Ambassador Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Israelis “clearly” had “groupthink” prior to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and suggested that everything Israel “needed to know to avoid the surprise was available.”

Speaking at a WINEP event on Thursday to promote his new book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World, the former senior policy advisor in the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations, said: “Groupthink … is the most destructive thing to good statecraft. … The Israelis clearly had it prior to Oct. 7.” 

Ross continued: “Any time you suffer strategic surprise, it’s never a function of lacking information. Everything that you needed to know to avoid the surprise was available. But a prism is created by groupthink, and everything you interpret through that prism.”

In the war that followed, Ross asserted that Israel failed to properly identify its objectives. “Oftentimes we end up picking the wrong objective, and it’s because we don’t understand the situation, or we have a set of political pressures,” he said. “[Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu established very quickly ‘total victory’ as his objective. … Total victory is a slogan. It’s not an objective.”

“What should have happened at the time,” he suggested, “were specific questions. How much of Hamas do we have to destroy? How much of its military infrastructure, how much of the tunnels? What do we need to achieve in terms of their weakening to then be able to create, not on our own, but with others, an alternative to them? Because you can talk about eradicating Hamas, and that’s an ideology you won’t succeed. You can talk about, you know, a certain level of defeat, but if you don’t have an alternative, then you leave a vacuum in which they can come back, or you’re stuck there forever.”

Tom Donilon, a co-panelist and former national security advisor to President Barack Obama, said in response: “If you’re able to degrade the military aspects of Hamas to a degree … what’s next? And that, I think, has been really one of the significant failures here. … I don’t think that that thinking has really been done at anywhere near the level of depth, I think, that it needs to be done at this point. And it was almost like a refusal to do it while the military aspects of the operation were underway.”

Donilon went on to compare Israel’s war in Gaza with America’s presence in Iraq: “You can’t just wish away the later pieces of this on humanitarian [aid] and on reconstruction and, really importantly, on governance and on security, otherwise you will be in a military posture forever. … We certainly learned that in Iraq.”

On the war in Ukraine, Ross said acting as a mediator is “an appropriate role” for the United States but that Washington should “have a keen appreciation for the leverage that we have over the Russians at this point and also to have a keen appreciation of what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s ultimate goals are.”

For U.S. foreign policy broadly, Ross said, it is “pretty clear that [President Donald Trump] wants to shift our grand strategy. He wants to build it, I think, less around alliance systems. … President Trump tends to look at allies as they obligate us. … I worry that it does reflect a fundamental view that we can deal with allies and adversaries as being the same, and I think that, sooner or later, he will find that will not succeed.”