the great challenge of diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest ways.

Today's guest has practiced American diplomacy at the highest levels and turns his experienced eye to the challenges facing the United States in the second Trump administration.

He's Frank Lowenstein, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music softens) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is an old friend.

Frank Lowenstein was the special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration, and also served previously as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when then Senator John Kerry was chairman.

Frank is joining us today from Washington DC.

Frank, it's great to see you.

- Oh, it's great to be here, Jim.

Thanks so much for having me.

And I'll just put in a brief plug for Jim as a foreign relations committee staffer.

He was the most intelligent and honorable guy that I ever had the honor to work with over the years.

So, Jim, thanks for having me.

- The check is in the mail, Frank, I appreciate that.

We want to talk to you about so much of what's going on in Washington today and in the world, and in particular in the early months of the second Trump administration.

What can we glean about American foreign policy?

We're gonna get to the bread and butter of the Middle East eventually, but let's start much more broadly.

Three months into this second Trump presidency, what's your overall assessment of the president's approach to the world and foreign policy generally?

- Well, I think that the challenge for the president internationally is that he really doesn't have any interest in building any kind of coalitions or alliances to address some of the problems that the United States faces.

And that was really the core of Secretary Kerry's approach.

How many people can we bring to the table on our side?

Also, I think one of the flaws with the Trump administration approach is they don't really seem to understand the politics of the parties on the other side.

So their approach is really just to threaten.

They're threatening Iran, they're threatening Hamas, they're threatening China.

And at the end of the day, these are countries that are not going to accede to those kind of threats, you know, readily.

And I don't know that the Trump administration has demonstrated the wherewithal to enter into the kind of give and take negotiations that Kerry was so well known for, and that, really, I think the situation today calls for.

- Yeah, so I think that the Trump administration and President Trump in particular would say that, you know, just getting people in a room and then talking isn't gonna solve problems.

We're gonna talk a little bit about the Iran deal that Secretary Kerry negotiated while you were still at State, but there's also negotiations right now between the United States and Iran around this very issue.

Can you speak a little bit to sort of how those two different approaches to really complex technical issues, not just manifest themselves, but how do they actually lead to different outcomes?

- Yeah, it's a great question, Jim.

And I think it goes right to the heart of whether these negotiations with Iran can be successful or not.

The team that Kerry pulled together to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal was incredibly large and had a lot of very sophisticated players involved.

Ernie Moniz, the Secretary of Energy, and a whole slew of, it was really a whole of government approach.

How are we gonna address it at very technical level what the Iran nuclear program, you know, is attempting to do?

And how we can put it in a safe box, right?

So that we can have this diplomatic answer to a very, very difficult question.

I just don't think the Trump administration has anywhere near the wherewithal to negotiate a deal of that complexity, right?

It was also a multifaceted deal.

Obviously, it was the Perm Five plus one that negotiated that deal with Iran.

And again, you know, it goes to the question of, do you bring others to the table with you to strengthen your negotiating position?

Trump is really going it alone when it comes to Iran, and that really sort of reduces our leverage over the Iranians, especially given that the Russians and the Chinese and a lot of others are really prepared to align themselves with Iran to defend Iran's interest in a way that may be counter to our own.

So whereas in the past, we had the Russians and the Chinese at the table helping us to negotiate this deal.

So we knew they weren't going behind our back, right, to tell the Iranians, "Hey, you don't have to give into this demand or that demand."

They we were all on the same page with that.

And I think we're seeing the sort of the opposite of that dynamic now where it's just Trump saying, "I'm gonna bomb you if you don't accede to my demands," and it's just hard to see how that's gonna work.

- So really quickly on just staying on Iran for just another moment here.

The deal that Secretary Kerry negotiated effectively froze and monitored the Iranian nuclear program well short of their ability to have enough enriched uranium to produce a bomb.

Those restrictions have been gone since the first Trump presidency.

How likely are we now to get a deal that will be as good as or better than what had previously been in place?

- That's a great question, Jim.

You've really gone right to the heart of the matter.

If Trump were a sophisticated player in all of this, I would imagine he would take the JCPOA, which is the deal that Kerry and others negotiated and use that as a baseline, right, to expand upon it, to improve it, to extend all the deadlines.

I think one of the big concerns with the original deal was that it was time limited, right?

And so what I think the Trump administration would do if they were wise is not to try to recreate that entire incredibly complex technical deal, but just rather look to extend out the timeframes.

The problem with it is fundamentally that the Kerry approach was limited to the nuclear deal, right?

It was, what are we gonna do about your enrichment program?

What Trump is talking about now, and I think a lot of this comes from the Israelis is, we're gonna end your ballistic missile program.

We're gonna end your support for proxies in the region.

You know, just sort the whole range of things we would like to see Iran do differently.

The problem with that is that's going to require major concessions to the Iranians, right?

You're going to have to remove all of the sanctions in order to get that kind of deal done if it was even possible.

And, again, things like no more support for proxies are difficult to monitor more so than how much uranium you're enriching in any given, you know, week or period of time, right?

So the question in my mind is, are you willing, as the Trump administration, to make any concessions to the Iranians when it comes to relief of all of these sanctions?

Will the Iranians ever trust us, right?

Because Kerry negotiated a deal which would've resulted in significant sanctions relief for the Iranians, and then Trump came in and pulled out of the deal.

So at the end of the day, Iran agreed to all of these restrictions without getting what they would've thought of as the benefit of the bargain for them, which is sanctions, really.

So it's very difficult for me to imagine how the Iranians would trust Trump to follow through on removal of all of the sanctions and then that they would trust subsequent administrations to stand by that deal.

So there's a really difficult question here, you know, in terms of the absolute absence of trust on both sides, and the demands that the Trump guys are making relative to what's realistic to expect out of the Iranian.

So I don't think there's a real high likelihood that this is going to work.

I think what they may be able to do is something along the lines of what Biden did, right?

Now, Biden didn't want to go back into the Iran nuclear deal, right?

He had every chance to do that.

And so I don't think they liked the politics of that in the Biden administration.

I think there was a lot of domestic political blowback against the Iran deal.

Basically, you know, people that didn't really understand what it did and the requirements of making that kind of a deal, right?

So if they agreed to was a temporary extension where Iran would agree to limit its uranium enrichment, and they'd get some limited sanction relief.

You know, what Trump did when Biden did that was he criticized Biden for having released some small amount of money to the Iranians as part of this quid pro quo.

So now Trump's gonna come in and, you know, he's got this record of criticizing Biden for having made small concessions down.

And how is he going to make much, much larger concessions to the Iranians and justify that politically?

So I think it's, so a short-term deal may work.

A long-term deal, I think, is a real long shot.

- So, Frank, can you give us sort of a broad view of the president's foreign policy tactics and methodology?

A theory of the game, as it were, that would help us understand what he is trying to do.

- Yeah, okay.

I'll do my best.

I think his approach is very similar to how he approached doing real estate deals, right?

Which is that he will make, you know, very, very strong demands, and he'll threaten the other side and hope that he can extract concessions out of them that way.

And I think that's largely what he's been trying to do around the world.

He threatens the Chinese.

Obviously, he's threatened Hamas.

He's threatened the Iranians repeatedly.

And the result of that is you really put the other side in a box.

So maybe in the United States, if you're dealing with a contractor on one of your real estate deals, he doesn't have the wherewithal to go fight you in court.

And so maybe you can just sort of extract concessions that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to by threatening legal action and by making outlandish demands.

I just don't think there's a lot of evidence that sort of approach works internationally, especially, and I emphasize this, when we're going it alone, right?

At a time when the United States is receding from the world, the idea that we can just threaten the other side, make outlandish demands, and get them to agree to things that would've been previously unthinkable.

And because Trump has said something so much more outlandish, they seem reasonable.

For instance, on Gaza Strip, right, Trump is threatening, essentially, to remove all the Gazans from Gaza and threatening to, you know, bring hell to Gaza if they don't accede to his demand.

The problem is Gaza's already hell as far as those people are concerned.

And they won't make that kind of a deal without, you know, getting major concessions that Trump has no interest in giving.

So, I guess short way to think of it is that he's got an America-first agenda where he's trying to bully other countries and parties into doing what he wants.

And there's just very little evidence, you know, that kind of approach is gonna work.

- So you mentioned Gaza.

Where do things stand now in Israel's war on Gaza?

And keep in mind that we're taping this in late April.

- Yeah, well, we're at an interesting juncture right now.

The original deal negotiated by Biden, and Trump really got over the hump with the Israelis, had what we call phase two where there's supposed to be negotiations on how to finally end the war, right, and get all of the hostages back.

Problem is that Netanyahu doesn't wanna negotiate an end to the war.

He just wants to get the hostages back.

And so we're in a position where he's not willing to offer Hamas what the original ceasefire required of him, right, which is negotiations to really end the war.

And is instead saying just give me more hostages and then in return for an extension of the deadline, right?

And so I just don't think that there's any basis for a deal there that's really gonna resolve this conflict because, you know, I just don't think that's what Netanyahu I was interested in for his own political purposes.

We had an interesting negotiation with Hamas and Israel in 2014 during the war that broke out there after our two-state negotiations failed.

And what I really learned from that is that the Israelis have no interest in negotiating any kind of outcome with Hamas, right?

They view it as a sort of an insult to have to even talk to Hamas.

The only reason why they're entertaining any of this is because the hostages are out there.

But do not expect the Israelis, certainly not this Netanyahu government, to make any of the kind of concessions that Hamas would require in order to truly end this war.

Now, at the same time, neither side really seems eager to go back to war just now, right?

So we'll see where we are when this airs in six weeks or whatever it is.

But I think that there's a point in time where the absence of the war becomes more and more difficult to restart the war, right?

And so I think we could see this period extending out for weeks or even months, because, again, Trump doesn't want the war to resume.

He doesn't want Israel to have to make any concessions to Hamas, but he also doesn't want the war to resume.

Remember, his narrative politically is, "I'm the ender of foreign wars," right, and "I'm the guy that gets the hostages back," right?

So you're in a situation where he can neither end the war nor get the hostages back, but doesn't want to give up on either one of those propositions.

So that's why we're in this extended interregnum.

My guess is that the war will resume at some point over the course of the next few months.

And what I'm really concerned about there, and what I think everybody should be concerned about is the plight of 2 million perfectly innocent civilians in Gaza.

I mean, oftentimes it gets lost in the discussion of, "Oh, Israel has a right to defend itself," or, you know, there's obviously been a lot of domestic political turmoil around all this.

And I think it sort of misses the point at one level, which is that this is not about Israel and Hamas for the 2 million people that live in Gaza.

This is about their day-to-day lives where they wanna live, where they wanna raise their families.

They wanna have an actual life, and they're getting pushed around the board like chess pieces.

And increasing, what the Israelis are trying to do now is to implement the Trump vision, right, which is really to resettle Gaza, to turn it into the Cancun or the Riviera of the Middle East by getting all the Palestinians to leave voluntarily, but there's nowhere for them to go.

Most of them don't want to actually leave their homeland.

So it's not a realistic plan to end the war.

What it is, is carte blanche for the Israelis to destroy Gaza completely, to put the people there in such an unbelievable extremis that maybe they start to reconsider and think about leaving for somewhere else.

But that policy will result in tens of thousands or more, I mean, there was almost 50,000 Palestinians killed in the first phase of this war.

They're talking about doubling down on the prior approach, right?

So destroy everything that hasn't been destroyed, put the people in an even worse situation.

Maybe restrict humanitarian assistance, right?

And then hope that they're all going to leave, which would normally have been considered an illegal operation, right, under international law.

But Trump's given them now the imprimatur of pursuing this as if it is a valid goal on the ground.

So I hope that the rest of the world, and maybe the United States at some point will stand up and say, "Look," you know, "the civilians in Gaza had nothing to do with starting this war.

They're not members of Hamas.

They want nothing to do them.

They're protesting against Hamas.

We have to take care to make sure that they're not put in any worse of a situation than they might otherwise be put in."

And I think sometimes Israeli's attitude has been just the opposite.

Try to pressure Hamas by putting an enormous amount of pressure on civilians.

- You know, Frank, I'm not sure how to, I'm not sure what the question is here, so I'm just gonna go for a second.

But you've spoken elsewhere about Secretary Kerry's view that our foreign policy issues are others' domestic policy issues.

But in your sort of unpacking of the current conflict between Israel and Gaza, we've gotta consider domestic politics in Gaza, domestic politics in Israel, domestic politics in the United States, and domestic politics in the neighboring region.

How as a diplomat, and you're an experienced, seasoned diplomat, how as a diplomat do you navigate all of those shoals while you're trying to move towards what I think everybody would say the goal should be a just enduring settlement?

- Yeah, absolutely, Jim.

It's a good question.

And one of the ways Kerry used to approach this when we would travel to these various places to do whatever diplomatic effort we were involved in.

On the way over, he wasn't interested in a lot of technical background information on what the conflict was.

He was interested in the domestic politics of the person we were talking to.

So we'd go to Afghanistan, and on the way there, we would spend 10 hours on an airplane, and half of that time, you know, talking about the business, half the time would be spent talking about Karzai's politics.

And Kerry would want to go into incredibly granular detail.

Who does he rely on for his support, right?

Every leader, whether democratically elected or otherwise, has a primary goal of staying in power, right?

And Kerry always recognized that.

I think it really helped that he was a senator for all of those years, and he understood that so many of the decisions that he made were based on politics for any politician, right?

So you go to know Karzai, or we were in Sudan and Syria and quite a bit in the Middle East, of course, and always his question was the same.

Whether it's Bashar al-Assad or Karzai or any other, who are they relying on for their power?

And really, Jim, further to the sort of narrative of your show here, what's the story we can tell them, right, about how this is going to be beneficial to them in terms of their own politics?

And that's a different kind of approach than the one that a lot of of presidents and secretaries have taken, and certainly a different one than the one Trump has taken.

But yeah, we would've polling data at our, we would ask, you know, the teams at State, like, hey, we need to understand, you know, what's the latest polling, and who are the power brokers behind the scene?

Like, what's the infrastructure of power here?

Is it warlords, is it oligarchs?

Whoever the case may be, there is always folks behind the scenes that are really pulling the strings, right?

So what is it gonna take?

What are they asking for?

And then what are we gonna be able to give this leader in return that he can take back to them?

What's the story he's going to be able to tell them about how this is good for the country and it's good for their interests as the folks who hold the power over there?

So yeah, it made for a very different kind of conversation that we would have in those meetings than the ones that I think a lot of diplomats.

But we wouldn't go in there and hector them about, you know, the standard US talking points.

Because Kerry was always like, you know, "What if somebody came to the United States and told us, 'Hey, your elections weren't free and fair.

You need to change, or we're gonna cut off assistance.'"

Our attitude would be, "Hey, man, this is our country," right?

"We have some problems, but we're doing the best we can.

But don't come here and lecture me on my own po-" And a lot of people just go, and it feels like the right thing to do.

Tell them where we stand on democracy, tell them where we stand on human rights, make clear what the American position is on all this.

Instead, Kerry would go in and say, "Of course, you understand we stand for this, this, and this.

But here's how I can make this work.

Here's how I can make your political interests and mine align together so that we can try to find a solution that will work for both sides going forward."

But he was always willing to empathize with the other side.

He could put himself in the shoes of the other party, as distasteful as that often was.

We were in Sudan with some, you know, these guys are genocidal war criminals.

We never actually met with the actual war criminals, but their seconds in command.

And they were incredibly creepy, horrible people.

And Kerry would be like, "Look, I don't care what their story is.

I care about whether they're gonna make a deal here that's gonna save," you know, in the case of Sudan probably millions of lives.

So it'd be like, okay, so who is it that you care about, and how can we make this work for you politically, and also really as a narrative matter?

Everybody wants to be able to say, "I'm doing this in the best interest of the country.

I achieve this for my people and for my nation," right?

So you have to give them a victory out of the narrative of the deal.

And I just don't think Trump's willing to do anything like that.

- So, Frank, talk about the president's policies toward Ukraine and Russia.

(Jim laughs) - [Frank] Yeah.

- How long do we have, right?

(Jim laughs) - Yeah, you know, again, I think this is another big sort of meta narrative of the Trump administration is what his goals are in terms of his own narrative, which is "I'm the ender of wars," right, "I'm a peacemaker."

Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize.

No, literally, like I think there's folks in his administration who are actively sort of working on how to get that done, right?

So he wants to achieve big things that he can say, "Hey, I ended this war and here's the peace deal that I deserve credit for as the president," right?

So that's his want.

On the other hand, he's got, you know, no wherewithal to really work through the difficult issues that will be required to make the deal.

So what we've seen in Russia and Ukraine is that he goes to the Ukrainians and he says, "Gimme all your natural resources," right?

You know, it's very interesting.

I was at the Munich Security Conference and I heard JD Vance speak one day, and the next day, Zelenskyy spoke.

And Vance got up there and said, basically, you know, "The United States, we have no interest in advancing democracy or human rights around the world.

We have an interest in advancing an America-first agenda," right?

And then you had Zelenskyy got up and said, "We can't rely on the United States anymore.

We need a European army to protect us," right?

So at the same time, Trump is asking for so much out of the other side, he's willing to offer less than presidents have ever really been willing to offer, and he's really receded from a position of influence on a number of different realms.

And so the result of that is that there is no coherent plan behind all of this other than, "I wanna make peace.

I'm gonna try to bully both sides into accepting that.

And if they won't, then I'm gonna walk away.

Take my ball and go home."

Or in the case of Israel and Iran, perhaps authorized Iranian military strikes.

- Frank, you are in regular contact with people around the world.

You mentioned you were at Munich Security Conference.

I know you've traveled extensively internationally.

What are you hearing from people about their reaction to and response to this pivot in American foreign policy, and essentially what seems to be this great withdrawal of the United States from really important values and institutions in the world?

- Yeah, well, it's incredibly concerning to much of the world.

Although, you know, again, it's important if you travel around, you realize that when we talk about the world, we're often talking about Europe, right, and the Middle East and Russia, Ukraine, that sort of thing.

There's really a whole global south here that's more than half of the world's population that never saw things the way we saw them, right?

And so I think that there's been over time a realignment where Russia and China and, you know, Iran and North Korea are really trying to create a separate world order altogether, right, where they're impervious to US sanctions, where they'll trade amongst themselves and they will reject, you know, any of the norms that we created through international institutions like the United Nations after World War II.

So they're already setting up basically a parallel world order here.

And what Trump has done is really accelerated that process and also driven more countries into the arms of the Chinese and the Russians, because we're just receiving, we're taking all our foreign assistance off the table.

Now, we didn't do foreign assistance just out of the goodness of our hearts, Jim, as you very well recall, you know.

Kerry thought very strongly, and I think a lot of us do, that this was an instrument of US power, right?

It was soft power for the United States.

We stood for these values and we put aid behind it, and we put all of our, you know, economic power behind it, and that helped to get results for the United States on some very, very challenging problems over the course of the last years.

Now, we pull back, we're not giving out any more foreign assistance, we're not providing the kind of military backup that we would've provided.

Certainly, we're questioning whether we're gonna be a part of NATO any longer.

So what that does is it, so not only have we alienated the entire global south, but some of our allies that we relied most strongly on over the years have now begun to say, "We're gonna have to go it alone.

We can't rely on the United States to protect us any longer."

There's talk of Germany re-arming for the first time since World War II.

You know, why is that?

This is counter to the very way the entire German society has been set up since World War II.

And the answer is because everybody wants them to, because they have the most power there because we can no longer rely on the United States.

Now, we're gonna put more money into defense.

We're gonna put more money, you know, behind arms, we're gonna create militaries where there weren't militaries before.

and the result of that is just that the US gets marginalized.

We have less and less and less influence.

So the flip side of America first is America alone, right?

And that's really the direction that Trump tried to head in the first term.

But now that he's come back, he's done all of this stuff even more adamantly than he has in the past.

So I think it's going to take a very long time before the world will ever trust us to play the leadership role that they've been accustomed to us playing since World War II.

And I think that's really gonna hurt us interests and values and the American people over time.

- Yeah.

You know, at the end of the day, does this make the United States more or less safe?

Does make the world more or less stable in your estimation?

- Oh, well, I think it absolutely makes us less safe.

And I'm sure it makes the world less stable because, you know, we provided a lot of that stability around the world, and we no longer are even attempting to play that role, right?

I mean, I thought it was interesting that one of the first agencies that Marco Rubio shut down bureaus in the State Department was Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, right?

And another reason why is because he doesn't think it's the United States' job to promote democracy anymore or to promote the rule of law or to promote human rights.

So if we're not going to be doing those things, right, in accordance with a system that we set up, we set up the whole United Nations system and all the economic treaties and alliances in order to advance US interests in a way that didn't require United States troops on the ground everywhere, right?

So there was a sense of collective security, but we were the backbone for that.

We were the ones who provided the muscle behind that.

We were the ones that kept order, that imposed this world order on everybody else in conjunction with us.

If we're not doing that any longer, then there's a sense that says might makes right now.

So invasions of other territory, right?

Even during George Bush, remember the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, and we said, "You can't invade foreign territory, or we're gonna step in and kick you out."

So the next country that thinks about invading says, "Well, hang on a second.

We might be at war with the United States."

I don't think any of that's gonna happen anymore.

No one thinks that they go invade another country that Trump's gonna come in and somehow or other stop them from doing that.

So that's going to increase instability.

The sense that might makes right.

That if you can impose your will on somebody else, you know, go for it.

We're not gonna interfere in that.

And so I think you're gonna have more and more of these conflicts emerging around the world that we effectively put a lid on, you know, with our leadership and the threat of force and the actions at the United Nations and in conjunction with a lot of our other allies.

So, yeah, I think it's gonna be a more dangerous world, Jim.

- Frank, we got about 30 seconds left.

You've been a experienced diplomat, and you've worked in these issues for more than 20 years.

At this moment in American history, what's your principle concern and what's your greatest hope?

30 seconds.

- My principle concern is the economy.

Honestly, I think that that we're not only damaging our economy in a way that that could take, you know, years and years, but we're damaging the global economy, right?

And that's going to be, I think, something that's gonna have an impact on the day-to-day lives of people all around the world for as far as the eye can see.

So that's what I'm most concerned about.

What I'm most hopeful about is that once people see what the Trump administration stands for and Orban and some of the other sort of right-leaning autocrat types, that they'll realize that that's not the way they wanna organize their society.

That there's going to be some blowback to this movement, to the right internationally as the people see that these policies don't actually benefit them.

So that's my cause for optimism over time.

- Frank Lowenstein, I always feel smarter after I'm done talking to you.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if want to wanna know more about "Story the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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