Transcript

Where do the other Middle East countries and the Gulf nations stand on the Iran-Israel conflict? How do they view the US’ changing foreign policy?

What were the motivations behind the recent US and Israeli attacks on Iran? Was it preventive or pre-emptive action?

Is regime change in Iran a realistic objective by Israel/US?

Could Australia be asked to support future US military or strategic actions in the region?

In this episode, Jessie Moritz and Ian Parmeter join David Andrews in discussion about the unfolding conflicts in the Middle East and their consequences for the future of regional and global security.  

(This transcript is AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)

Ian Parmeter

For all the states in the region, they will see the United States as being somewhat unpredictable and very hard to read in terms of what its next actions are likely to be.

Jessie Moritz

There's no easy replacement for the United States. Russia is not offering to replace the United States as a security guarantor. Neither is China.

National Security Podcast

You're listening to the National Security Podcast, the show that brings you expert analysis, insights and opinion on the national security challenges facing Australia and the Indo-Pacific produced by the ANU National Security College.

David Andrews

Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm David Andrews, Senior Manager for Policy and Engagement at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and I pay my respects to the elders past and present.

This week I'm joined by Jessie Moritz and Ian Parmeter for an incredibly timely discussion about the unfolding conflicts in the Middle East and their consequences for the future of regional and global security. Dr Jessie Moritz is a senior lecturer at the ANU Centre for Arabic and Islamic Studies. She previously completed a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Trans Regional Institute at Princeton University and her PhD, which was also undertaken here at the ANU, received the 2017 Association for Gulf and Peninsula Studies Dissertation Award.

Ian Parmeter is a research scholar and PhD candidate also at the ANU Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies. Ian was formerly Assistant Director General at the then Office for National Assessments with responsibility for Middle East analysis and before that spent 25 years with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, including as ambassador to Lebanon, deputy head of mission in Russia and with other postings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Jessie, Ian, welcome to the National Security Podcast.

Ian Parameter

Thank you

Jessie Moritz

Thanks for having us.

David Andrews

Well, when we first started talking about this episode, things weren't as they are now. We've now in the last 24 hours seen US attacks on Iran following the earlier attacks from, I think the 13th of June that Israel had conducted against Iran. Now I'll note for our listeners, this is on Monday, the 23rd of June that we're recording this episode. So a lot could still change in the next couple of days before it's released, but a lot's already happened in the last 24 hours. So that's clearly going to be a large part of our conversation today, but before we get into, I guess, the particulars of that, I also wanted to zoom out a little bit and put this into maybe a bigger comparative picture of the last four, eight years, perhaps. So since the first Trump administration and now into these first six months of the second Trump administration, and understand a little bit about how regional dynamics have shifted both in that first and now second Trump administration, particularly. Have there been any key points of continuity in that time, through Biden, I suppose? or is what we're seeing now a wholly different approach to the US and its relationship with the Middle East? Perhaps Jessie, if I can start with you and your thoughts on the matter.

Jessie Moritz

Yeah. So I mean, traditionally with US foreign policy towards the Middle East, there's a great deal of continuity between democratic administrations and Republican administrations. What we're seeing in the era of Trump, both 1.0 and 2.0 is at first and maybe Trump 1.0, some degree of continuity in some parts, but really a significant level of disruption. And then in Trump 2.0, we're really seeing quite significant disruption.

But I think it's worth suggesting that this conflict that's going on at the moment is also undermining what might have been the US foreign policy platform in the Middle East. So Trump was really pushing for the Abraham Accords. He was trying to get Middle East and particularly Gulf states to sign on to a closer normalization deals with Israel. Gulf states were quite amenable to this, at least some of them. Particularly the UAE and Bahrain had signed on and Saudi Arabia, of course, was the major prize. And they were also, Trump had just finalized about a month ago, a major tour of the Middle East where he signed on to these major investment deals. So those looked to be some of the emerging foreign policy planks of the Trump 2.0 administration. But many of that has been thrown into at minimum disarray and most likely collapse potentially as a result of this conflict.

Ian Parmeter

If I could just add to that, I think it's worth noting that during Trump 1.0, there was a general feeling among his supporters that a lot of opportunities had been missed. So there was far more attention given to having a concrete agenda of that was particularly America first. And that was where we saw all the tariffs that were announced. So it's had a broad impact on the world as a whole.

And it's raised questions about the president's personal commitment to NATO and generally about American foreign policy. There's been a strong element of unpredictability that's arisen in this period with Trump 2.0.

Jessie Moritz

And I think this is also something it's, I mean, we're looking from the US perspective, but from the perspective of key Middle Eastern partners of the US in the region, they are, like us in Australia, we've been looking at a less predictable United States and we're trying to start to question perhaps that relationship, that traditional security partnership that we have with one of our closest international allies. So too, are states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, looking at what's happening. And it's not just this conflict. This has been happening since the mid 2000s. They've been looking at the US interest, shifting the US attention more to the South China Sea and towards East Asia. And they've been concerned about their status and their role and the importance that the US has played as their key security guarantor for the of the Western aligned states in the Middle East. So they have for some time for at least for over a decade been looking at different ways in which they might diversify their security relationships. Not entirely though, there's still a crucial key role that the United States has played and there's no easy replacement for the United States. Russia is not offering to replace the United States as a security guarantor, neither is China. So there's no one-to-one replacement as a security partner for these states, but they are more aware that they might need to step up more in the region.

They're going to need to rely on a host of different security relationships. And one key turning point to point towards perhaps, particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia, was the bombing by Iran-backed militias of Abqaiq and Khorey's oil and gas facilities. Because this, for the Saudis, really cemented to them. The US response to it was, from the Saudi perspective, relatively timid. They had knocked out a significant portion of Saudi production and they did not see the US response as sufficiently protecting their security. So that has really, even though this is a longer-term trend, that 2019 point was a key tipping point and I think we're at another one today.

David Andrews

Ian, one thing I wanted to pick up on was you're talking about the sort of perception and it's Jessie you’ve gone on as well, this perception of allies and alliances and Trump's relationships there. We're obviously in Australia talking about being asked to carry a bigger proportion of the burden for our own defence and for regional security and this talk of the U.S. wanting allies to increase their defence spending to something in the tune of three and a half or 5 % of GDP. But at the same time, a lot of key partners in the Middle East are backed, whether it's through USAID or through defence grants and loans and provision of equipment, thinking of places like Egypt or Jordan or other countries in the Levant particularly. Have those sorts of impacts that the ones that we're going through in East Asia and the Pacific, are those kind of impacts being felt by states in the Middle East as well?

Ian Parmeter

I think definitely. They are very much aware that US policy is not only becoming less predictable, but to the extent that it can be forecast that the US is focusing far more on East Asia and on China in particular. And this is where it worries states like Jordan and Egypt, which are very dependent on US aid.

So, I think that's something that they will be lobbying the US and not just President Trump's level, lobbying people in Congress to try to put pressure on the administration to keep up the levels of aid. Now we've had the reports that the Department of Government Efficiency, under Elon Musk, has put down. But we're still not sure at this stage, the way that Musk has now left the administration, to what extent all of that is now set in concrete. So even now we're seeing, and this is from Australia's perspective, a sense as well, a sense that it really is a matter of going and arguing the case with the US administration and with President Trump in particular, which is why our own prime minister has been so anxious to get an appointment with President Trump.

Jessie Moritz

And it's really a multi-pronged effect because it's not just that the US is by cutting off, for example, funding to USAID, but also declining funding to other UN agencies and cutting off funding to UNRWA, which particularly supports Palestinian refugees who are in Jordan, for example, among their other activities. What that means is that, say for the Jordanian economy, which is really still fundamentally dependent on foreign aid, they're seeing not just a direct threat to direct US military and also funding for, there's a major water desalinization project that the US was partnering on, for example, and a number of other projects. But they're also seeing that the funding that used to flow through international institutions like the UN and other agencies is also not coming through to Jordan. There have been carve-outs that have occurred in the last few months for Jordan and other key Middle Eastern states. But as Ian said, it’s really, it's still kind of very unclear, including from the perspectives of these states trying to understand what is their standing with the US exactly? What can they rely on in terms of economic funding, but also military support and political support? And I think one of the concerns that we should be having here is that the US really seems to be neglecting soft power. One of the enormous influences that the US was attempting to build over the last 25 years in the Middle East, successfully or not, was soft power support for things like democracy, for positive attitudes towards the United States. Now, we can have a whole separate debate about the history of US foreign policy in the Middle East, but funding for child nutrition, funding for healthcare services, funding for water and basic services, can build up your soft power in a region. And then on top of that, you can have direct funding for things like there are programs that would support, say, young Syrians during the civil war, and they would bring them to places like Cairo and train them on what does a democracy look like? What does stable governance look like? What are the key steps that you can take as a youth activist who's opposed to Bashar al-Assad's regime to try and build up a stable Syria if he's ever toppled, which is the situation that we're in now? All of those programs are under threat and that just it's a huge sort of I guess abandonment of US soft as well as hard power in the region.

Ian Parmeter

I'd include the US Institute of Peace as well because that was completely abolished by the Musk Doge investigation. It has, fortunately, I think in terms of US influence, it was aimed at spreading democracy around the world and was actually set up by Congress. Fortunately, a US judge has said that it can't be abolished at this stage by the US administration because it is a congressional program. But that still is under threat. I will just have to see how Congress reacts to that.

David Andrews

Perhaps to address the elephant in the room, I think those soft power dimensions, we've seen the same thing in Southeast Asia, in the South Pacific, in parts of Latin America as well, in Africa. These impacts are being felt across the globe, but that's a really great articulation of how they're applying on the ground in the Middle East as well. I think any of our listeners will probably be very fixated on current events. In this case, it's the escalation of attacks upon Iran now by the United States.

First, as I said earlier, by Israel under the auspices of Operation Rising Lion attacks beginning on the 13th of June, which were then followed yesterday on the 22nd of June under Operation Midnight Hammer, number of US B-2 bombers and some submarine launched cruise missiles as well attacks upon a number of key sites for the Iranian nuclear program. I suppose to put this question most simplistically, why? So why attack Iran? Why now? To what end? Ian, perhaps I can start with you in this one.

Ian Parmeter

I think it has to be seen in terms of the continuum of events that have occurred since October 2023 after the Hamas attack on Israel and then the reaction of the Netanyahu government in making a major attack on Gaza and actually attacking a lot of what you would call civilian sites as well and we've seen this on television every night. that has to be seen in terms of Israeli domestic politics. It was extremely important for Prime Minister Netanyahu to reestablish his security credentials with the Israeli people because he really was the one that would be blamed in any form of formal inquiry into what went wrong on the 7th of October 2023. But then He, with the support of his cabinet, a very right-wing cabinet, took that into Lebanon as well and managed to certainly degrade the power of Hezbollah with remarkable operations, including of course the extraordinary exploding walkie-talkies and ferns. But essentially, that's why Hezbollah has not been able to get involved in helping Iran. But the problem for Netanyahu is he really can't stop the war going at this stage. This is to put it very bluntly because he's cabinet, key members of his cabinet, ones that the Australian government has put sanctions on, Ben Gavir and Bezalel Smotrich have been saying that they will walk out of the government if they don't see Netanyahu being sufficiently aggressive in the region against Israel's enemies. We don't know at this stage how much formal and believable intelligence there was of Iran actually being close to nuclear breakout. We know that they had a substantial quantity of, it was 60 % enriched uranium and we know also that there had been a report by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency on the 12th of June saying that Iran was in breach of its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation agreement. That appears to have been the trigger for Netanyahu's decision to attack Iran.

He clearly knew he could not achieved the task of destroying at least one of the nuclear sites, the one at Fordow, without American support. And clearly he was putting a lot of pressure on the United States to agree to that. We really didn't know whether Trump would agree. Trump has wanted to stay out of Middle East fights, and he said that he would probably take two weeks to do it. But anyway, he's now got into it, and now the whole system has changed.

But what it means is that the United States could be involved in further action in the region. We don't know if that's going to happen. But we also need to factor in that for all the states in the region, they will see the United States as being somewhat unpredictable and very hard to read in terms of what its next actions are likely to be. But Jessie, you may have something more to say on.

Jessie Moritz

I mean, think the part of the elephant in the room, of course, is that the intelligence behind this strike. So Israel has claimed very directly and overtly that they argue that Iran was within weeks of developing a nuclear weapon. The reason that without casting any doubt on the capabilities of Israeli intelligence across the region, but the reason that it's so difficult to take that assessment at face value is first because the Israelis have claimed this before many, many times.

And secondly, as Ian pointed out, there are domestic political factors at play that make this a rather convenient time. the big question, of course, in terms of international law is whether this was a preemptive strike or preemptive conflict or a preventative war. With a preemptive strike being, or preemptive war being defined as something that sort of you're at imminent threat, you're an imminent risk and you strike your enemy state before they're able to strike you. That's what Israel claims that they're doing.

But it looks much more like that if this intelligence is not upheld or not convincing to the international community. And so far, we're seeing that the US CIA analysis is unclear. They're not yet aligning with Israeli intelligence on this. Tulsi Gabbard has said varying different things, but she's a political operative in a political space. Trump has said that he's convinced, but I think, for example, here in Australia, for us to say that we support these strikes or that we may get, if we're asked to involve, we should be very clear on what the basis of this intelligence is and if it's convincing or not, because we've seen before what happens if you take on questionable intelligence and you go to war in the Middle East and you attempt to change your regime on the basis of that. And I'm obviously referring to Iraq. So there are many other factors. One point that I might want to make here is that our perspective here in Australia is very different from the perspective that will be seen from Middle Eastern states in the region. So their entire ontology is going to be a little bit different here. They're viewing Israel as an existing highly aggressive state despite the attempt to try to improve and mediate relations with Israel. And they're viewing the US as aligning with this aggressive state. So despite the fact that, say if Saudi Arabia and Iran have historically had quite contested relations since 1979, there's an element of, I guess, illegitimacy in how this conflict is being viewed in the Middle East, that if we're not aware of that and if we're not managing that very carefully in Australia, it could really damage our relations with these countries.

David Andrews

As you say, Jessie, just to sort of pick up on that point that there's clearly been some level of contestation over the intelligence that's been provided in that, like you said, Tulsi Gabbard has said a few different things, but at least initially she, I believe, said that there was no evidence that there was an imminent threat of weaponizing Iran's nuclear material. Trump said she was wrong. And then I saw a news interview with Marco Rubio when pressed on this same point and he essentially said, it's irrelevant. So that's not necessarily filling a neutral observer with a great deal of confidence that this is as, as fulsome a claim as it might be presented. And there is, it seems to me at least maybe a sense of opportunism on Israel's part in that talking about Hezbollah in the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the extent to which this is maybe a convenient time in something that's been long desired within Israelis to eliminate or to greatly restrict Iran's nuclear program, that maybe this is a good opportunity to take that when they've not had such a good opportunity to do so before and now that seems to have been achieved to some extent. I'm not sure if you have any further thoughts or Ian if you wanted to jump in here, but there seems to be a certain flow of events there which stood out to me.

Jessie Moritz

I what you're describing, and I'll hand over to Ian, but you're describing the definition of a preventive war, which is generally considered, and there's definitely a little bit of confusion about this since the Bush Doctrine and the early 2000s of conflating preemptive and preventive war, but you're describing the definition of a preventive war, which is when you go to war with an ally at a time that is convenient to you to try to address a key concern that you have. But I'll hand over to Ian.

Ian Parmeter

Yes. In the time I've been working in the Middle East and I first went there in 1977, so it's a long time, I've seen remarkable changes in terms of the knowledge of people living in the Middle East, people in the Arab state of international issues. They have access to the internet now, of course. They can see the same sorts of news that we see here in Western countries, but also the advent of Al Jazeera in the 1990s, providing in Arabic what amounts to very, very detailed and in many cases very accurate news has meant that there's a new awareness among people in the region about what is really going on.

When I first went to Egypt, it was possible for the Egyptian government to dictate the terms of public debate. It's no longer possible to do that. So, it means that governments in the region have got to take account of the views of their own people. And that's where it becomes very tricky because we saw all of this happen with the Arab Spring, short-lived Arab Spring from 2010 onwards. But that doesn't mean that those issues have gone away.

We don't have any democracy in the Middle East, in Arab states, but the whole issue of rulers of states having to manage their people is a very real one. And that's where having an unpredictable ally in the US, which is what the moderate Arab states have got, makes it very difficult in terms of managing their people because they are reacting adversely to a lot of what the United States has allowed Israel to do in the Middle East since October 2023.

Jessie Moritz

Yeah, to give you an example of that. So in Bahrain, for example, and we should say generally across the region, and maybe particularly in sort of the Gulf region, this is not a period where we might otherwise expect to see high levels of popular mobilization, of opposition mobilization. You need some key ingredients for opposition mobilization. I do a lot of interviews with opposition interviewees across the Gulf region. And one of the reasons why people will decide to protest or not is something what's called the perception of efficacy. It's basically if I protest, will it achieve anything? And the other key driver, there's lots of other drivers that I could talk about at length, but the other key driver is, is there stability in the region generally? Is this a moment for instability? And certainly with the conflict in Iran, we wouldn't be expecting to see high levels of protest in the Gulf.

But that being said, these issues around Israel's actions in Gaza, Israel's actions in the West Bank towards Palestinians, bombing in Lebanon, bombing in Syria, now bombing in Iran as well, bombing in Yemen, et cetera. Just to give you a tangible example of what that means for opposition communities, in Bahrain, the opposition is traditionally quite fragmented. You have some largely Shia opposition, you have some secular opposition groups. There's also some nascent sort of Sunni opposition groups against the Sunni monarchy on particular on economic issues. But actually one thing that draws those opposition groups together is attitudes towards Palestinians and defense of Palestinians. They're not working together directly that much yet, but this is definitely an issue that could build that sort of sectarian and cross ethnic and cross class solidarity that the Bahraini government is absolutely very concerned about. And they are, of course, one of the signatories to the Abraham Accords. So these are the kinds of things that these governments are weighing up in their minds when they're assessing what risk this Israeli and US bombing of Iran poses to them aside from the direct, obvious military risk of that there's bombs flying a couple hundred kilometres from their shores.

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David Andrews

One thing I wanted to maybe touch on as well, is, I suppose, what the US objectives are. So we've talked a little bit about what sort of might have motivated Israel to take that sort of first step a few weeks ago. But it seems to me that there's also a level of maybe contestation within the administration in looking at say the comments that JD Vance made, particularly during his sort of his Senate run and in the election campaign in this very MAGA, no new wars, no Middle East wars kind of bring everyone home approach. And, you know, I hope I'm not mischaracterizing the Secretary of State here, but I feel like Michael Rubio's maybe tapping into a different foreign policy tradition within the US Republican party particularly that maybe is a more forward leaning anti-Iran sort pro-Israel kind of approach. And it feels to me like there's a level of underlying tension here. So is there a sense in of what principally the US is interested in? I mean, we've just seen Trump talking whether joking or not, but putting regime change on the table here. Is that where they've come into this from or is it to support Israel? What's that sense of continuity?

Ian Parmeter

Well, Trump would certainly be aware that his own base is divided on this issue. ⁓ Trump was elected on the platform that he would not get the US into any more forever wars, as he called them. He was very critical of previous US administrations, including Republican administrations, the George W. Bush administration, over the getting involved for so long in Iraq and of course in Afghanistan as well. the cutting across that of course has been that within Trump's Republican base is a very strong pro-Israel element. We see that with people like Lindsey Graham. And I think this is where Marco Rubio comes in too. I think it's the pro-Israel element that's extremely strong with him.

But that's not shared right across the MAGA base. Most of the MAGA base, I think it's fair to say, would not want to get involved in further wars. Trump, his address, formatted the address explaining what he had done after the attack on the three nuclear sites, said, now is the time for peace. And he may genuinely want there to be peace.

I have no doubt as well that he would like to see a change of regime in Iran. But regime change is a rather difficult thing to get popular support on because that's what, if we go back to the rationale that George W. Bush had for the invasion of Iraq, regime change, getting rid of Saddam, was the first. And when it was realized that you weren't going to get very far on that with the UN Security Council, it became, we have to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. And then when they weren't found, had to be a third explanation, which was to make the region safe for democracy. So, regime change itself is exploded now. It cannot be used as a justification for military action in the region, it is up to the people. And I think this is somewhere where Netanyahu has been probably a bit more realistic than Trump on this in making the point that this is where the Iranian people have got to rise up and take control if they're determined to change the regime. He put it in terms of we will create the conditions for you to rise up, but it's up to you to do that. We're yet to see. I personally think that they won't. I think there's more pro-Iran patriotism among Iranians, which won't leave that, not necessarily pro-pro regime elements, but certainly pro Iran, the strong Iranian nationalism.

David Andrews

Jessie, one thing I wanted to check your reflections on as well is what happened with the JCPOA? So the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was the Obama era deal that was made with Iran to try and sort of address this threat. How does that fit into the picture? Might that have achieved the same result of winding down sort of Iran's nuclear weapons program? Were it not ended by Trump? What's the background there.

Jessie Moritz

Yeah, so the first JCPOA, and I'm going to come a little bit here from the perspective of the Arab states of the Gulf, so Saudi Arabia, UAE, cetera. The first deal that was signed was kind of viewed by those states as they're a bit annoyed that they weren't included. And then they also were frustrated that it didn't address Iran's ballistic missiles program and their funding of proxy groups across the Middle East. So in the Western aligned, if I can call them that, Middle Eastern world. There was a little bit of frustration in the JCPOA. Trump, of course, pulled out of the JCPOA point, version one. I mean, he made it very clear that he was going to do that. He didn't think it was going to be effective. Whether or not it was or not, you might have to ask a nuclear scientist. But the second deal that they were working on with using Oman as a mediator, using Qatar sometimes as a mediator, using the Saudis as a mediator, I think this is something that Israeli intelligence is watching very closely. And if we come back again to the timing for this current conflict, one of the potential explanations is that there was movement towards this second nuclear deal that was viewed as unacceptable within Netanyahu's coalition.

So I think that's kind of one key point. The second is that there was possibility that alongside this US-Iran nuclear deal, there were also negotiations going on between the Arab states of the Gulf and Iran on Iran's other ballistic missiles program. And of course, their most notable proxies Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis are a little bit more complicated as a proxy, but they had been fairly consistently degraded in their capabilities since 2023 by Israel's direct actions. So the second Iran nuclear deal, I'm not sure it would have entirely resolved this problem, but if we come back to what Ian was talking about, regime change, I think this is a deeply problematic idea politically that both the Israelis have and the Americans have. It may be possible for them to potentially, although I don't think it's going to be soon and I don't think it's going to be neat, they may be able to topple the current government of Iran potentially. Does that mean that they're going to have some sort of magical pro-democratic, pro-Israel opposition-led government that's suddenly going to rise out of what is actually a very fragmented and not pro-Israel government and it's going to occur because Israel bombed them. It's just, it seems to me a really naive misreading of the political situation. So for example, Iran's existing opposition, which runs the full gamut from pro-Western reformers to just don't particularly like this particular version of theocratic fundamental theocracy, at the moment they're fragmented, they're being bombed, they're not capable of organizing right now.

I imagine that Netanyahu Is trying to look forward to the next, you know, not 5 or 10 years. Israeli military has been very clear that this is that Israel needs to get ready for a long-haul conflict. I think that might show some disjuncture between what, how they're presenting that and what Trump is going to try to present the American people that this was just one and done a quick intervention.

I think it's very unlikely to be that if the goal is regime change. And if the goal longer term is to have a stable Middle East that is not producing nuclear weapons, that is not firing as many ballistic missiles towards Israel, I also think that's really questionable. If you dissolve the Iranian regime, what do you have? You have a fragmented IRGC. You have different groups in a country where there's enriched uranium already. And every other intervention as Ian pointed out. We've seen 10 to 15 years of instability resolving out of this. We've seen heightened terrorist attacks. We've seen heightened civil war, civil conflicts. I'm not seeing, unfortunately, a pathway to stability as a result of this conflict.

David Andrews

Someone whose views I think are definitely worth reading, and this maybe applies more to those that still use Twitter, but Jeffrey Lewis, who's from the Middlebury Institute in the United States, is very good on all of the nuclear science dimension of it and on arms control aspects and something that I read from him suggested that there's a good chance that this will be a tactical victory, but a strategic loss when it comes to sort of moderating or constraining or stopping Iran's nuclear program. I think that certainly, I think is a pretty credible outcome in my assessment, but maybe just to keep things rolling along in our conversation and maybe just sort of pivot slightly to the Australian perspective. And of course, Ian, please come back at me if you disagree or have anything else you wanted to add, but I just wanted to also reflect on how Australia has engaged or responded so far to this conflict. So we’ve seen today some comments from the foreign minister and from Minister Plibersek that seemingly yesterday were a bit more neutral and today is much more Australia supporting these strikes. Obviously, you've got a long time in government to draw on Ian. Is there something you can sort of tell us about the Australian response here?

Ian Parmeter

I'm very happy to get on to the Australian response, but just to add to that point about a short-term tactical victory, but a long-term strategic defeat, I think we can be pretty sure that as soon as this current round of fighting between Israel and Iran stops, that Iran will withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It will therefore have no more inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it will be able to reconstruct its program but without any external oversight. And that could be the strategic defeat that he was talking about.

Just getting onto the Australian government itself, quite clearly the Australian government was initially unclear, I think, yesterday as to what legal basis the strikes by the United States might have had. think overnight they've first of all probably been affected by the opposition saying that we were not being sufficiently supportive of our primary ally. But I think as well there was a sense that in the way Marco Rubio had put it, it really doesn't matter very much at this stage.

We essentially have got an ally in the US and we have to take what has happened as a given and deal with what we've got. So the way I understood Penny Wong talking this morning was that she said Australia opposes Iran's nuclear program and believes that it should not have an enrichment program. But at the same time, we support action to prevent that happening. And if that's the case, we support what the United States has done yesterday. So it was a roundabout way of giving support to the Americans.

David Andrews

Do you think that it is likely that we would be, I suppose, one asked and two would commit to providing additional support in the event of things coming apart further? Or do you think that there would be a relatively sort of firm line drawn under our commitment were things to escalate further in the region?

Ian Parmeter

Well, I don't think there's any, I think the Prime Minister, Albanese, has already said that we will not join US military action against Iran. He's been quite clear on that. That's different, of course, from the way that the former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, talked in 2019, where he did actually make a statement that if the US asked us to join, action against Iran, Australia would seriously consider it. But it seems very clear that the Albanese government has ruled that out. And in a sense, there's nothing that we could do that would add in any material way. This isn't like a coalition of the willing or anything like that. And the United States, in contrast to what it did in Iraq, is not going to get involved in invading Iran. You do not invade a country of 90 million people.

Jessie Moritz

Yeah, I think though, the challenge that we may face is that this is going to contribute to regional disorder for potentially the next decade. And one of the ways we might see that is sort of one of the responses that Iran has available to it is to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea and in the extreme case would be they cut off trade through the Strait of Hormuz. Many of the options that are available to Iran, we should say this first, are not good options.

 

They're really on the back foot, which kind of indicates the extent to which they were actually quite invested in the US nuclear deal and in a diplomatic kind of way forward. But one of the options is to harass shipping, to hijack shipping. That's been a typical response. That's the kind of thing that, and broader instability across the region, that's the kind of thing that Australia could be indirectly drawn into. And we might need to commit some resources towards that. For example, as recently as early this year, we were part of the international team that was trying to secure maritime safety and shipping in the Red Sea region. So that's the kind of indirect impact that this could have on Australia aside from direct requests from the US for support.

David Andrews

Picking up on that thought actually, Jessie, this might seem like a bit of a pivot, but I think it's actually closely connected is this, the question of oil and of natural resources. And I don't mean about Iran in particular, but I guess it's centrality to the economy of all of the Gulf States and yes, to Iran as well, but to the wider region. And I want to sort of step away a little bit from this conversation on the war particularly, but maybe looking at some of these broader regional trends and how they tie into this issue of oil and natural gas being that we're seeing, especially in Saudi Arabia and all of the Gulf States, trying to pivot away from oil to some extent or to use those resources that built up to fund other investments and objectives as they, I guess, as we all experience this kind of wider green transition decarbonization process we're talking about, investments in artificial intelligence and in cyber and in fantastical cities in the desert that are being worked out with former Australian parliamentarians like Wyatt Roy being involved as well. It's all a lot to take in, I guess it's that nexus between economic development and social development. We've talked a lot about, I guess, the people of Iran and of Syria and elsewhere, but when we're talking about the push towards renewable energy and therefore how that affects the future economic growth of the region, what does that look like, I suppose, for the social contract and for societies that are in the region when so much of their underpinning social contract is backed by the great wealth that comes from oil, the provision of low or no taxes, sort of the things that are given as part of annual budgets to people in the public service and citizens. It's an economic structure which relies on that. But whether it's through closing the straight of formulas in the short term or in the longer-term transition, what does it look like for the future of the region to, I guess, disentangle its relationship societally from these key commodities?

Jessie Moritz

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of questions within that that we could unpack piece by piece. maybe we can start with, so my research actually entails wandering around the Gulf region and interviewing people about what is their relationship with the government and trying to unpack how much of that is related to this oil wealth that is channeled through the government through to people and our understanding of that as a crucial part of the social contract. A lot of my research is actually about how much of that is not too dissimilar fundamentally from what we would expect in terms of good governance in Australia. We expect the government to provide economic opportunity, we expect the government to provide significant and high-quality social services, etc. So that level of you support the government because they're providing you with those things kind of makes sense and works in the Gulf. But there's lots of other reasons why people would be loyal towards or opposed towards these governments.

They're not democratic, but they can be responsive. of Ian hinted at this earlier. These citizens are some of the most surveilled in the world. The UAE is a global leader in adoption of some of these domestic surveillance and sort of high-tech technologies and applying them to their domestic population. So the government actually tries to track what their citizens want and tries to sometimes be a first mover and offer it to them before they've formed a protest movement, they could ask for it. So to say that these countries are not democratic doesn't mean that they're not trying to be responsive.

There's also other reasons why citizens might protest or might not protest. I interviewed, for example, a Bahraini woman. I said, why did you decide to protest? And she said, well, they arrested my cousin. They dragged her off the street. And the only way I was going to be able to get her back was to protest. So this is also someone who had materially and financially really benefited. from this oil and gas wealth. So the first thing I would say is that I don't think their oil and gas wealth explains as much of their political stability as we think it is. That being said, they have to reinvent the entire base of their economy within the next 25 to 30 years. It's an incredibly tall order. And they've announced that they're going to do that through these flashy programs like really famous one that everyone will have seen on their social media is The Line, which is part of the NEOM project.

That one I would say is, I've actually wondered if it's more of a PR program than a genuine development project, but so much money has been committed to it that someone must have thought it was a good idea. That one is not particularly realistic. I don't think it's ever going to get built, at least not more than like a couple hundred meters. It's meant to be 170 kilometers long. But there are other programs across the Gulf region that are more grounded in the existing topography and the geography rather than trying to carve through mountains. There's a project in Oman called Sultan Haitham City, which is trying to build up a new residential neighborhood. It takes advantage of the natural wadi, the valley that floods annually during the monsoon heavy rain season. It creates cool waterways.

These projects are trying to build a different economic base for these Gulf countries, these traditional oil and gas exporters. They're also trying to decarbonize the economies. For these countries, they rely on oil and gas exports. The best thing they can possibly do is to decarbonize their entire domestic electricity grid and their domestic inputs into petrochemicals and other industries.

So that they can export as much oil and gas whilst the international markets are still willing to pay for it. And these will be some of the last oil and gas exporters in the world. Even though oil and gas demand is potentially going to start declining soon globally and it's starting to grow globally, Asia Pacific in particular, demand is still growing. So they're going to export more and more to those markets.

Coming back a little bit to this conflict and the impact on oil and gas infrastructure, one of the potential options that Iran has available to them is to go after oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf. There has been a clear focus on the Arab states of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula on trying to identify alternative economic and supply chain corridors that don't go through the Strait of Hormuz. But many of them are still nascent. And so we could see disruptions to oil and gas prices. I don't know if Ian wants to add anything on top of that. There's a lot there.

Ian Parmeter

I think the main point is we're dealing with very large populations too. I countries like Egypt, Iran, even countries like Syria and Jordan are growing. But Saudi Arabia in particular, I've been to Saudi Arabia many times. When I went there to work in 1979, the population was seven million. It's now over 20 million.

 

And these people, when it was just seven million, could be supported essentially by more or less just being civil servants, working in government ministries and not really doing very much at all. Now, there are too many to be able to do that. They're a huge drain on the economy. So it means that the Saudis need to find jobs for these people and need to make them jobs that they will enjoy doing.

So that's the sort of thing at the moment that the Saudi government under Mohammed bin Salman is actually casting a butt to find. as Jessie was saying, it's not an easy task. So we'll just have to see how that develops. Tourism, of course, is one of the big factors that they're looking at. a country like Saudi Arabia is extraordinarily beautiful. They could do something with it, but they need to get a lot of infrastructure built.

Jessie Moritz

And human capital domestically, mean, one of the huge challenges they face is they're trying to build up new sectors, which includes renewable energy sectors. And it includes high tech sectors like AI. They're going to build, one of the things that Trump had tried to do on his last trip was that he'd signed off on these huge investment deals, particularly on the UAE. They're going to build a massive data center. And so these countries that were once energy exporters, they're now toying with the idea of can they be data exporters or can they find other industries that are going to generate the type of rents or the significant revenue that they were getting from oil and gas imports. They've also been talking about sort of blue and green hydrogen and things like that. But the major challenge that they're ultimately going to face is are these new industries and this new shape of the economy going to generate economic opportunity and jobs for their citizens?

And many of the steps that they're taking, I'm not sure that they will. So they want to automate and bring in AI. They want to reduce, they want to do that to reduce their reliance on migrant workers. That's fine. But at the same time, they're probably also going to outsource and automate many of the jobs that citizens are typically in. And I'm not sure yet, having looked pretty closely at their development plans, that they're thinking enough about those issues and enough about how much they need to build up these industries domestically, et cetera. There's a lot there.

David Andrews

Well, we've covered a huge amount of ground and there's a lot more we could have done, talking more, at least for my personal interest as a former resident of Jordan and Kuwait about sort of the Hashemite and sort of Saudi relationship there and the of gridlock in Kuwait, more about Lebanon, of course, and Syria. There's so much more we could say. But Jessie and Ian, thank you so much for being part of the National Security Podcast and for sharing your insights with us this week.

Jessie Moritz

Thank you, for having me.

Ian Parmeter

Thank you.

National Security Podcast

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