This is part II of Fariba Amini’s two-part interview with Columbia University Political Scientist and former National Security Council Adviser (to President Jimmy Carter) Gary Sick, among America’s foremost Iran specialists. Part I is here.
Gary Sick. Courtesy Columbia University.
Fariba Amini: How do you see Trump’s internal and foreign policy agenda in the coming year?
Gary Sick: Compared to chaotic time of Trump’s last administration, he may be better prepared this time. This is a good sign, but history is not linear. It doesn’t go in one direction. In this particular case, I think it was the combination of having gone through the pandemic and the worst inflation that people remember very clearly—showed the government of the United States did not handle the right way. There was a tremendous demand for change, and that was not only true in the United States, but throughout the world. It is a grand movement following the pandemic and economic problems. So, in all of the world, we have seen changes in governments, people coming out of nowhere, and people who previously believed unelectable suddenly finding themselves supported by the populace for somebody different who will shake things up.
Trump, as an agent of change, stands for truly challenging the government, our history and background, and the kind of things we grew up with. He is prepared to challenge all of those. That’s an enormous undertaking and hugely impactful, because he actually changes the way the United States leads many other countries in the world, changes the whole security balance in the world. One can imagine that he got a second chance to decide what he wanted to do in his first administration. I hope he does not, but he may. If he does, it’s going to mean that the United States is heading into a perilous security position.
For many years, NATO has essentially become part of the institution of stability in terms of military security. If he changes that, or if he wants his generals to have personal loyalty to him, that’s not how the US government works, and it’s not how the US Constitution is written. But he seems prepared to try. He is accurately reflecting the views of the people who voted for him. They want to shake things up, challenge the status quo, and change the way things are done because they don’t believe the current system is working. They don’t think about the consequences; they just say let’s shake things up and see what happens. He has these big ideas.
My guess is that he has two years to get all of his big ideas done, and at the end of those two years, we’ll have a new bi-election, with a very real chance that the Democrats could take control of either the House or the Senate, or both, because a lot of people are not going to like him — even the people who supported him. He makes changes in Medicare, for instance, in Social Security. A lot of Americans rely on that, and they are going to take it very seriously. So, he has these two years and will bring people whose sole expertise is their love for Donald Trump and who will do what he wants to do.
The next two years are going to be absolutely chaotic, and really, we are going to see if the people who voted for Trump will be happy with the kind of program he may come up with. So, I expect a lot of crazy ideas, maybe some good ideas. I think at the end of the fourth year, he’s going to say, I need to get all the things done that I should because people want me to do this. He may try to effect a third term. I think that is going to be very much in his mind, if not already, I think that will be the case at the end of the fourth year. He will be convinced that only a part of his program is enacted, and he still has a huge amount to do. We will see.
Fariba Amini: Trump has been boasting that within 24 hours of his presidency he will end the war in Ukraine. Do you think a Trump administration can resolve the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine?
Gary Sick: It’s far from clear what he would come up with. My guess is that he is talking about what he won’t be able to do. Basically, he might agree to something that is substantially suicidal. Trump’s advice is basically to make a deal with the Russians in which Vladimir Zelensky gives up territory. That is not going to go over very well in Ukraine, so Zelensky knows that his life is on the line.
At a certain time, he was a great buddy of Netanyahu, who doesn’t want to see the war end. I don’t think he is going to solve that. It is not clear that there is a solution, because from the Palestinian point of view, there should be at least a minimum recognition of a two-state solution. But the government of Israel is simply not thinking about that. The Israeli people don’t like Netanyahu and his politics and are unhappy with the way the war is going, but there is no opposition, or the opposition is so weak that Netanyahu is able to simply keep on going. Of course, Netanyahu, among other things, tries to stay away from jail, and as long as he is prime minister, he is free from going to jail or facing charges of corruption. So, under such circumstances, it’s difficult to see how this is going to end.
Basically, Israel is still fighting in Gaza, but it really cannot get rid of all the people who are Hamas supporters. Hamas is not very popular in Palestinian circles and in Gaza these days, but basically, people like the idea of challenging the Israelis and showing that they are not invulnerable. That is the question of deterrence. Israel sees this as a case where they have to prove that attacking Israel is very costly, and they thought they had done that. But if they think they’ve solved it this time around, they are wrong. They have probably put themselves in a position where this war in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon is going to be long for some time to come.
Fariba Amini: Since October 7, 2023, more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The numbers may be even higher with many lying under the rubble. Many civilians have also been killed in Lebanon. How do you see the future for Israel, for Gaza and Lebanon?
Gary Sick: The reality is that Israel thinks that the solution to its problems includes basically wiping out a lot of people. If you look at the Israeli strategy in Gaza is exactly the reverse of what the laws of war would require. The laws of war say that if you locate two Hamas members in an apartment building, you want to get them, but if there are 150 civilians in that building, you have to back off. You can get in on foot and find those two men, but you shouldn’t just bomb the building because there are civilians in the way. The Israeli strategy up to this point has been exactly the reverse.
Where there is suspected Hamas leaders at any point in any situation, their answer to that is a bomb, which is indiscriminate and kills a gathering of civilians in a refugee camp, around hospitals, or schools. If you have a huge group of civilians, that should mean that you don’t bomb, but in Israel’s case, they decided to kill a large group of civilians where there is one or two Hamas people in that group. The answer to that is a bomb and that’s what’s going on. So, the number of civilians, women and children, who have been killed is unbelievable and incredibly high. Whatever you want to call, you can call it, but the reality is that they have reversed the laws of war in conducting the campaign in Gaza. In Beirut, they were bombing apartment buildings where leaders of Hezbollah are located.
Israel is going to have to face the outcome of this war with a real loss of dignity and support from a lot of people. You see that in the American capital. A lot of Americans, including actually a lot of American Jews, are in awe of what Israel has been doing. There are also people who are in favor of how Israel is handling it, but it has changed a lot of people’s attitudes towards Israel in a way that was hard to imagine a year or two ago. We don’t know how he is going to deal with it. As far as I can tell, as long as Netanyahu, who wants to continue the war, is the prime minister, with people around him who want to use means that are extremely deadly for a lot of civilians, this war is just going to go on. I don’t think that until Netanyahu changes his mind, or Israel is led by somebody else, the circumstances will change. I don’t think there is any answer to this situation as long as the people who are involved remain in power.
Fariba Amini: Why does the U.S. administration continue to arm Israel while we know that thousands of civilians have been killed with the weapons we’ve sent them?
Gary Sick: Israel of course insists that it is taking precautions, but they assert that Hamas officials and fighters are taking refuge behind civilians which means that a lot of civilians are killed. Israel asserts that the number of casualties is far smaller than the Gazan Ministry of Health numbers and that the percentage of “terrorists” killed is much higher, but they offer no details. It is my impression that the USG accepts much of the Israeli rationale, at least for purposes of arms sales. Theoretically US arms provide a bargaining leverage that can be used to pressure Israel for greater attention to civilian casualties, but that lever never seems to be used in practice. The Israeli/US position is not very convincing and is contradicted by virtually every neutral source.
Fariba Amini: Do you think a war on Iran is inevitable?
Gary Sick: Trump is the one who is to blame for this. He is the one who walked away from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal] that was agreed to by the Obama administration. His argument was that it was a bad agreement and that he would now be able to put maximum pressure on Iran to keep them from expanding their nuclear facilities. Of course, exactly the reverse happened. When he walked away from the JCPOA, the Iranians waited for almost a year to see if he would change his mind. He did not.
So, they began responding, and from a situation where it would have taken Iran almost a year to get enough fissile material from enriched uranium to build a bomb, it became a matter of days or weeks. He’s going to put pressure on Iran to stop their nuclear program and reverse it. Whether he comes to admit that his policy is derailed, I don’t think so, and I think his answer is to put pressure back. That’s not going to work, but that’s his approach. It’s hard to see how anything is going to come out of it.
Iran has not made the decision to build the bomb, but it has made the decision to create enough material for a number of bombs in a very short period of time. Israel may want to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but the facilities that Iran has built, with all the centrifuges, are deep in the ground. They are very difficult targets, and the Israelis have the capacity to hit them, but they’ve been cautious about going after very ambitious targets. So, when Trump comes in January, we’re going to face a new world.
I don’t know what that is going to look like, but from everything we know from the past, he is not going to do a deal with Iran. He’s going to impose new sanctions on Iran and put more pressure on Iran, and I think we’ve seen enough examples of that from the Bush administration onwards. But putting pressure through sanctions on Iran would not change Iran’s policies or their nuclear capability. Now, for better or worse, Iran has the capacity to decide to build a bomb and do it very quickly. We can’t do much about that. That is very much because of Trump’s policy of walking away from the JCPOA.
Fariba Amini: I always thought the decision to walk away from the nuclear deal was made in Tel Aviv and not Washington. What is your take?
Gary Sick: Do you mean the decision to walk away from the JCPOA? I think Israel is quite happy with that, but I don’t think they are the ones who made it happen. Netanyahu was pushing Trump to walk away, so indeed they were satisfied with that. But I think he already believed that; he didn’t have to be persuaded. It’s almost as if he wanted Iran to have a bomb. This is not just true of Republican administrations; this was true of Democrat administrations, except for Obama, who worked out the JCPOA.
Fariba Amini: Turning to a different subject, now that you have retired from running Gulf 2000, after thirty years: how did you come up with the idea? And what is its future?
Gary Sick: Let me give you a very brief description of my experience with Gulf 2000. Basically, I worked for the Ford foundation, then I quit and decided to work for myself. George Perkovich at the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, VA, called me in about 1992 and said that he did not believe that the Persian Gulf was getting the scholarly attention it deserved. He asked if I had any suggestions. I asked him for a small grant and spent a few months researching various possibilities.
One of the things I learned was that scholars in various Gulf countries seldom talked to each other. I proposed a series of conferences consisting almost entirely of scholars from each of the Gulf states. He agreed and gave me a grant to cover conference costs. I called the project Gulf2000 since I thought it would probably end in a few years, and that seemed suitably forward-looking. We did hold a series of conferences, mostly in Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean countries that built a personal relationship among regional scholars and produced a series of scholarly books consisting of the papers written for the meetings.
The internet and email emerged during this same time, and the members of our group began communicating with each other via this new form of communication. I opened up the project to other regional scholars, and within a relatively short time, scholars from all over the world began to use it. At the turn of the millennium, we renamed it G2K, and it became a useful virtual meeting place for Gulf experts, with a membership of about 1,600, which was supported by a series of major foundations via grants to Columbia University, where I taught.
By the time that G2K moved from Columbia to the Sage Institute in Virginia in September of 2024, it had more than tripled my original estimate of its sell-by date and was still going strong.