Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
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We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Ted Snyder.
He's a regular writer for Antiwar.com and Consortium News.com.
And this one is in Mondoweiss.net.
Outside in the Trump administration's plan to remake the Middle East.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How you doing, man?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
And this is a really interesting article.
I like your take.
Who knew that Trump had a plan?
Oh, I see.
Technicality, administration.
And so then that includes Benjamin Netanyahu and his guys.
Yeah, it may be just, I don't know if it's Trump's plan or that this administration plastic enough to have their plan shaped to sign on to Netanyahu's plan.
Yeah, well, so outside in, what do you mean by that?
Is that the term they use?
No, outside in is actually a term that Netanyahu's referred to before.
He's used that term to describe his take on what's known as the Periphery Doctrine.
So my sort of take on the article is that the kind of the clearest lens, if you want to look at Israeli foreign policy and try to simplify and look through it through one lens, is this doctrine they call the Periphery Doctrine.
And the Periphery Doctrine was an idea that goes back to the very founding of Israel.
It's the perception that Israelis live on this tiny sliver of land, this little island that looks out onto a sea of hostile Arab neighbours.
And the idea is that those neighbours are so hostile to Israel that the differences between them are so fundamental that making peace with your immediate neighbours is impossible.
So you leapfrog your immediate neighbours to the boundary of your neighbourhood and you make friends with the countries just on the periphery.
Hence it's called the Periphery Doctrine.
And that's why in early periods of Israeli foreign policy they made alliances with countries like Turkey and South Africa and Ethiopia and surprisingly and most importantly, Iran.
And this idea of the outside became known as the Periphery Doctrine and Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, who sort of ushered in the first phase of Israeli foreign policy, adopted the Periphery Doctrine with the idea that you can't be alone in the world, you need alliances, you can't find alliances in your neighbourhood, you can't be enemies with everybody so you go to the periphery and you ally with the outside instead of with the inside.
And that way if war does break out with your near neighbours, they may be divided on two fronts if they're surrounded by your other allies there.
Right, and it wasn't necessarily always a military alliance, it was an idea that even like economically and trade and everything, you need to have allies, you're not going to have them in the neighbourhood, so the Periphery Doctrine says that you can't be enemies with both the inside and the outside and you have to be enemies with the inside so you make alliances with the outside.
Well, but for example, one recent example of this, and I don't know if this is the same doctrine at play, but Israel and Turkey have been dividing Syria by two fronts in support for various jihadists in the north and the south of the country, for example.
Yeah, so one of the little discussed things is that Israel and Turkey have been incredibly close allies in a lot of ways.
There's a lot of Israeli Air Force stationed in Turkey and after the boats that tried to break the embargo, Israel and Turkey had a falling out, which was a breaking of the inside out, the Periphery Doctrine.
The thing about the Periphery Doctrine...
The Mavi Mamara and all that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the thing about the Periphery Doctrine that's important to sort of my take on this is that the Periphery Doctrine has gone through three phases.
The first phase was Ben-Gurion's where you are hostile to the inside, the Arab countries, and you ally with the outside, the non-Arab countries.
The second phase came in with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres who swung the pendulum.
They agreed that you can't be enemies with both.
You've got to be friends with either the inside or the outside.
But they swung the pendulum to be friends with the inside and not the outside.
So it was Rabin and Peres around 1992 that shocked Iran and said, you know, you're our enemy now, and tried to make friends with the inside through things like the Oslo Accord.
So Peres and Rabin said they wanted to shape what they called the New Middle East in which they would warm up relations with the Arab neighbors in order to have allies in confronting Iran on the outside.
So it went from allying with the outside to allying with the inside.
And then importantly now what Netanyahu's done, and I've argued elsewhere that this is actually, I argue that this is Netanyahu's sort of singular contribution to Israeli history and Israeli foreign policy, is that Netanyahu decided for the first time that you could be enemies with Iran and Palestine at the same time.
No Israeli prime minister had ever wanted to be hostile to Iran and Palestine at the same time.
You had to make sure that you had a friend and an enemy but never enemies with both.
Yeah, I was actually a little confused by that part of it when I read it too, and I think maybe I still am, because, I mean, you're right that they were friends with Iran and even after the revolution, but only until the mid-'90s, right?
And then they've been enemies with the Palestinians all along.
So that includes Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu the first time and Ehud Barak.
Okay, so go ahead.
So I agree with you that in reality I've been enemies with the Palestinians the whole time, but the foreign policy front, the lip service after the Oslo Accords was Rabin and Perez's idea that you would try to sort of pacify and make friends with signing the accord on the inside and keep the fight to the outside.
So they made the attempt to ally with the inside, at least that's the way it was presented, and hostile to the outside.
What Netanyahu did is instead of splitting the Arab neighbourhood from the non-Arab periphery, he split the Palestinians from the Arab neighbourhood.
So Netanyahu's idea of outside in is that you make enemies with the outside, Iran, you also make enemies with the inside, Palestinians, and the way you do that, because you can't be enemies with everyone at the same time, is you warm relations with the Sunni Arabs in the neighbourhood.
In other words, the idea of outside in is that you first make alliance with the Sunni Arab states outside of Israel, specifically Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and then in exchange you extract a peace plan from them that you impose on the inside in Palestine.
In other words, what Netanyahu said is we're going to go from the outside in.
We're going to ally with the outside, we're going to get Saudi Arabia and Egypt on our side, then when they're on our side and we've sufficiently weakened Palestine, we can impose a peace plan on the Palestinians on the inside, and they'll be friendless now because we've got the outside, the Saudi Arabians and Egyptians on our side.
So it's a complete shift in the periphery doctrine where instead of splitting the inside from the outside, you split the Palestinians on the inside from the Arabs on the inside, and you basically trade the Arab states' support for imposing a plan on the Palestinians on the inside.
All right, so now, I mean, this is really a replacement also for the pretension.
I guess this is implied in what you're talking about in previous times leading up to this, is the pretension of the Oslo Accord and the peace process and all of that.
Now that is basically, you know, acknowledged to be over.
Now is the next stage, and the idea is that almost forget negotiation.
This is the deal that the Palestinians will have to accept.
That's right.
At this point, you completely abandon the idea of negotiations.
You say that the Palestinians are sufficiently weakened and they're sufficiently ally-less in the Arab world that you can now impose a peace plan on them.
So you abandon the idea of negotiations.
You accept the status quo.
You lock it in the way you want, and you basically trade Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
What you do is you say to Saudi Arabia, we're going to partner with you against Iran, and we're going to back you and support you militarily.
So you trade support with Saudi Arabia and Egypt for the imposition of a plan on Palestine, and now Saudi Arabia and Egypt will side with Israel instead of with Palestine, and the trade-off is that you give them military support and cover, and then they back you on Palestine.
So Netanyahu's plan is to get the Arab world on the side of Israel by trading to them what they want, that is enmity with Iran and military and financial support, and then you have the Sunni Arab states on your side, and then allied with them, you impose the plan on the Palestinians.
And this kind of, you know, this idea was first, I think the first time I heard this was around 2014 when Netanyahu was making a speech at the UN, and he talked very cryptically about how the first time we have allies in the region who can help us make a peace plan with the Palestinians.
And then at the beginning of Trump's presidency, when he met Netanyahu the first time, and they had this kind of bizarre press conference that actually happened before their meeting, and Trump really sort of cryptically referred to this plan being a bigger deal than anybody knows.
And when they talked about what bigger meant, he talked about having allies that you wouldn't expect that will make a deal with the Palestinians, but then when Netanyahu sort of in that same talk also kept referring to this idea that we'll make friends with Arab countries who didn't used to be our friends, and we'll sort of parlay that partnership into imposing a peace plan.
And it became really clear as it developed from 2014 to now that the idea was we're going to side with Saudi Arabia against Iran, we'll back you against Iran, we'll give you military support, we'll give you political cover, and in exchange for that, you're going to be on our side when it comes to a peace plan with the Palestinians, and then we can impose a plan on the Palestinians, so we can impose a plan on the inside by this new alliance on the outside.
It's a new idea for the Trump administration, they've just started talking about it, but Netanyahu's been developing this language for at least four years now, this idea of outside in.
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And when you say back them against Iran, what that means in practice is the civilians of Yemen are the pawns that are sacrificed for this, and that doesn't, in reality, that war doesn't have a thing to do with limiting the power of Iran other than maybe expanding their power there by giving them credit for the entire Houthi movement and all their achievements over the past few years.
Yeah, I mean Saudi Arabia uses Iran as the front for attacking Yemen, and people in Yemen have always used alliance with Iran as an excuse for making attacks in Yemen, but Iran has little to do, almost nothing to do with the war in Yemen.
So the states backs them there, of course, by refueling their planes in the air, by providing missiles, by providing targeting intelligence, but they provide Saudi Arabia cover everywhere.
And in my article, I talked about the bizarreness of the recertification of Saudi Arabia in front of Congress the other day, which is, like we can get into a second one, it's bizarre, but you even see it in the news today where, you know, Trump is ridiculously providing cover to Saudi Arabia over the probable killing of this journalist.
Just like everywhere Saudi Arabia needs diplomatic or military or economic cover, Trump's there because the deal is, we'll provide you cover and you help us impose an agreement, well, not even an agreement, it's not a negotiation, it's a deal on the Palestinians.
So that's why you've got these really weird optics the other day.
It really didn't make much news.
There's been so much distraction in the news that some of the real news isn't even making the news.
And you've got this really bizarre scene the other day where Mike Pompeo stands up.
This is September 11th of this year.
Pompeo stands up in front of Congress and he certifies that Saudi Arabia is making sincere efforts to stop civilian casualties in Yemen.
He has to do this because under the National Defense Authorization Act, in order to continue supporting Saudi Arabia militarily in Yemen, the Secretary of State had to certify to Congress that Saudi Arabia was making real diplomatic efforts to end the war, to address the humanitarian crisis and specifically to protect civilians.
So Pompeo stands up in front of Congress and he certifies that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are doing everything they can to reduce harm to civilians.
This is really a tricky move to make because it's completely untrue that the Oxfam says that the last couple of months in Yemen have been the bloodiest ever.
And the UN Human Rights Council just released a report which, quote, strongly suggested that Saudi Arabia is committing crimes under international law and that there's no evidence that they're minimizing civilian casualties.
So Pompeo stands up in front of Congress and he says, we can go on supporting Saudi Arabia because they're addressing civilian casualties.
It's completely not true.
So why would he stand up there and lie in front of Congress?
Lie is Oxfam's word.
They said that he's defying and lying to Congress.
But seen through the lens of the outside-in doctrine where you have to provide Saudi Arabia military and political coverage to get them on your side, then that makes sense of why he would put on that weird theatrical performance in front of the Congress.
And you get a similar thing.
I don't know if you want me to just go on talking or not.
Go on.
You get a similar thing almost at the same time where you get the same bizarre thing in Congress where Pompeo, in order to provide military support to Egypt, has to show that Egypt's improved their human rights situation because when Tillerson was Secretary of State, he froze almost $200 million of aid to Egypt because of human rights abuses.
So in order to continue aid to Egypt, Pompeo had to provide Congress with a memorandum of justification, which means he had to justify giving the money back.
That means he had to justify on the grounds that the human rights conditions had improved in Egypt.
But he stands up in doing it, and he puts out this laundry list of Egyptian human rights abuses where he says, and I'm quoting, he says straight up, the overall human rights climate in Egypt continues to deteriorate.
And he lists huge things, like infringements of freedom of expression, right to fair trial, disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings.
So here's this guy saying money that was held back from Egypt because of human rights abuses is going to be returned to Egypt because of worsening human rights abuses.
But what he's really saying to the world is we're going to go on funding Egypt no matter how bad the situation gets.
In other words, they're publicly saying to Egypt, we're going to provide you covered military support no matter what you do.
So why would he do those two things?
Well, under the outside in idea, you have to provide cover and support to Egypt and Saudi Arabia in exchange for, you know, they're abandoning the Palestinians.
So these bizarre moves in the news lately that don't seem to make any sense shift into focus when they're seen through the lens of the outside in doctrine, and they suddenly make total sense.
Yeah.
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I mean, America's had these...
We've been paying the Egyptians to get along with the Israelis since 79.
Since Camp David, yeah.
I mean, it was...
After the success of the counter-revolution and the coup against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 and the reinstallation of the military dictatorship there, there were Americans and Israelis who were, at that point, proud to take credit for their policy that the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia had gotten with the Egyptian military and said, go right ahead.
We've got your back.
Anything but Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, so restore the dictatorship.
And that was what Saudi wanted and it's what Israel wanted and so it was what America wanted.
Even though there were those who were saying, of all the factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptians, I mean, they do believe in democracy.
They're trying to participate in it.
And they're all old and rich enough to be conservatives, not radical bin Ladenite bomb throwers and all this and that.
And so if we practice what we preach at all about spreading democracy and this and that, hey, they won their bare majority.
Let them have their administration, see what happens.
But nope.
And it was, blatantly, it was about the interests of Israel and of Saudi, and as you say, of Saudi in large part, and we've had our alliance with them all along too, but in large part, in order to get them on board with Israeli policy in Palestine.
That makes perfect sense.
In fact, you can see the formerly referred to Saudi peace plan as this horrible, terrible threat to Israel that they had to figure out a way to destroy and mitigate and take off the table.
Because that was a plan, a doctrine that would have been fair to the Palestinians.
Right.
And if that's not what you want and you don't want to negotiate it, then you need to impose it.
And the only way to impose it is to make the Palestinians weak enough and bring their regular allies on side with you.
And that's what's new now, because in the past when they would ally with Egypt or Saudi Arabia, that alliance would usually bring the Palestinians in with the understanding that Egypt might be a broker for Palestine and make enemies of the Iranians.
There's never been a prime minister in Israeli history who's had a policy that simultaneously is hostile towards both the Palestinians and Iran.
And the way Netanyahu had to make that trick work is that you have to make sure that you're never enemies with everybody at once.
So if you're enemies with both the Palestinians and the Iranians, then you have to split Palestine off from the Sunni Arab states and you have to make allies with the Sunni Arab states.
And so now you do what you need to do to make allies with them.
And then what happened, by the way, Scott, then what happened is that the problem became that once Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, the Palestinians had had enough and they said we're no longer negotiating or listening to the states.
So how do you impose a plan on the Palestinians if the Palestinians won't come to the table?
So what they did then is they tried to bully them back to the table.
They cut $200 million of funding to the Palestinians.
They cut half of the United Nations Relief Works Agency money to the Palestinians.
And then just to make it clear, this is outside in, that the idea is to impose it on the Palestinians and they have to participate in the talks.
Trump actually says to the Palestinians that unless you participate in these peace talks, we're going to cut the rest of your funding.
So when the Palestinians didn't capitulate, Trump cut the other 50% of the funding.
So it became really clear.
And then, of course, he closed down the PLO office so they didn't have a voice.
And then he redefined refugee to only include people who lived in Palestine pre-1948.
So by definition, you get rid of the refugees.
So in other words, you weaken Palestine so much that they don't have a voice.
Explain that.
Just on that last point, that means that their children and grandchildren living in these refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, in Gaza, and elsewhere don't count anymore.
They don't count.
So the normal understanding of refugee is that if you've lost your home and you're living as a refugee somewhere else, that status and protection applies to your kids, too.
And what Trump has said is that they want to redefine refugee to mean that you have to have lived in mandatory Palestine prior to 1948 when the refugee problem happened.
If you do that, if you say refugee just means you lived there in 1948, then in order to count as a refugee, you have to be over 70 years old.
That means very soon there will be no refugees.
You erase the problem by definition.
You don't negotiate the right of return with Palestinians anymore.
You don't talk about funding refugees anymore.
You define refugees out of existence.
So you're not only defunding the refugees, you're derefugeeing the people you are funding, right?
Okay, but so, I mean, the thing is, so the Palestinians, even, okay, let's say that they are able to bring them, quote, to the table, they're still going to reject this.
They can't go along with this.
And so is that what the Israelis want, is to redo 2000 where they give them an offer they can't possibly accept and then just pretend it was the most generous thing in the world and continue, because the Israelis would actually prefer to not have a peace deal at all that has any kind of semblance of a Palestinian state and independence there.
They would prefer the current situation of slowly, not that slowly, establishing facts on the ground and just colonizing the whole damn West Bank in front of everybody.
So Scott, the way, what I argue in my piece is that this is how they're going to try to impose it on the Palestinians.
I don't know where this goes because I don't, I can't see this working.
The idea is that, is exactly what you said, like, I don't know what the plan's going to be.
The little bit I've heard so far seems to be, from what I've read, seems to me this idea that you basically take it the way it is now, you sort of pay off the Palestinians to accept it, that you do give this offer to sort of, and then you rely on Saudi Arabia and Egypt, you and your side to impose it.
That's the plan.
I can't see it working.
So when you ask what is it they're going to do, I think Outside In says that that is what you're going to do.
You don't negotiate with the Palestinians, you impose a plan on them, you assume that they're weak enough and ally-less enough that they'll have no choice but to accept it.
But I'm not saying that I think that's going to work.
I think that's the plan.
I can't see it working, but I think that's the plan.
I think that you- But why do you think that they prefer that to the status quo?
Which is just getting, you know, because this is- Why who prefers?
Well, I mean, I guess I'm, well, the Israeli government and the Trump administration, I guess it seems like, maybe this is reading too much into it, but it seems like even their peace plan they want to impose would have then some limits on the continued colonization of the West Bank.
Yeah, and I don't- They would prefer to just keep calling it a peace process and colonize the whole damn thing.
So I think part of the assumption here is that peace processes are meant to lead to peace and not to just be rejected and provide cover while you go on colonizing and saying we did our best to do a peace plan.
I don't even know if the end goal of this is to succeed.
I do think that when the plan comes forward that it's quite possible it will include things like recognizing the settlements in the West Bank and recognizing existing colonization.
I don't know if this is something that the American Israelis actually want to work.
I don't know if this is something that will work, but I think that this is the way to make sense of what's happening now.
Whether what's happening now is because they really want this to be successful, I don't know that.
I'm not sure that the peace process has ever been about hoping there's a peace and not providing cover for continued colonization while you say you're trying to make peace.
Well, it's clear that the Palestinian people are not going to give in to this, whatever Abu Abbas says, Abu Mazen.
Right.
Yeah, I think what this does is it takes three weird things that have happened in the last two months.
This barrage of cancellations of money to Palestine, like this total barrage of defunding, which is weird.
This certifying of Egypt while you list their human rights abuses, very weird to do that.
And lying to Congress about Saudi Arabia, really weird to do that.
So what I'm doing is I'm kind of looking at this pattern of weirdness and then I'm looking at how to, it is what happened, you can't take it away, it's what happened.
So if you can't change what happened and it doesn't make sense to your understanding, then change your understanding.
And I think when you change your understanding and you look through the lens of what Netanyahu is saying through outside in, then it makes sense what the states did in Egypt and it makes sense what they did in Saudi Arabia and it makes sense they defunded Palestine.
Where this goes, what the long-term goal is, I don't know.
But I think that when you change your lens this way, the stuff that was out of focus comes into focus.
It's a way of making sense what's going on with the Trump administration in the Middle East right now.
I don't know where it goes, but it makes sense now.
All right.
I'm sorry, I gotta go, but I agree with you.
It does.
Very good.
Outside in.
The Trump administration's plan to remake the Middle East.
It's at Mondoweiss.
We ran it, I think, yesterday at antiwar.com.
Ted Snyder, thank you again.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I always love being on your show.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
