Recent developments in the Middle East have raised concern about the potential for a wider regional war.  What do escalating tensions in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond mean for the future?  Join RBI Director John Torpey as he discusses the complexities of the contemporary Middle East with Win Dayton, a retired senior member of the U.S. Foreign Service and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Beirut.  Mr. Dayton shares insights from his decades of diplomatic experience, exploring the shifting dynamics of U.S. foreign policy, the challenges of intervention, and the prospects for stability amid growing regional and global pressures.

Below, a slightly edited version of the audio:

Transcript

John Torpey 

The Middle East conflict that flared up anew on seven Cctober 2023 seems only to widen and to threaten to get longer and longer after the Hamas attacks of a year ago, Israel has inflicted enormous damage on the Palestinian population of Gaza, killing more than 40,000 people, many of them women and children. In solidarity with Gazans Hezbollah, an ally in Lebanon, undertook pinpricks and prick attacks on Northern Israel. Eventually, the patron of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran also got involved directly, and Israel carried out attacks, not least the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in retaliation the wider war that many feared seem to have arrived but remains more in abeyance than in evidence. So what should we expect in the region? Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarlyand diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, we’re fortunate to have with us today Win Dayton, who’s a retired career member of the State Department’s Senior Foreign Service. His overseas diplomatic tours included serving as Deputy Chief of Mission, or DCM, at the US Embassy in Beirut, from 2019 to 2021, Principal officer at the US Consulate General in Basra, Iraq during 2016-17, and Deputy Principal Officer at the US Consulate General in Istanbul, Turkey during 2009 to 2012 in Washington. He served as Director of the Office for Counter ISIS Global Coalition Affairs in 2015 and as Director of Overseas Operations in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization operations during 2012 to 2014 where, among other things, he oversaw $100 million in programs to support the Syrian opposition. A graduate of Amherst College-full disclosure, that’s how we know each other-and also of the University of Virginia School of Law-which I didn’t have the good sense to go to. Mr. Dayton worked on Capitol Hill and as an attorney in Dallas, Texas for five years, before a 32 year career in diplomacy. Thanks so much for joining us today, Win Dayton.

Win Dayton 

Thanks very much for inviting me, John. It’s pleasure to be here with you this morning.

John Torpey 

Well, it’s great to have somebody with your experience and expertise in the Middle East, and obviously it’s a region where things look very difficult have been very difficult for a good long time, and we’re looking forward to your insights. So as your bio suggests, you spent much of the last decade of your career in the Middle East and Turkey. And perhaps we could just begin by having you tell us how you viewed the region when you first started working there a decade or so ago.

Win Dayton 

Well, thanks, John, yeah. I came to the Middle Eastern issues pretty late in my career. It was really both in Istanbul and when I was working on Syria, it was just as the Arab Spring was looked like it was taking root in Syria, and we’d gone through some ups and downs with the Arab Spring, but there was really a lot of enthusiasm and kind of bubbly confidence with the Syrian opposition, the large middle class were educated, you know, seemed like a very good fertile groundfor a more liberal democracy. But at the end of the day, looking back on it now, there are a couple of exchanges from those days that stick with me more and have really shapedmy views today. One was at a symposium where we had a lot of the senior members of the of the Middle East foreign policy community and folks from the NGO community that were orienting themselves to support the Syrian opposition. And the one contrarian at the group was kind of a legendary diplomat from the day and today, Ryan Crocker, who had been Ambassador to Syria as well as Lebanon and Iraq and Kuwait later, went on within Afghanistan and Pakistan anyway, he said, look, I see all this bubbly enthusiasm. Obviously, these Syrian interlocutors of yours are great folks. He knew a lot of them, but he was very candid in a warning to us. He just said, think carefully before you go into this full bore and be aware that the Assad regime will be willing to do a lot more and be savage and brutal in its suppression of this group with support from some of their friends, the Russians, the Iranians, then, the Syrian opposition will be equipped to deal with or that you may be willing to put forward. And so is it really in US interest, and it’s in the interest of the Syrians for you to give them so much encouragement and support at this point. And sure enough, you know, as the conflict bore on I would say most of the folks that we were dealing with back then, sadly, most of them are, are dead now, and not just from the brutality of the Syrian regime, but ISIS was the black swan that emerged anyway. The other thing I took from that day was there was a lot of interest and pressure from the foreign policy the Middle East foreign policy community and the the broader think tanks and NGO community, from the US to do more in those early days of the Syrian conflict, to support the civilian opposition against Assad that they did they weren’t equipped to deal with the pressure that Assad was dealing with, and particularly Assad’s use of his Air Force to pummel the liberated areas, and the idea was to get a no fly zone. And the White House and President Obama resisted a lot of that pressure from the foreign policy blob community, as it were, and the President’s position was, look, I sympathize with these Syrians, I want, I want to see them win. But until you can show me a path, a clear path that has a probability of success for the United States, where we won’t own a problem in the long run that we don’t want to own, and that’s going to definitely advance and protect US interests in the region, then I’m going to hold off until you can show me that, and the bloc was never able to really show him that. Assad’s kind of anti aircraft capacities were a lot more than Saddam Hussein’s had been in Iraq, and it was seemed pretty clear that we would probably lose some airplanes and probably have captured airmen and various reasons that we did not go down that path at the end of the day. I think that much is made of the difference between the two political parties in today’s polarized climate, including on foreign policy issues, but I think maybe under appreciated is is a drift away from the old convergence between the Neo-cons, the Republican Party, and the humanitarian industrial complex of the of, the more democratic side in support of nation building, or at least other names for nation building, so that now there’s a much greater reticence to get involved in open ended commitments for democratic forces struggling against authoritarian regimes, and much greater care in getting involved in what looks like could be contributing to perpetual conflict.

John Torpey 

Interesting. So, I mean, I’m struck actually, by your discussion of Ryan Crocker’s position in this and so I’m just curious, you know, what do you think it was that gave him the insight to be more skeptical to be more, you know, prudent, shall we say? I mean, there’s another name Crocker, Chet Crocker, who, I don’t know if that’s his father or that’s a diplomatic family or what, but, you know, how would you explain his ability to resist kind of, you know, an understandably feel good, kind of vibe among these diplomats that you described, who you know were, nonetheless, however, well meaning, kind of pushing in a direction that he was reluctant to go down.

Win Dayton 

There are a couple of recent incidents in American history, ones that he’d been associated with or been exposed to. One was the uprising by civil society in the city of Hama in Syria in 1982.  At that time there was a lot of positive energy, non-violent protests, brutally suppressed by the Assad regime. Up to 20,000 people were killed and the international community was unable to make any kind of difference for the people of Hama, which pretty much suppressed the confidence of the Syrian people for quite some time after that. So he was aware of what the Assad regime would be doing to any kind of civilian opposition, and particularly the difficulty of arming a civilian opposition in any way that was going to make a difference against that kind of group. Kind of brutality and commitment to a savage response. I think another incident that must have stood out in his mind was the fate of the Shia in southern Iraq after Gulf One. You know, we had pretty much whipped Saddam Hussein’s forces pushed them out of Kuwait back into Iraq. Did not go in to the Mafraq. We didn’t have support of our coalition partners. And that wasn’t the purpose of of of Gulf One. It was to kick the raiding, invading Iraqis out of Kuwait, which we did. But anyway, the Shia were encouraged to, on their own, take action against Saddam Hussein and his weakened state, and ultimately, many of them lost their lives in a brutal suppression of southern Iraq by Saddam Hussein. And the international community the United States weren’t able to do anything to prevent or weren’t willing to do anything to prevent it after we had at least tacitly encouraged that, you know, and from my own experience, having been in Basra before, where we’ve closed down our consulate there, I’m still trying to help some of our Iraqi employees there get out from a dangerous situation Again, folks that had an interest and at some sacrifice supported us. We were having a hard time helping in the long run.

John Torpey 

Interesting. So I know that was a bit of a distraction from what I said we’d talk about, but I thought it was very interesting and an important kind of question to have an answer to. But so you know, the main thing I’m really interested in talking to you about is the current situation in the region, and the concern that I mentioned in the introduction about a wider war breaking out. And you know, there have certainly been moves in that direction. But then there’s also been a kind of sense that Iran doesn’t really want this. The United States doesn’t want this. I mean, so how do you assess the situation? What do you think is going on and what do you think is going to happen?

Win Dayton 

Yeah, I think, as a, you know, as a former diplomat and a fellow student of history, I have to conclude that, you know, the prospect for wider war, for escalation, is real but hopefully avoidable. I mean, think, as you suggest, a couple of factors, drivers of kind of greater escalation, or one, Israel’s confidence, they’re emboldening by their by their success, and their carte blanche support, really, from both parties in the United States for continued fight against Hamas and Hezbollah, including taking it to the civilian populations that are their constituencies. And Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas also they’re existentially threatened, and so they’re going to have to take steps to preserve their credibility with their own people and the integrity of their capacity against Israel. Which means they’re going to fight back, but also as they become continually degraded, and you have to be very impressed with just the breathtaking success Israel has had against the Hezbollah leadership and its decapitation and actions against its communications and command structure, but they may be looking for an off ramp eventually, if there can be credible kind of security guarantees given not just by the United States, but by others in the region and the global community. For now, I think as much as Israel is going full tilt at Hamas and Hezbollah, they seem to have put a lid on immediate escalation against Iran, and Iran seems to be similarly mindful of keeping a lid on things there. There’s been some attention to continued US efforts to get some kind of a cease fire in Lebanon, Hezbollah has said they’re not going to agree to a cease fire until there’s really a cease fire with Hamas. But a situation evolves there. I think they could be a little more accommodating. They have to, in addition to their alignment with Iran, they have to be very mindful of their partnership with other Lebanese constituencies, not their just their important Shia constituencies, but Christian and Druze and Sunni partners that they have. They do not want to see Lebanon evolve into a civil war, that’s their stable platform that they need to survive and prosper to the extent that they ever can. And so they’re going to be perhaps looking for an off ramp, which not exactly there yet, but we’ll see how that unfolds. There are a few issues that could change the calculus of all of these parties, particularly for the United States and the pressure that they put on Israel, or the paths that they offer for Iran or Hezbollah, for example. And that would be maritime commerce and the Gulf, if that starts to be threatened more than it is now, and disrupted more you could see the US putting more pressure on Israel, and perhaps opening a path to to Iran, to reach some accommodation and simmer the level of conflict down. I think if terrorism resurgence, you know, as as parties get weaker and lose paths to power, you could see a resurgence of terrorism in the region or or globally, we haven’t seen that yet, Inshallah, we won’t see more, but that could get people’s attention and create some impetus for settlement and also large migrations of population, particularly out of Lebanon, where you have a large Christian population, it’s pretty globally connected, as well as other sectarian groups in Lebanon, if they start leaving Lebanon in great numbers, that could be getting attention of players like the United States and others to push more for a settlement.

John Torpey 

So you spoke in your previous remarks about a kind of carte blanche of American, basically the two parties, I think you were referring to, but basically the political power structure offering a kind of carte blanche to Israel and its actions in in the area. Now we’ve just, I don’t have to remind you, we’ve just had an election, and elections famously have consequences, and I wonder, you know, what do you think the consequences of this election will be for the Middle East? And what should people there expect?

Win Dayton 

Well, you hear often in these last couple of weeks that personnel is policy, and sure enough, I think probably the Middle East leaders are looking very carefully at the members of the Middle East foreign policy team that are coming in for the new administration. Three that stand out on the Middle East are Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, and then in Trump’s transition team, you see Brian Hook, who had been his Director of policy planning in the earlier administration, and also a special envoy on Iran. And Joel Rayburn was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Levan affairs at the State Department under Trump, and went on to be special envoy on Syria affairs. The all three of these very strong, rigid hawks on Iran, and have been very active in pushing sanctions and other means of constraining Iran, historically and absolutely, I think the region is going to expect that the max pressure campaign is going to continue and be intensified, and that they’ll be looking for new ways to constrain and sanction Iran and cut off its access to international trade and commerce. They may take actions against Iranian proxies in the region, but I think the issue both for the administration and for the Middle Eastern leaders and the other global players who have stakes in the Middle East, they have to look at least down the four years of this administration’s term and ponder that the max pressure is to what effect is it going to be to push for regime change in Iran? That’s not really worked much in the past, and I’m not sure that the we found the buttons to push to make that happen in Iran, and this administration will have to think about that. Or is it to further contain Iran? Is it going to be a strategy of containment, max pressure to keep Iran kind of bottled up and, again, cut off more from the international community. That’s going to have limits, because they are very well connected to others in the region, the Russians and others, and their arc of their Axis of Resistance, they do have international connections. Or is it going to be eventually, to use max pressure to affect some kind of regional arrangement that can restore some measure of regional stability and simmer things down with Iran in the long run, I don’t think there’s an immediate prospect of that, but I think it’s very interesting that the President elect has been very open about putting a spotlight on his priority on ending wars and keeping wars from from happening. So even as you have folks on his foreign policy team that will be looking to put pressure on Iran, and he’ll certainly be that’ll be in line with his thinking. He has been, historically, a person very willing to think and act outside the traditional box of the foreign policy blob. And you see some attention in John Bolton’s recent book about how he had during his administration, said, well, maybe I should talk to Iran. And was talked out of that by Bolton and others in his foreign policy community. But you could, you could imagine, sometime the next four years, amid all this pressure, the president suggesting that he talk to Iran and see what can happen. Now Iran is obviously they have a deep mistrust issues with the United States, but depending on their situation and depending on pressure and engagement that’s put with them by others, Russia, Saudi Arabia, others and the Europeans, that might open door to some path for an arrangement that would be more stable for the region.

John Torpey 

I don’t want to interrupt, but Elon Musk is now reported to have met with the UN Ambassadors of Iran yesterday in some kind of secret meeting. What do you make of that?

Win Dayton 

Well, I think that testifies. I certainly can speak with any knowledge about how what that was all about, but it certainly would be consistent with the the idea of of President Trump as a person who thinks outside the box, who wants to shake things up and do something leave a legacy that is going to set him apart from others. I think his effort for the Abraham Accords certainly was a signature accomplishment of his first administration that was done largely outside of the foreign policy blob, as it were, and when a very kind of limited, private close to him channel, and certainly, if he’s going to do something on Iran, you could see him doing it with people outside the traditional foreign policy community. That said, I have no idea what Elon Musk might have been doing if, in fact, that happened. But I do think it’s not inconsistent with the kinds of surprising things that President Trump might do in spite of his very hawkish foreign policy community, and again, he’ll use that max pressure to affect in the longer run.

John Torpey 

So I’m intrigued. I have to confess that you’ve used this term a couple of times, the blob. Now you know foreign policy, sort of insiders, I guess, and those who read people like Stephen Walt, you know, have an understanding of what that means. But I’m curious, you know what, what exactly you understand by that term. Were you, in fact, a part of it when you were, you know, active in active duty, and what sorts of you know, reservations might you have about it now?

Win Dayton 

Yeah, I don’t subscribe to a lot of wealth characterization as some kind of, you know, very tightly knit community that’s all out about job preservation. But I do think there’s an issue of group. Think any kind of big organization, a community of players that are all pushing for a same objective, they do get into into boxes, you know, a book from the Vietnam era that I recommend to all of the Foreign Service officers I will serve as mentor for, is a book called Decent Interval by Frank Snepp, who had been the senior CIA analyst in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. And he chronicles the front office’s views of the advancing North Vietnamese Army, and just they were unable to really understand and change their worldview about Vietnam, and they really thought that the North Vietnamese didn’t really want to take all of Vietnam. They had an interest in maintaining conflict. They didn’t want the Viet Cong to have so much power in the south and we’re reporting just in retrospect, outlandish things because they had been so trapped in their own own bubble. And I think that’s an issue in any kind of large organization. I do think there’s dynamism in the foreign policy community. I’ve seen it in every administration I served, in three Republican administrations and three Democratic administrations, and always saw a fair amount of dynamism, although in certain areas there is a group thing that’s very constraining, as Walt’s chronicles fairly in many cases, more often than not, a kind of a subconscious tendency to not want to break too far from the group that is is an issue and a problem, and someone like Donald Trump shakes that up people you know. He was laughed at and mocked when he made his overtures to Kim Jong Un, but at the end of the day, that was an outreach that hadn’t been tried, and we now know its limitations, but we learned a lot from that, from that outreach.

John Torpey 

Yeah, interesting. So I do want to get back to the Middle East. And you know, the question basically, of you’ve focused a lot in your remarks on Iran, perfectly understandable. But Israel is, in many ways, it seems to me, the central player here. And the question is, you know, is Israel’s reputation, you know, sort of irrevocably besmirched by the destruction and killing in in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, has Israel kind of gone overboard? Or you think it’s doing what it needs to do, you know, and I certainly expect Trump to give Netanyahu a freer hand. But I suppose I could be wrong about that. I wonder what you think about that.

Win Dayton 

I think Israel’s long term, you know, image and connectivity to the rest of the world is going to depend a lot on how Gaza and Lebanon are resolved. Ultimately, if Israel occupy, will Israel occupy Gaza and parts of southern Lebanon and start to introduce settlements there, will they eventually withdraw from Gaza? And if so, then who, who administers Gaza, who oversees that traumatized population, and who governs it? There’s no immediate Palestinian authority that seems capable or willing to do that. That would be acceptable to other players in the region, but there doesn’t seem to be a, you know, kind of a multilateral, either Arab or un outfit, to do that. Anyway, those, those kinds of things will have, I think, do a lot for how Lebanon is, I mean, how Israel is regarded by the rest of the community, for now, as long as they have the unequivocal support, bipartisan support of Washington, I think the rest of the world will kind of accept what they’re going to do. But over time, I do think there may be more pressure on not just pressure on the administration, but open mindedness of the administration to use its leverage on Israel in ways that could could shape their approach to these larger resolution issues that are going to have impacts on things like migration, terrorism, maritime commerce, the Persian Gulf and other things that the United States cares about, not just the carnage of and suffering of the people there. I do think you know the obvious leverage that at some point the Trump administration may quietly, certainly not openly ponder, is the unqualified military assistance to Israel. At some point, there may be larger constituencies, not just campus protests and not just a certain minorities in the United States that are vocal about this, but wider constituencies that object to that, you know, billions and billions of dollars of military assistance to a very rich country, you know, from a country that has other competing budget priorities as well. You know, back in 1978 and the first invasion of Lebanon by Israel, within a few months of that invasion, the Carter administration started to prepare notification to Congress of Israel’s violation of the terms of arms transfers to Israel. One, they were using cluster bombs that we’d given them that were supposed to be purely for defensive purposes in Israel. They were using them in Lebanon against Lebanese populations. And two, they were giving military material that was supposed to be exclusively for Israel’s use. They were giving them to proxies, the South, Lebanon army and others in in Lebanon to use there. And those violations of our explicit terms would have required cut off of certain military assistance to to to Israel. And when that became kind of public, and the Israelis were aware of it, they quickly pulled out of Lebanon and said, look, no reason to pursue this. Now we’re out of Lebanon, so let’s keep the military supply flowing. And we did. But the point is, our leverage on the military supplies is significant one, Israel doesn’t want to lose that material supply. But two, if that were discussed and pondered by an American administration, it very well might likely shake up Israeli domestic politics, Israel Israeli constituency. Are firmly behind Netanyahu from a broad swath of the civilian population, of elect, of the electorate, as long as he’s winning, as long as he’s got firm us support. But if that us support is jeopardized in any way, I think you’ll start to see that broad support within Israel for the war start to get a little more complicated for him. So that’s a quiver in Trump’s bow at some point if he wants to use it. I don’t think you would ever see that used publicly, but behind closed doors, you could see him using that some effect, if he wanted to affect Israel’s behavior in some way. I haven’t seen evidence, evidence of it yet, but that is a possibility.

John Torpey 

Remains to be seen. But I want to get back to this comment you made about, you know, not just college campuses being unhappy about what’s going on in Israel, but wider groups you kind of were euphemistic about. And I want to ask you to be more explicit, because, you know, I recently heard this negotiator, Aaron David Miller, talk about what he called something like the US Israeli operating system, this kind of punitively, you know, unshakable alliance or connection between the United States and Israel. And one wonders, given what happened on college campuses in the past year, you know whether that’s so unshakable one, and I wonder, you know, if you could speak to that question and to this issue of the wider groups that you’re talking about beyond college campuses.

Win Dayton 

Sure, I think the the that operating system you described, has been under at least some obvious pressure with the reaction of media, the international community, certain constituencies in the United States to Israelis, very aggressive approach In in Gaza and and Lebanon. But it has survived intact so far, because Americans are pretty insulated, actually, from the effects of that. They turn the channel. They see they don’t like it, but it doesn’t affect them enough for them to really exert their influence within the American political process. That changes, that may change from a few circumstances, I mentioned things that could be shaken up on. You know, if petroleum, international, petroleum market is affected, Persian Gulf maritime commerce, if you start to see terrorism, you start to see more outflows of refugees that affect the United States or Europe. And I will say there’s 80,000 estimated 80,000 Americans in Lebanon. These are, you know, American citizens there who are connected with the United States and have Lebanese families. All of that could start to get play a role in the media, and they do have political connections in Washington. You don’t have boots on the ground there, so as long as Americans aren’t coming home in body bags, it’s there’s a limited amount of attention that the United States polity will react to. But you do have other international players too who are going to be important to the Trump administration, I think just for example, the Abraham accord signatories, they have their own domestic constituencies that are very vocal in their opposition to what’s going on with Israel and their government’s relations with with Israel. None of them have broken off relations with Israel yet, but as this domestic situation for them becomes more complicated, and if they start to suffer things like terrorism, you could see them coming to the Trump administration saying, Look, we’re going to drop out of this accord if you can’t get a lid on this. And again, that being a signature achievement of the Trump administration from the first term that would get their attention. You could see them putting more effort into getting some kind of accommodation that is going to be putting a limit on on Israel’s engagement in Gaza and and Lebanon. But that’s all speculative. There are international players, and there are international impacts that could get the attention of broader constituencies in the United States. Economic impacts could move private sector, the energy sector, others in the United States to start putting pressure on the administration to to put an end to the conflict more.

John Torpey 

Okay, well, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Thanks so much. I want to thank Win Dayton for sharing his insights about the Middle East. I also want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us and look forward to having you with us again for the next episode of International Horizons.