is the most important geopolitical development of this century. I wouldn't write America off. America has great internal powers. But there's no question there is a challenge. And in between are other things, like Russia, possibly India, but for the moment, Russia. But much more important, I think, the interstitch between east and west is Iran. And Iran represents the rise of radical Islamic state. That could be the first nuclear power that is run by radical Islam. If there is a regime change in Pakistan and the Islamists take over, that would already be an existing nuclear Islamist power. But Iran is already run by an Islamist theocracy, a phagocracy, really, that if it gets its hands on nuclear weapons, would make this already complicated multipolar world much more complicated. Because look at what Iran is doing today without nuclear weapons, and then you can project forth what it will do with nuclear weapons. I've devoted a good part of my years in public office before I became prime minister, and after that to do everything we can to block Iran's race for the bomb. So it wasn't a race. We probably slowed them down by at least a decade by the various things that we did. But they're still at it, and they're trying to cross the threshold. And if they cross the threshold and become a nuclear power, then they'd be, well, look at what a small country like North Korea does to international peace. North Korea is an anti economy. It's about 7% of Israel's GDP, but it's developing ballistic missiles that could reach soon any part of the United States with nuclear warheads.
Now, North Korea is a family business gone awry. It doesn't have a great but Iran is not. And Iran is infinitely bigger, more powerful, and more capable and more dangerous. So if you not only cries Death to Israel, death to America, but subjugate everyone in between, especially if you're a Muslim number one target. So Iran's rise on the world scene, if you think it's problematic having wars when one side has nuclear weapons and the other side does not, and I wouldn't tell you where that's happening right now. Then think of what it would mean that Iran's aggression, which is just all over the map, literally would be buttressed by nuclear weapons, a nuclear arsenal, and a means to deliver it to the far corners of the world. We would all be held hostage. This is a development that we have to stop. Since I devoted my efforts to this. And it cohered with the same fears that the Arab states and the Gulf states in particular had because they're the plum. They're the right plum ready for plunder that's they're right there across the water. So they sought being uncomfortable with the American response at the time. They sought tacit alliances with Israel. And they were tacit indeed because I met Arab leaders secretly in 2015 after I gave a certain speech in Congress that wasn't favorable to the were you there, Jim? Yeah.
Wow. And you've been a great friends before and after. So I want to thank you. When they saw that speech, we got communication from an Arab delegation in the Gulf and they said, we can't believe what your prime minister is doing. It's actually challenging an American president. I wasn't happy to do it, but I thought I had to do it. And that led to these meetings. These meetings opened up other possibilities which obviously could go well beyond that. The minute you had an American administration under President Trump and his able colleagues here who understood not initially, I have to say I'm not sure the president understood that right away. It took some time until a few years until he understood that we have this opportunity. And in my first meeting in the White House, David, you probably remember this. I think you were the ambassador by then. Yeah, well, I met the president and I said, you know, FDI brought a warship to the Middle East after Yalta. And he met and he met Ibn Sod from Saudi Arabia. And there you have an alliance that lasted 70 years. And I think that you can bring an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea and you invite Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed and other leaders and me. And I'm telling you, Donald, that there are four peace treaties to be had right off the dock.
Well, he didn't really take to that. He thought he could. He wrote the Art of the Deal and it was the deal of the century to be made. And so we spent a couple of years going down that rabbit hole and finally in the last year, year and a half, we could pursue this idea. And we did. And we got the Great Abraham Accords, but we ran out of Runway. I think that if we had more time, we'd probably have been a long way to going through a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia which would effectively end their Israeli conflict. I'm quite sure that the Sultan Kaboos of Oman, who invited me openly to a visit in Oman that we would have had peace treaty with him. Unfortunately, he died a few months later. But I think that that opportunity create a nexus of power and common interest. And in this case, it's not common values. On some there's common values, but there's also strong common interests. You were saying that you often make alliances with those who share your values, but sometimes those who don't necessarily share your values. Well, that's certainly true in our case.
So I want to make clear America is the indispensable alliance. It's the indispensable alliance, but it doesn't mean you can't have other alliances. And with the help of my colleagues, I see Yakir Dore Gold. And where's merban Shabbat? I don't see him. He's not here. Okay. We've had the opportunity to develop these alliances, and I think the jury is again still out. If Iran gets to nuclear weapons, it will start casting a shadow on well, it'll probably prevent future peace deals, and we'll start eroding existing deals if we beat them to the punch, I think we can expand the circle of peace. And if we expand the circle of peace to Saudi Arabia, then I think we effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict, which means we work our way not inside out, solve the Palestinian problem. You can't, because they don't want a solution with Israel. They want a solution without Israel. And if we wait for them, we'll wait another quarter of a century. We didn't. So we went around. We have to continue the circle, and then we can work our way back in. Why? Because when the Palestinian fantasy of destroying Israel, of coming back to the orchards of Jaffa you're in Jaffa now. You see any orchards here? No. You see skyrises all over the place. No orchards? No. Rewinding the clock. But that fantasy holds because they believe that ultimately we won't hold. When they see the entire Arab world coming to a closure with Israel, believing that the Jewish state is here to stay, then you might be able to get a workable peace with them, one that we could live with and not die with. I think that's possible.
So this is another long answer. I know this, but here's the thrust of it. The thrust of it is that I believe that pursuing a peace that is based on common interest of using Israeli power, military intelligence, technological and economic, to buttress local, that is, peace agreements and normalization agreements with our neighbors can help achieve two things. One, it can expand the circle of peace. Second, it can serve as a bulwark against Iran. And I think we can have a quantum leap if the Saudi leadership decides that it wants to be formally part of this. Informally, they're part of this. Yeah.
Walter Mead: I notice that there's a bit of a pattern in some of these peace efforts that very often the most successful ones are not the way Americans like to think of. We twist these people's arm and move them, and then we twist those people's arms, and so we force them both to the middle. And then there's an agreement. That's probably the sort of template a lot of folks in Washington think about. But so many of these peace agreements have come almost in spite of or against an American initiative. I'm thinking of the agreement between Sadat and Begin and some others. And this one, as you say, there was a preexisting logic in the region. And in some ways the Americans were only able to be constructive once they realized they should work with this pattern.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, I would say, first of all, it's shedding the Palestinian veto, basically, that's it. The Americans constantly believed, and many others, I mean, Europeans and Israelis believed that again, you can't make peace with the Arab world unless you solve the Israeli Palestinian problem. That was the Reginant assumption until just a few years ago. And it was an impassable barrier. You couldn't pass it because the Palestinians don't want to stay next to Israel. They want to stay instead of Israel. So you wait and wait.
You have successive prime ministers. And by the way, you should understand, there was always one obstacle to peace. You're looking at him. But if we get rid of this guy, you'll get an Israeli leader who will not be an obstacle to peace. And therefore maybe you twist you don't have to twist an arm. You could twist a finger and you'll get the concessions that will make peace possible. Basically. That was the theory. Okay, well, that didn't turn out well. Didn't turn out well with Rabin, didn't turn out well with Paris or with Sharon or Omar or Barack or all the, you know, the whole cast of characters didn't work out. No matter how much you offer them. They needed more. But it's not that they needed more. They could no more make peace, he Palestinian leadership, Arafat and Abbas, they can no more make peace with the Jewish state accepting that we're here in Jaffa, in the orchard, that we're here any more than they could fly to the moon. And you can keep trying and keep trying and keep trying. You'll be stuck. You can be stuck for a quarter of a century, a half a century, how long? However you want. Unless you break out of that mold. You can't do it.
And I think that the idea that all you have to do was twist a little, get a few more concessions to get Israel to satisfy the Palestinians. That would work. That doesn't work. We wasted a lot of time with the Obama administration. We had a crisis every 5 hours. And the crisis was every time there was a porch built in Gilo, we had a crisis. So we were consumed by this energy, enormous amount of energy. Instead of going outside and beginning to change history, we were stuck in this groove.
I think our colleague Ron Dermer also deserves credit for tremendous help that he gave in this effort. He explained to President Trump when he wanted to pursue the Palestinian peace and not the broad piece that I was suggesting, he said to him, because he plays golf, I don't play golf. So he said, Mr. President, making peace with the United Arab Emirates is a five foot putt. Making peace with Saudi Arabia is a 50 foot putt. Making peace with the Palestinians is a 200 foot strike through a wall, whatever that means. I don't know what it means, but the president knew what it meant. I don't think he bought it, but eventually he did.
I think the idea of arm twisting, finger twisting and all that is based on the premise that the problem is that there are two symmetric tribes here, okay? They both have what they call narratives, which is true, but okay, it doesn't help you very much. And that basically, they have a common hostility to each other. And if we could only bang their heads together, we'll get with American persuasion, we'll get peace. These are not symmetrical tribes. We just had these kids mowed down by a Palestinian killer, two brothers, six and eight beautiful children, and they were giving candies out in the Palestinian Authority. On that same moment, that same hour, you see an Israeli rescue worker taking out rescuing a child in Ankara, in Turkey, okay? These are not symmetrical tribes. They don't have symmetrical values. But the important thing is, if you keep banging your head, if you keep going down the rabbit hole, you'll be in the rabbit hole. We had to get out of it, and I'm glad we did. And I hope we'll continue. We'll see very soon.
Walter Mead: I gather in Washington, we're hearing more about the Palestinians and some sort of you've had some pressures already. How do you see the Palestinian issue working, and how do you see it affecting your relationship with the Biden administration going forward?
Benjamin Netanyahu: I think there's been a sobering up, a more sober view, I would say, in Washington. First of all, you're looking at an Eastern European potentate who wants to destroy Israeli democracy and destroy the judiciary. In fact, don't believe anything you read. But time will tell you that this is the case. But one of the things that we've had to contend with is obviously these false images that we've had. And I believe that I believe that we can that there's been a change in the perception in Washington.
First of all, on Iran. Probably six months ago, seven months ago, they were ready to cut a deal and then reality clubbed them on the head, both with these incredible protests inside Iran and, of course, the supply of the killer drones to Russia. So that pushed that aside. And so America's position, while not in any way identical to Israel's and to my position, is closer. It's less far apart than it was before, and I don't think they're heading into that agreement.
The second thing on the Palestinians. I think it's sort of a plague on both your houses. Now, what's the point? We'll just get stuck. They get the rabbit hole after decades and decades of this. I don't think that they have. I have to say that I think Joe Biden is a real friend. I'm not just saying that because we're here, and I have to say it now, I really know him, he has that sentiment, but he would also like to solve the Palestinian problem, but he just doesn't think that he can.
I think that's probably it. So I don't think they're vesting their interest there. On the other hand, they don't want it to explode. Neither do I. I mean, I wish we could solve it today and not wait to go around outside in. But we have a common interest, a, to keep maintain security as far as possible, maintain prosperity, which is very much my policy, both and as far as possible also eventually get a new reality working. I think they understand that there's nothing, no prizes in the offing now. So they're not tempted by this. I think they have a more sober view. So yeah, we have differences, but they're not let's say this, they don't have the passion and zeal of former years. You get my point?
Walter Read: When it comes to Iran, if the JCPOA is as dead as it looks, and I wrote some months ago that it was the Schrodinger's cat of diplomacy and while no one had opened the box, you're getting a certain dead cat smell coming out of the box.
Benjamin Netanyahu: This is by the way, this permeates the entire book. You should read it. I mean, it passes the most important test of any book: it's readable. You flip the pages and he is.
Walter Mead: A terrific judge of literature, one of the great critics of our time, as well as a politician. But the thing is, if the administration were to say, okay, the JCPO is completely dead, there's no going back to it in the foreseeable future, they need to have an Iran policy. And what would that Iran policy be?
Benjamin Netanyahu: Okay, what would that Iran policy be? Well, okay, ask a question. How do you stop a rogue nation from acquiring nuclear weapons? You have to ask yourself that. Well, let's see, I mean, there have been some examples, so we can maybe deduce a rule.
Well, you had one that's called Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was stopped by military force. Ours. You had a second one that is called Syria, that tried to develop nuclear weapons, and it was stopped by a military action. Ours. There was a third country. Mahmar Gaddafi's. Libya. It wanted to pursue nuclear weapons and it gave it up by the threat of a military action. Yours.
There's a fourth country, North Korea, that sought to develop nuclear weapons. And it wasn't, by the way, signatory to the NPTs and all these agreements doesn't mean anything. They were stopped. They weren't stopped because there was no threat of use of nuclear weapons sorry. Of military action. And so they developed this capacity.
Now we have Iran. Iran seeks to develop it. It was actually stopped for a year in their program in 2003 when they thought right after the Gulf War, when they thought that America would take action against them. So they stopped, then converted into a secret program disguised by various civilian so called research organizations. But they continued and they've been stopped, or rather slowed down by various actions that we took and some sanctions that were applied, which are important, which we had to encourage, shall we say, the US.
Well, the sanctions came about because the Americans were saying, this crazy guy in Jerusalem is going to bomb them unless we do something. So that's how Iran came to the table. But then they left the cash on the table and let Iran take a lousy agreement.
So the only thing that has credibly stopped rogue nations from developing nuclear weapons is a credible military threat or a credible military action. You can couple that with crippling economic sanctions, but that's not a sufficient condition, a necessary condition. And often a sufficient condition is credible military action. The longer you wait, the harder that becomes. We've waited very long.
In any case, I can tell you that I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That is not merely an Israeli interest, it's an American interest. It's in the interest of the entire world.
Walter Mead: As I try to think about how folks in Washington would respond to what you're saying, I can imagine a lot of people saying we have a war in Ukraine. We are worried about Taiwan and what might happen there. Do we really need a third major crisis in the world, a third war in the world? How could the United States respond to that? What do you say to people who have those concerns that you'll face a much more dangerous war when Iran has nuclear weapons?
Benjamin Netanyahu: It will, I think, overshadow everything that we've talked about, because to have that in this difficult world in which we're living would be a tremendous danger, a tremendous danger to the ability to maintain international peace. For one thing, it may produce, probably already is producing a crisscrossing of the Middle East with nuclear trip wires because other countries will rush and are rushing to develop nuclear weapons. So is that going to increase? What kind of world will we find ourselves in?
And I would argue differently, by the way I described this in my book. Because when I suggested to President Obama in his visit to Jerusalem, I said if you take action against Iran's nuclear facilities it would greatly enhance the prestige of America and will effectively allow you to address other theaters, other conflicts with a posture of enormous strength. Enormous strength. And he said to me, and I really respected him, it's not that I thought he was ideological, it wasn't that he was a weak man, he was ideologically strong, but I don't always agree with his ideology. So he said, you know, Bibi, nobody likes Goliath, and I don't want to strut the world stage as an 800-pound gorilla.
And I thought, and I said this to my colleague, it's Hak molCO. After we left the room, I said, in this kind of world, I'd like to be a 1200-pound gorilla. So I would argue that it's precisely because you have these other theaters that you're concerned with, that you want to deal with what would become an unimaginable threat, and you want to deal with it early on when you can, and that would help you and not hurt you in dealing with other arenas. But I can understand the difficulties of a democracy coming to that conclusion. Churchill said that he called this the slumber of the democracies. They sleep until he said, the jarring gong of danger wakes them up. The question is, does it wake them up when it's still time or when it's too late? And that is really the issue we're facing now with Iran.
Walter Mead: It's interesting, we see, at least in the press, signs that there's greater cooperation between certainly Russia and Iran than before Russia and China, and for that matter, Iran and China. Are we looking at the real time formation of some kind of a consciously cooperating force or entity among these three countries?
Benjamin Netanyahu: For sure. I mean, they have, they've had their interests well before the Ukraine war. Russia has multiple interests. It has interests with Iran, but it also has competition with Iran in Syria. That's why when, I said to Putin early on, I said, we have no choice. We're not going to let Iran establish a second Hezbollah front in Syria. So we're going to attack them. We can clash with each other, with your air force and our air force, or we can cooperate and have to be careful. If I describe what his response to me was. But as you can see, we have the freedom of action in Syria, air action. And happily, we haven't clashed with Russia, but doesn't mean that Russia and Iran had identical interests. Often they had competing interests.
Right now the problem is that as Russia becomes dependent on Iran, the supply of Iranian drones and other weapons, that this could change also in Syria. So we are obviously looking at that. It's a big issue as far as China is concerned. China has interests everywhere. Everywhere, but especially with Iran, which is a source of energy and other things that interest them. China also has an interest in Israel, especially technology, more technology. We are aware of that too. So we're looking at this issue as well.
But I would say that what we need today in the world that we're entering, this multipolar world where you do have cooperation between authoritarian and dictatorial, regimes who are developing formidable weapons, is we have to have an alliance of the like-minded, smarts. This means countries that are like-minded, like valued. You know you have the five eyes right now, right? You know the five eyes, right? There's a 6th eye, and the 6th eye is an eye. It's Israel. And Israel's value as a supplier of intelligence and other things is growing by the day as our capacities grow.
And so I maintain that we should have the one answer we have. We don't have their numbers. They outnumber us. They steal technology, they arm themselves. They're quite formidable. The only way we're going to be ahead of them is to be ahead of them. We have to be ahead of them with our creativity, with our innovation, with our weapons, with our resolve.
And that requires reshifting of international alliances. We have to create supply chains and all the other things that, you know, we have to look differently at the world. We thought we could organize it in the multinational organization of the UN. I don't think anyone believes that's going to take care of this problem.
So we have a competition right now between the various parts. There is a middle strata. Take as much of the middle ground as you can of those who don't share your values, as much of it as you can, but organize your common defense with those who do share your values.
Now, we can be stuck on the house in Gilo for the next ten years, or we can deal with what I've just described, which is an existential requirement not merely for Israel, but for Western civilization. If we don't get together, nothing is guaranteed. Doesn't mean that the good guys win. The good guys win only if they're willing to fight and win.
If they're not willing to fight and win, if they're not willing to mobilize their strength, their wits, their guts, they're not going to win. Because history doesn't guarantee such a victory. Never does. If anything, history favors those who are large and strong. It doesn't necessarily favor those who are small and virtuous. Virtue has no guaranteed victory in history.
Nothing. You read Will Durant. I mean, he's very good on this. It's true. And so this challenges goes back to the fundamental question you raised in the beginning of this conversation. What do we need? Well, we need to increase our power in order to protect our values. And that is the fundamental difference I've had with some American administrations. They believe that peace brings power, and I believe that power brings peace and that you cannot maintain peace in our part of the world, just about any part of the world, now, without a lot of power.
So the question is, do the democracies, do the like-minded states join forces to protect their values by increasing their power together? If we can communicate that idea to Washington and to other capitals, then this conversation was worth it.
Walter Mead: You've dealt with President Putin a fair amount and probably know him as well or better than just about anyone else in world politics. Now, what advice would you have for President Biden or European leaders trying to think through what to do and how to maybe get him to a place of ending the war?
Benjamin Netanyahu: What advice? Private advice?
Walter Mead: Okay. Is there anything you can share with us from your knowledge of Putin that we would find enlightening and useful as we try to think about this situation?
Benjamin Netanyahu: The answer is yes, but I won't.
Walter Mead: Move on. One of the things that I found as I was researching the book was not only that Christian Zionists had a significant role to play in the development of the Zionist movement among Jews. Nobody was more aware of this, by the way, than Herzel, who saw this as instrumental to his strategy, but that the rise of Israel had an immense role in the rise of Christianity, global Christianity, after World War II.
And I first noticed this in Nairobi, Kenya, where I came out of the Anglican Cathedral one Sunday, and there was a huge book fair, and the piles of books that were selling the fastest and the largest piles were books by John Hagee, the founder of Kufai Christians United for Israel. It was extraordinary thing to see all of these Nairobi Anglicans buying the books of a Texas Baptist. As I have traveled the world and talked to people in developing countries in the global south about the rise of Christianity. Even in China, the rise of Israel in the 20th century was seen as a confirmation of biblical prophecy, a sort of ratification that people are seeing the success of Israel somehow as proof that Christianity is true.
And this is a powerful force in the US. It's a powerful force around the world. How do you see today's Israel working with Christian Zionism? Or how do you see Christian Zionism paving the way for Israel, perhaps in Latin America or Africa? What's going on?
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, a lot everything you described. You see that in Kenya, you see that in Nigeria. It's the most populated country in Africa. You see that in South Korea. You see that in Japan. See that in China. You see it in Scandinavia and so on. So these are tremendous in Latin America. These are Brazil.
Okay, so here's how I saw it in Brazil, just so we understand what we're looking at. You remember the leader of Brazil before? No? Before. Remember before? Keep going.
Walter Mead: Oh, Dilma.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Dilma, right. Okay. Dilma. Russo. Okay. Dilma. She was not a great friend. And one day I see in my office, I've been here long enough. So I've been in office a long time. And a few years back, when Dilmarusof is the president of Brazil, somebody sends me a photo of Dilmarusof standing next to next to a mockup of the Jewish temple increased in size in the middle of Brazil. Now, that's when I said what? I mean, she's not exactly an evangelical leader or dependent, whatever. So I realized something's growing. Obviously, what was growing is that the evangelical church in Brazil was growing at the expense of the traditional Catholic Church, growing at a fantastic rate, something like 12% a year or something like that. And there are literally millions and tens of millions of evangelical Christians in Brazil.
I went there, by the way, and went walked on the beach. Brazil has a way to go. I mean, I remember that when I was there decades before. And Israel, you can see the difference wasn't that big a difference. From the time I'd been there in Israel, you can't recognize the country. Every time you come here, it changes. But I walk on the beach with my wife Sarah, and all these people start shouting, Israel, Israel. I said, These are believing Christians, and they identify with Israel precisely for the reasons you say. And that is happening in many parts of the world.
The question is, of course, what will be the longer term trends of Christian belief? Will the evangelical support for Israel in the United States continue in the future, in the coming generations? These are things that I look at. But I've been a great champion of supporting, not of supporting alliance with creating alliances between Israel and our Christian friends. That didn't always make American presidents very happy. In fact, President Clinton wasn't very happy when on a meeting that he was supposed to put the squeeze on me. The night before that, I met in the Mayflower Hotel, Jerry Falwell, and so many of the other Christian leaders. He really wasn't happy with that. But I was happy with that because I make alliances. I told you about Herzl. You make alliances with those who can support you, and in this case, those who support you deeply from deeply embedded beliefs.
So that has been people don't understand this Christian Zionism preceded Jewish Zionism. It's doubtful whether Jewish Zionism would have succeeded without the centuries of Christian Zionism, especially the 19th century Christian Zionism in Britain and in the United States. It would not have succeeded. And we have to do everything we can to preserve it, but also we have to do other things. We have to preserve the broad American alliance as best as we can, and we have to create additional alliances. And the ones that beckon immediately are right here in the region. Right here in the region. And we've only begun.
Walter Mead: Guess maybe we're running out of time. I think it'd be worth given this audience to ask a question, a final question about relations between the American Jewish community and Israel and different strands in Israeli politics because we're certainly seeing a lot, right, especially right now, but we're seeing a lot of dissension. One way that I found of thinking about this in my book is that Herzel's idea was that liberalism would be fatal for the Jews to trust in liberalism and in the Enlightenment and all of this human rights that if the Jews of Europe trusted in that for their protection they would be destroyed. Israel, by and large is full of Jews for whom either they or their parents Herzel was right to a certain degree. The United States is full of Jews who at least so far Herzel has not proven right for them. That is that the American tradition, history of liberalism, equality before the law has given American Jews the kind of security those Viennese Jews thought they were going to get but didn't. Now, there are obviously always questions about the future. But do you think this kind of cultural-historical difference is playing a role in the tensions between these two branches of the Jewish world?
Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, there are obvious tensions and for God's sake, these are Jews.
Walter Mead: I've been told there are sometimes tensions between American Jews and Israelis.
Benjamin Netanyahu: They normally don't kill each other. We haven't had a civil war in 2000 years. And the last one was done very badly on the walls of Jerusalem when the Romans were right outside. So you'd think we'd learned from that. But it's quite incredible to hear some of the people, and I don't think they represent the majority of those going into the streets, who also represent a minority. But to call for civil war, that won't happen because of our history and shared fate.
There are differences, obviously. The question of American Jews is first a question of tensions between assimilation and anti-Semitism. Assimilation is an individual Jew's decision. If they want to come to Israel, they'll be welcomed. The best thing is to increase Jewish education, Hebrew study, and understanding Jewish history. They should read your book. There's no guarantee numbers won't shrink; they apparently will. Little we can do but we should arrest the slide.
Fight anti-Semitism forcefully. When a rapper like Kanye West speaks, you stand up. It's not left or right but threatens all Jews and beyond. It's an American issue. Will America be another Vienna, where Herzl and Twain saw proud Jews but which went up in smoke, its culture and science gone? Stefan Zweig fled, writing a book on seeing the world go up in ashes before committing suicide. He described Herzl stunningly. Vienna was bigger than Paris or New York but gone.
America is built on surer ground by geniuses, like Athens and Jerusalem. American democracy is stronger than turn-of-the-century Austria. Assimilation and anti-Semitism may compress Jews, spurring aliyah or resistance. I want aliyah but call on all to resist anti-Semitism. It's been around 2500 years; you can only fight it with strength.
Walter Mead: And on that note, I'd like to thank you, prime minister. And just add that in my view the fight against antisemitism in the United States is a fight for everything that makes America the country that I love.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Thank you.