The Arab states are running scared of Trump, Ian.

They're either afraid of him, or they want something from him, and/or they're persuaded that he is the last, best hope to try to contain, constrain, curtail the Netanyahu government.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And just days ago, just days ahead of the second anniversary of Israel's war with Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made his fourth visit to the White House since President Trump returned to office.

The two leaders unveiled a proposal to end the war in Gaza and demanded that Hamas accept it.

On the show today, I'll ask, how far is too far?

How far is Israel willing to pursue its military goals in Gaza and its territorial ambitions in the West Bank?

How far is Hamas willing to push the suffering of the Palestinian people to continue its fight against Israel?

And how far is the international community willing to go to isolate Israel for what some of its closest allies have condemned as a genocide?

I'll be joined by a man with decades of experience negotiating for peace in the Middle East, talk about a thankless job, former top U.S.

diplomat and Carnegie Peace Fellow, Aaron David Miller.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

What do you know about apologies, Donald?

That they usually cost a lot of money.

But this isn't about me.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and... "It's like water off a duck's back."

That according to The Guardian, is how one young man in the Israeli city of Sderot recently described the mounting international condemnation of Israel's Gaza campaign.

And it's a sentiment that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keen to promote as more Western nations move to recognize the state of Palestine and as Israel faces arms embargoes from the likes of Japan, Italy and France, potentially even the United Kingdom.

During his United Nations address last month to a mostly empty chamber, Prime Minister Netanyahu tried his best to turn down the temperature.

Nah, just kidding.

So here's another message to those Western leaders.

Israel will not allow you to shove a terrorist state down our throats.

We will not commit national suicide because you don't have the guts to face down the hostile media and anti-Semitic mobs demanding Israel's blood.

Far from buckling under international pressure, Netanyahu is escalating his military, stepping up its occupation of Gaza City, and he's weighing plans to annex parts of the West Bank.

Even so, Bibi has begun to acknowledge that Israel is facing a, quote, "kind of isolation that could last for decades."

"Israel has no choice," he recently said, "but to become a super Sparta, a militarized, self-sufficient economy that can stand alone."

Can Israel make it on its own?

There's growing evidence that the Gaza War, the longest and most expensive in Israel's history, is taking a real economic toll.

In 2024, Israel's economy grew by just one percent, its weakest performance in decades, not counting the pandemic years.

The European Union, Israel's biggest trading partner, recently proposed sanctions that would partially suspend its free trade agreement with Israel.

In August, Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, announced it was divesting parts of its portfolio in Israel due to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

But how can Israel ever be alone, you ask, when it has the backing of the United States?

On the one hand, yes, absolutely.

On the other hand, Israel is no longer the only American ally in the Middle East.

President Trump has made it a priority to cultivate much closer ties with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Case in point, when Netanyahu visited the White House in late September, Trump made him get on the phone, the Oval Office phone, and apologize to his Qatari counterpart for launching missiles into Doha earlier in the month.

In short, with the Iran threat diminished, it's not hard to imagine a near future where the United States loses patience with Israel's regional elbow throwing and tightens the tap on that military aid.

How likely is that outcome and how isolated can Israel afford to become?

The next few months will be critical in answering those questions.

Joining me now to discuss all that and more, Aaron David Miller.

He's a former State Department Middle East negotiator who has served under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Aaron David Miller, welcome to GZERO World.

You know, it's a pleasure to be here.

I'm a big fan.

It's kind of you to say.

Look, it's a big week for you and I to have this conversation.

This week, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu met for the fourth time this year in the White House.

And that, of course, led to a significant announcement of an achievement forward in negotiations on Gaza.

You thought it was very, very low likelihood that Hamas would accept the terms.

It was going to be more of a yes, but explain what you mean by that.

Hamas is going to come back not with a clean yes, they're going to come back with the equivalent of what Benjamin Netanyahu offered up, which on reflection is a yes, but.

It's just that working these things through is a galactic lift.

There are no timetables, there are no maps.

Every one of these points is a universe of headache, complexity, and potential argument.

So Trump will have to decide, if Hamas comes back with a "yes, but" he's going to have to make a decision.

Is this a "no" and then we'll lose the forces of Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF on Gaza City and much else in Gaza?

Or is Trump open to additional negotiations?

That's where we stand.

What's the actual gap between what the Gulf Arabs had accepted and what Bibi and Trump presented on Monday?

I think the key point is the issue of Israeli withdrawal, which is now conditional on timetables for decommissioning, de-radicalizing, de-militarizing Hamas as a military force.

And it seems to me that that was, I think, built in to the Israeli calculation, and it was probably a demand that Netanyahu made.

The Israelis, in the wake of October 7, have a fundamentally different conception now of border security.

It's not just preemption and prevention.

It's actually physically being in places where their adversaries operate.

You see it in Gaza.

You see it in the West Bank, where they are now more militarized than at any point since the second intifada in 2000, 2002.

You see it in Lebanon, where they still occupy five or six high points.

You see it in Syria, where they want to turn most of the area southwest of Damascus into a no-go zone.

You saw it in Doha, when they tried to eliminate, weeks ago, much of the - - political leadership of Hamas.

Given that, Aaron, I mean, the Gulf states had agreed to a different formulation when they met with Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

And yet, now that Trump has announced this deal that he's worked out with the Israeli Prime Minister, it appears that the Gulf states, as well as America's allies across the West, are all saying, "We're on board."

Was this masterful diplomacy by the Israeli Prime Minister?

He clearly played this very smartly.

He has reframed, redefined Trump's 20 points on core issues in terms that make it possible for him to make the argument that in fact he got just about everything that he wanted.

In fact he said in his statement that Trump's plan aligned, I don't think he said perfectly, with the four or five objectives that the full Israeli cabinet has now approved.

So again, I think we're in for a prolonged negotiation if Trump is prepared to accept the Hamas "yes, but" as not a no.

Because I mean if he does not accept that, if he takes the yes but as a no, then he has the same problem with the Gulf Arabs, does he not?

Which is, you know, they sat him down and said we're prepared to leave the Abraham Accords, the UAE specifically, unless you get to this outcome.

That's not the outcome that Trump presently has gotten to.

When you look at the exponential rise of Palestinian deaths, mostly civilians of Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe that now exists there, call it malnutrition, famine, food insecurity, whatever you want, it's horrible.

Not a single cost or consequence has been imposed by any Arab state on Israel or on the United States, which has enabled an acquiesce in Benjamin Netanyahu's tactics and strategy in Gaza.

Not a single one.

The Israelis struck Doha, hosting America's largest military base.

But he apologized, Aaron.

He said he wouldn't do it again.

It may cost him something in Israeli politics.

I guess my point is the Arab states are running scared of Trump, Ian.

They're either afraid of him or they want something from him and/or they're persuaded that he is the last best hope to try to contain, constrain, curtail the Netanyahu government.

They've done nothing, it seems to me, given what the Israelis have done and what this administration has acquiesced in to impose any costs or consequences.

And you could add to that the three European powers that the Israelis care most about, the French, the Brits, and the Germans.

The Germans imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel, and yet they're buying $4 billion in aero-defense systems from the Israelis.

Performative virtue signaling.

And I take it you would include in that ineffective performative virtue signaling all of the recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state by many of those allies over the past week.

I would.

For some reason, Donald Trump has made a judgment that he's not yet ready to actually impose on Netanyahu serious costs and consequences.

And Netanyahu, I think, got out of Washington in better shape, perhaps, than he had imagined.

So Trump did publicly not threaten, but said, as explicitly as I've seen him make a statement towards the Israeli Prime Minister, that Israel will not annex the West Bank.

Yes.

Period.

End of story.

He said that.

I mean, implied that he was running Israel.

So that clearly seems to be a red line for the US President.

Why there and and why the flexibility on Gaza?

As far as annexation is concerned, I'm, you know, I have to say I'm really not impressed because he has presided in the last nine months.

He has reversed all of the, I would say, largely performative actions of the Biden administration with respect to Israeli actions on the West Bank.

Biden sanctioned Israeli settlers and entities.

Biden had a very strong, tough position, rhetorically at least, on Israeli settlement construction.

Trump reversed all of that.

And he has acquiesced in what I could only describe to you as de facto annexation.

It really doesn't matter whether or not the Israelis, well, it does matter if they pronounced at, were annexing part or all of the West Bank.

It matters to the Gulf states, clearly.

It does, but the de facto process of annexation, the administrative changes, the facts on the ground that the Minister of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich, has engineered is probably binding most of Area C, which is where the settlements are, the nature preserves, the military zone, that's 60% of the West Bank, to Israel proper.

So not impressed that Trump basically said, "You will not annex the West Bank."

I think even Netanyahu knows that's a bridge too far.

Look, what we have is a level of impunity.

We have no consequences thus far from the Americans.

We have the Gulf states running scared of some combination of the U.S.

and Israel.

Having said that, the Israeli people don't want to be isolated, and there have been some measures taken outside of this process.

I look at what seems to be a coming removal of Israel from Eurovision.

I see debates about taking the Israelis out of FIFA.

Of course, I also see an incredible change in popular support away from Israel towards the Palestinians in our own country, Aaron.

So I'm wondering, first of all, do you think these things matter to the Israeli prime minister?

And secondly, even if they don't, do they matter to Israel?

Yeah.

I don't think they really matter, and they haven't mattered for quite a while to Benjamin Netanyahu.

He has a constituency of one in the United States.

It's Donald Trump.

And if I'm correct, at elections, government may not go to term October 2026.

I think we're talking elections in the spring of 2026.

You need three months to prepare.

If he announced elections next month, October, you'd already almost be into 2026.

He is planning his election campaign.

That means keeping Donald Trump, not just on his side, but as an active supporter, as Netanyahu at some point runs his election campaign.

I'm not sure it matters to him.

If I were an Israeli, it would matter to me.

But I'll tell you, looking out right now, the three elements of what constitutes an American ally-let's just talk about America now.

Value affinity, high coincidence of values, high coincidence of interest, not strict, but high coincidence, strong base of domestic support.

I think you can make a fairly compelling case that all three of these elements are increasingly fraught under stress and pressure.

It's not time for what I call the cosmic oy vey, the end, somehow the end of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, because has it affected policy?

No.

But they have a lot to do with the eroding Israeli brand and Israeli policies.

The Pew polls, they all suggested turmoil on the campus, which frankly and to this day, I'm not sure I can fully explain.

I mean, we were in a 20-year war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We killed thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, civilians.

And yet you saw none of what you saw on many, many campuses throughout the United States as a consequence of what the Israelis were doing in Gaza.

I think Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, frankly, as a member of the American Jewish community, I think that they're making Jews less, not more secure for any number of reasons.

So the end of the Israeli brand, the end of Israel as a morally or ethically tethered society perceived by most Americans, different political systems, but more or less like Americans, one of the handful of countries that have maintained their democratic character continuously since the end of the Second World War.

I can't pronounce the end, but I'll tell you, the headlines look bad and the trend lines right now look worse.

I'm of course, as someone who grew up with a lot of the same texts and tracts that you did, think about indispensable America, think about the beacon on the hill, leading by example, soft power, all of these things that we've talked about for so many decades.

And yet it's not what the United States stands for today.

Right?

I mean, the United States today stands for power, stands for you do it our way or else, market power, military power, oil power, technology power, you name it.

And I mean, could you not make the argument that actually Israel in its own backyard, in its region, is kind of just following along what the new American playbook actually is?

I mean, I think there's a lot of mirror imaging going on here.

I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu, he's tethered his future, I think, to Donald Trump, which is why the single most important accomplishment on Monday was an Israeli prime minister saying, I support your plan as a, quote, critical step in ending the war in Gaza and expanding the peace.

I mean, don't blame Joe Biden.

He couldn't get that out of Netanyahu.

And Donald Trump did it.

Without conditioning or restricting U.S.

military assistance to Israel, without voting for a Security Council resolution, our own or somebody else's, critical of Israel, without reaching out to Palestinians, without unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood, he didn't have to exert that sort of pressure.

It is the fear of Benjamin Netanyahu that Donald Trump-he knows what Trump is capable of, because he sees part of himself in Trump.

He needs Trump, and Trump, to a degree that I can't entirely explain, somehow, transactionally or instrumentally, still believes he needs Benjamin Netanyahu.

After all, Netanyahu gave Trump an extraordinary gift.

A 12-day Israeli war against Iran led to a decision by an American president to strike Iranian nuclear sites without a major regional war, and it would appear without immediate cost or consequence.

That was a gift.

That was because of what the Israelis have done.

And by the way, former Biden administration officials, no point in mentioning names, I think also understood that Israel's newfound escalation dominance, the fact that the Israelis for the first time in their history control the pace, the focus, the intensity of their military conflict with all of their adversaries can escalate when they want to without fear of counter-escalation.

In a way, Biden rode that escalation dominance and Trump's riding it now.

At what point will Trump conclude that for him, because he measures, if Trump's all about the me, not the we, at some point he's going to conclude, maybe it's only, what, 10 months in, that you've got to translate that escalation dominance, that military power, into political achievement.

And if he can benefit from that somehow, Nobel Peace Prize, regional peace, Israeli-Saudi normalization, with or without Benjamin Netanyahu, I might add, I don't think he cares, he'll go for it.

It's just right now, he seems to be riding the Netanyahu train and not looking back.

Aaron David Miller, thanks so much for joining us.

Ian, it was a pleasure.

Enjoyed the conversation.

And now to Puppet Regime, where we've got an exclusive look inside the Oval Office as President Trump facilitated a totally voluntary call between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Qatari counterpart.

>> Hello.

>> Hello, Qatar.

I have someone here who would like to say something to you.

>> No, we will not do any more business with you or with your family or with your extended family or with your administration members' families until Israel apologizes for... >> Well, as it happens... Come on, do it.

>> Hello, it's Netanyahu here.

Come on, do it.

Look, I'm sorry.

You were so offended when we bombed you.

I don't think that's an apology.

What do you know about apologies, darling?

That day usually cost a lot of money.

But this isn't about me.

Can you just do it?

Okay.

I'm very sorry that you were hiding territory of your country directly under members of the Hamas.

>> This is not going the way you thought it would.

Look, baby, I asked almost nothing of you, okay?

And by almost nothing, I mean basically nothing.

So could you please just do this one thing very strongly?

Okay.

I'm sorry we bombed you.

And I swear we'll never ever do something like that again.

Wow, that was great.

>> Is he crossing his fingers?

What?

Please, baby would never do something like that behind my back.

But... baby!

Puppet Regime!

That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

If you like what you've seen, or even if you didn't, but you owe the government of Qatar an apology, we can get them on the phone for you.

Why don't you take a look at gzeromedia.com [Music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, health care, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... [Music]