Rob Malley, the Biden administration’s Iran envoy, revealed Thursday that the investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified information, which prompted the suspension of his security clearance and his suspension from his post, was closed earlier this year.

“I didn’t know what they were looking at. The claim was that I mishandled classified information. I don’t know what they were referring to. They never told me what they were referring to. I still don’t know what they’re referring to. I may never know what they were referring to or looking at,” Malley said on a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace webinar on Thursday. “I do know that after roughly two years of the situation, the Justice Department notified my lawyers that they had closed the investigation.”

Malley was first suspended around April or May of 2023, which would likely place the end of the investigation — based on the two-year timeline Malley laid out — during the Trump administration.

A State Department inspector general’s report last year found that Malley’s suspension had been mishandled: State Department officials allowed him to temporarily remain in his role as Iran envoy and failed to broadly disclose the fact that he had been suspended, even to his direct supervisor or other top officials.

Congressional Republicans have sought for years to obtain additional information about the investigation, but were consistently refused by State and Justice Department officials. They have alleged Malley transferred classified information to a personal device, which was hacked by a hostile actor.

Discussing Iran talks under the Biden administration with moderator Aaron David Miller, a Carnegie senior fellow, Malley suggested that President Joe Biden was never as interested in or committed to reaching a nuclear deal as President Barack Obama had been, and was unwilling to expend the political capital needed on Capitol Hill or with Israel to make a deal happen.

“When I started off with the Biden administration, I thought President Biden was eager to get back into the deal. That was a misperception on my part. And we took our healthy time to express our interest to the Iranians. And we started off by saying that we wanted a longer, stronger deal,” Malley said. “I think at some point the Biden administration, the team, concluded this is not working, and so we went back to a pure revival of the deal. But by then, perhaps the Iranians had different ideas in mind.”

He said that both Biden and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameinei had been unenthusiastic about reaching a deal and overestimated the other side’s interest in it.

Malley criticized the Biden administration for keeping the Trump administration’s maximum pressure sanctions in place to try to bring Iran to the table after campaigning against those sanctions.

“For President Obama, this was a priority. It was one of his top foreign policy, perhaps even top priority writ large,” Malley said. “I think President Biden never felt that it was that important. He never was in love with the deal. And I think he was not prepared to overcome for a long time the political obstacles that he was facing and the regional obstacles — Israeli opposition in particular.”

He argued that if the Biden administration had been able to “rip the band-aid” and seal a deal early on in Biden’s term, it could have mitigated, if not fully avoided, the political backlash in the midterms and the 2024 election, though he said that he was unsure if the Iranians would have agreed to a deal, given their fear that a future U.S. administration would have again withdrawn.

Malley added that there had been a “real chance” to reach a deal in August 2022, but said that “at that point was clearly [the Iranians’] responsibility” to agree.

He also said that the core premise of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — that Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief could be decoupled from Iran’s other malign activities in the region — may have been faulty, given both American and Iranian political considerations.

Asked by Miller if he would have resigned from the Biden administration over its handling of the war in Gaza, had he still been in his position, Malley said he “very much would like to think that I would have resigned.” 

He called the U.S.’ handling of the war “a blemish, a scar that we’re not going to be able to overcome, far worse than Iraq, in my view, because this is a case where we enabled, participated in, fueled, what an increasing number of organizations are calling a genocide.”

Dana Stroul, the director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior Defense Department official in the Biden administration, warned on Wednesday that the Israeli strike on Hamas leaders in Doha is leading Arab states to rally around Qatar, potentially dealing setbacks to regional normalization.

Stroul, speaking at an American Jewish Committee event in Washington to mark the five-year anniversary of the Abraham Accords, said that Arab leaders are offering support for Qatar following the strike, and that both Israeli and Iranian moves to make the Gulf a “new battlefield in the Middle East” are making the U.S.’ regional partners “very nervous.”

“It is really disappointing that not one [Arab] government acknowledged Hamas,” Stroul said. “What’s very clear is that everyone else in the region is aligned that this was a strike on Qatar,” as opposed to a strike on Hamas. “This is about Qatari sovereignty. We’ve seen really a shoring up of Arab leaders’ alignment with and defense of Qatar.”

She said that there had been relatively little criticism in the region for Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program, undermining Hezbollah or helping bring down the Assad regime in Syria, but “this time Israeli military action didn’t happen on what everyone sort of agrees is an adversary … that was a major non-NATO ally of the United States who is actively participating in diplomatic processes.”

“Now we have the leader of the [United Arab Emirates], who years ago was the leader of the Gulf Rift in isolating Qatar — he just went to Qatar,” she continued, noting as well that Israel was disinvited today from the Dubai Air Show, where it had a significant presence in previous years.

“The risk is actually that these kinds of actions do set back the cause of normalization and integration,” she continued. 

She also called Qatar, as the host of the U.S. air base in the region, a critical hub of regional defense integration efforts.

Another crucial question, she added, is how the Hamas military leadership in Gaza holding the remaining living hostages will react to the Doha strike. 

“I’m very, very worried about the hostages,” she said.

She said it’s unlikely that the strikes will make Hamas leaders in Gaza more willing to negotiate or release hostages. The dispute between the U.S. and Israel over the strikes, compounded by growing international criticism of Israel, could further harden their resolve to not negotiate or compromise.

Stroul said that the strike’s apparent failure to kill any of the senior echelon of Hamas leaders could make it a “worst-case scenario,” in which Hamas leaders are less incentivized to negotiate and could cause Qatar to withdraw from any further mediation. 

She added that it’s unclear how ceasefire negotiations can continue, and that parties may look to Egypt to step up as the new mediator, placing it in a potentially precarious position.

She said it was common knowledge in the region that the Hamas leaders are “dead men walking,” but said it’s an “open question” whether now was the right time to carry out that strike, or its broader implications.

Stroul also said that Qatar had never been formally asked to expel the Hamas leaders — she said that former Secretary of State Tony Blinken had asked the Qataris to do so in late 2024 when ceasefire talks yielded little progress, but the Trump administration’s special envoy Steve Witkoff asked that be walked back so that he could continue talks. Stroul was out of government at the time.

And she said that Qatar’s support of Hamas pre-Oct. 7, frequently cited by the country’s critics, was conducted with Israel’s knowledge and support, and that of the United States.

ASPEN, Colo. — Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog and other pro-Israel speakers received a warm reception from the crowd at the Aspen Security Forum this week, as they discussed continued efforts to free the hostages in Gaza and Israel’s strikes on Iran.

But Herzog told Jewish Insider, on the sidelines of the conference after his panel on Wednesday, that he’s been disappointed by the response to the strikes from Democratic lawmakers in Washington, which has been overwhelmingly negative.

It’s a response that also stands in contrast to Herzog’s description of the transition he observed in the Biden administration’s thinking on Iran: from pushing for a nuclear deal with Iran that Herzog said would have been weaker than the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to, by the time President Joe Biden left office, active discussions of strikes on Iran.

“I must say, I was disappointed by the response of some senior people on the Democratic side,” Herzog told JI. “I’m saying it carefully because I never interfere in domestic politics here, but from a strategic point of view, I was disappointed by the response of some senior Democrats to the war on Iran.”

Herzog said that maintaining bipartisan support for Israel was the central goal of his ambassadorship and that he engaged with nearly everyone, including critics, with the exception of the most extreme voices. He said he expected U.S. leaders on both sides of the aisle to realize that the strikes offered a “unique opportunity” to counter a “malign actor” and “changed the strategic landscape in the Middle East.”

“People who either criticize it on procedural issues or people who say, ‘[It] wasn’t the right timing because they were talking to each other about a deal’ — there’s never a right time. Never,” Herzog said, emphasizing that the strikes had not, as critics warned, spiraled into a protracted war similar to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Herzog said Israel must “put a lot of work into maintaining that dialogue with both sides of the aisle, explaining our common interest, away from domestic politics here … and exploring the new opportunities that have been created in the Middle East.”

Herzog said that Israel has been preparing for an attack on Iran for decades, but the specific planning for what became Israel’s Operation Rising Lion and the U.S.’ Operation Midnight Hammer began in earnest in November 2024, after the second Iranian strike on Israel and Israel’s elimination of Iran’s air-defense systems. By that time, U.S. nuclear talks with Iran, which Herzog criticized as misguided, had been long stalled.

He said the fall of the Assad regime in Syria the following month provided a further opportunity to take action.

“If you look at the journey the Biden administration took from the initial days when they were rushing to a deal with Iran, to the last few months of the Biden administration where they were talking to us about military options against Iran, they went a long way,” Herzog recounted.

Herzog said he believes that the Biden administration underwent “disillusionment with the possibility of reaching a good deal with Iran,” as Iran made unrealistic demands, such as removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ terrorism designation. And he said Iran’s supply of weapons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made the talks “much more difficult.”

“I just could see that movement with time, to the last phase of Biden’s presidency, when, after we turned the tables on the Iranian axis and opened that huge opportunity, we actually started looking with them at the military option,” he said. “It was too late in the day [to carry out the strikes before Biden left office], but it was a very interesting journey that I noticed.”

Looking at the rising isolationist sentiments on the Republican side of the aisle, Herzog said he’s been monitoring the issue and has “been concerned about it,” but also argued that such voices aren’t dominant in the Trump administration’s decision-making.

“It’s like a swing of a pendulum because the U.S. ultimately decided to follow Israel and strike Iran, and this is really historic, in that it’s a first-of-its-kind coordinated offensive operation. … This is the first time that we are coordinated in our offensive operations, that’s a very big deal for a long time to come in my view,” Herzog said.

He said he sees the pendulum swinging against the isolationists in the administration’s recent moves to provide additional support to Ukraine and take a tougher stance toward Russia as well.

“So all in all, I don’t think that the administration is following this isolationist trend, but I do follow it and I am concerned about it,” Herzog said. “I do believe that the world needs American leadership, [an] American dominant role. The world needs America to be a force of good, as it has always been, and that’s what we’d like to see.”

Herzog — reflecting on the panel he spoke on, “Israel at a Crossroads” — said that the U.S. and Israel need to be closely coordinated and in lockstep on the path forward on Iran, including the limits of a diplomatic deal and the red lines that would prompt further military action to prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program, as well as ways to capitalize on Iran’s weakness throughout the region and prevent it from rebuilding its proxy network.

“We managed to surprise the Iranians, hit all the main centers of gravity and take them completely off balance. But challenges are still ahead of us because we have to assume that Iran will seek to rebuild those threatening capabilities,” Herzog said. “We should not rest on our laurels.”

He also emphasized that the strikes and the degradation of Iran’s proxies had “created the conditions for a different Middle East.”

Asked about the Israeli government’s policy on Syria — which shifted in the span of a week, from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actively discussing normalization and diplomatic paths with President Donald Trump in the White House to Israel bombing key Syrian government sites in recent days — Herzog described the new Syria as a “mixed bag” with both risks and opportunities, and said that it may be too early to judge.

“On one hand, I believe that this new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, a.k.a. Mohammad al-Jolani, doesn’t want, he doesn’t seek war with Israel, and he sends across messages, and that’s what he told the Trump administration,” Herzog said, adding that Israel had started a dialogue through the U.S. on what Herzog termed a formal or informal non-aggression agreement and the demilitarization of southern Syria.

“On the other hand, we should not forget the background of al-Sharaa and the people surrounding him or subordinate to him,” Herzog said. “They all grew up in the school of jihadism.”

He criticized al-Sharaa for what he said was an effort to “subjugate [Syrian minorities] so they become part of his Syria, his vision of Syria” rather than allowing for a federalist system. Herzog said the Israeli strikes “sent a very strong message … that we will not tolerate the scenes of humiliating the Druze and endangering their lives,” and aimed to block the Syrian army from conquering Druze areas and carrying out atrocities.

“What we’ve seen, first with the Alawites and now with the Druze, is very troubling,” Herzog said. “We in Israel, our concerns are about, first, the security situation in southern Syria, and second about the state of minorities, especially the Druze, because not only are they close to our border, [but] because we have an important Druze community in Israel. They are our brothers in arms.”

He added that it’s unclear to what extent al-Sharaa himself is in control over Syrian government forces’ actions.

The Israeli ambassador also reflected on the ways that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel seemingly activated a global wave of antisemitism.

“You’re hit hard, you’re bleeding, and all your enemies smell the blood and rise to hit you,” Herzog said. “That pertains to all of our enemies in the region, the Iranian axis, but also pertains to anti-Israel, antisemitic forces here in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

He said that Israel has “gone a long way” against its military adversaries in the Middle East, “really turned the tables on Iran and the Iranian axis” and “created the conditions for a different Middle East.”

“But,” he continued, “we still have a long way to go against these anti-Israel, antisemitic forces. That’s an open front.”

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee drafted a new memo on Thursday alleging that federal funding granted to USAID and nongovernmental organizations under the Biden administration was given to Palestinian nonprofits with ties to proscribed terror groups.

“Oversight conducted by the Committee reflects the Biden-Harris Administration’s neglect and misuse of taxpayer dollars through USAID, the State Department, and other federal agencies, which were used to directly and indirectly fund the efforts of anti-Netanyahu organizations and terrorist groups,” the memo sent to committee members, which was obtained by Jewish Insider, states.

Judiciary Committee Republicans also revealed in the memo that they were “expanding” their investigation “to include additional American and Israeli NGOs that may be involved in funneling U.S. government funds with the purpose of undermining the Israeli government or for the support or fiscal sponsorship of terrorist groups.”

The memo comes nearly four months after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, began reaching out to six NGOs to determine if they had received U.S. tax dollars through USAID or the State Department and the role they individually played in the protest movement. The inquiries specifically requested documentation and communications from the organizations about the funding applications, any communications between the NGOs in question and details about how the funds were spent. So far, the probe has not published evidence indicating that they have received federal funding.

The organizations — the Jewish Communal Fund, Middle East Dialogue Network, Movement for Quality Government in Israel, PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Blue and White Future — “produced 380 total documents” to the committees to date in the ongoing probe into “the Biden-Harris Administration’s use of U.S. taxpayer funds to undermine Israel’s democratically elected government,” according to the memo. 

Blue and White Future categorically denied the notion that the organization received any federal funding in a statement to JI and in communications with House lawmakers.

“No state entity, administration or government body – American or otherwise (USAID included) – has ever provided funding to the organization, whether directly or indirectly. All donations to the organization originate from private donors who care deeply about Israel’s security and its future. Every donation received and every activity undertaken by the organization is fully documented, reported, and independently audited in strict compliance with applicable law,” a BWF spokesperson told JI.

“The letters circulated by members of the U.S. Congress rely on biased and factually incorrect publications that bear no connection to reality. These claims are entirely baseless. The organization has clearly and comprehensively addressed these allegations in its responses to all relevant inquiries,” they added.

ASPEN, Colo. – Former U.S. and Israeli officials speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday emphasized that Hamas bears responsibility for the failure of hostage release and ceasefire talks, and discussed the possible paths to ending the war in Gaza.

Brett McGurk, the top National Security Council official responsible for the Middle East under the Biden administration, argued on Wednesday that the history of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas “is being rewritten by people that weren’t involved in this.”

He emphasized that Hamas repeatedly ignored and rejected proposals that fulfilled many of its demands over the course of the last year, arguing that Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah had helped force Hamas’ hand to a temporary ceasefire deal that went into effect in early 2025.

“The moral toll of this awful situation tears at the soul of anyone who’s worked on this, anyone,” McGurk said. “But this war could have stopped multiple times if Hamas stopped the war and released hostages — multiple, multiple times.”

He said that, to this day, the “fundamental issue” is that the pressure for the deal has been on Israel, with “no pressure on Hamas.” He said the group has “not budged” on its demand to be allowed to remain in power in exchange for the release of hostages.

“Hamas started the war on Oct. 7, this panel is about Israel, but the enemies of Israel have agency,” McGurk said, emphasizing that Hamas made a choice to start the war, joined by Hezbollah and various Iranian proxies, in addition to Iran itself.

McGurk said he believes that if both sides accept the current U.S.-sponsored proposal to pause the war for 60 days while negotiating a permanent ceasefire, the war would end.

Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog said that Israel “never developed a coherent plan [of] alternatives to Hamas.”

Herzog argued that Israel needs to propose an end to the war in exchange for the release of hostages, and that Hamas can be dealt with again at a later point while Israel focuses in the short term on Iran, normalization with Arab countries in the region and beginning to heal its own people and society.

Herzog framed the ceasefire deal with Hezbollah as a potentially successful model. 

Former IDF Intelligence Directorate head Amos Yadlin said that the Gaza war is the “most justified war ever; however, at this moment, continuing the war is not serving Israeli interests.”

He said Israel should agree to end the war in exchange for a one-time release of all remaining hostages and the exile of some Hamas leaders, and work to bring in Arab partners to demilitarize the territory, with the understanding that Israel will continue to attack Hamas forces that reemerge as it has done with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Even if some Hamas forces remain, he said, they will not have the strength or capabilities they did before the war.

Yadlin also emphasized that Hamas leaders are to blame for the civilian casualties in Gaza, since they could have ended the war by releasing the hostages at any time.

Author and “Call Me Back” podcast host Dan Senor noted that Israel’s military was ill-prepared for the kind of extended, grinding, close-to-home war it is fighting in Gaza, and described the challenges of Hamas’ diversion of humanitarian aid and hostage-taking as unprecedented. And, he said, fear of Hamas has hampered efforts to cultivate alternative civilian leadership in Gaza.

“I think the idea that we could have a permanent ceasefire would only work if Israel would agree for Hamas to stay in Gaza and … in terms of the objectives of war, there is no world in which Israel can agree to Hamas staying in power in Gaza,” Senor said.

Pushing back on the comparisons between a potential Hamas deal and the Hezbollah ceasefire, Senor noted that in Lebanon, the Lebanese government and Lebanese Armed Forces provide a domestic counterweight to Hezbollah able to enforce demilitarization. In Gaza, no Arab states have stepped forward to carry out governance and demilitarization.

At the same time, Senor said that President Donald Trump’s proposal of mass relocation of the Palestinian population is not a realistic solution. He added that Israel will need a substantial buffer zone between its population in the south and the population in Gaza to feel safe in returning people to communities close to the Gaza border.

Yadlin pushed back, arguing that the relocation threat would provide Arab states the necessary motivation to become directly involved.

Yadlin added that Trump’s work to cultivate investments from the Gulf in combination with the strikes on Iran have shown the American people that the Middle East does not have to only be a region of loss and suffering, but one that has real promise.

Asked if Israel and the United States’ quick and devastating military campaign against Iran was a signal that the world had overestimated the threat from Iran, the panelists argued that was not the case. Instead, they said, many had underestimated Israel’s own capabilities and preparations, and the destruction of Iran’s proxies significantly undermined Iran’s ability to threaten Israel.

“You have to remember that Israel has prepared this war for decades, for many, many years, especially the last few months, but for decades,” he said.

McGurk added that the U.S. and Israeli interceptions of missiles fired during Iran’s October 2024 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent destruction of Iran’s air defense systems under the Biden administration set the stage for last month’s strikes, which he characterized as the result of close coordination across multiple administrations for years.

Looking ahead, Herzog said that there are not yet clear answers on the extent to which Iran maintains nuclear capabilities, but said that the strikes’ impact on Iran’s decision-making is also critical: whether it will race to a nuclear device to protect itself or — as Herzog said he believes — it is deterred and will move slowly and carefully if it attempts to resume its nuclear program.

He said there are two paths ahead: a new nuclear deal, including no enrichment and with intrusive inspections, which is nevertheless controversial in Israel because it would provide Iran with sanctions relief to rebuild its capabilities, or Israel’s continued use of force, which brings its own set of questions and challenges.

Herzog also said he’s hopeful that the strikes have deepened the divide between the Iranian regime and the Iranian people.

Yadlin similarly argued that the timetable for Iran’s nuclear program is less important than what kind of agreement can now be reached.

He said that the attacks had disproven Iran’s key calculus about its nuclear program: that Israel had the will but not the capabilities to do significant damage to the program, and that the U.S. had the capabilities but not the will.

McGurk and Herzog both spoke about the initial hours of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and their perspectives as the situation developed. Herzog, who was serving as the Israeli envoy in Washington at the time, said he received a call shortly after the onset of the attacks on Israel from a senior general shouting, “Mike, this is war, it’s not another round. It’s a war.”

McGurk said that Herzog had informed him about the attack, relaying along that same message: “It’s a massive attack, this is war.”

Herzog described McGurk, who has remained one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of President Joe Biden’s team since leaving office, as “the best partner that I could wish for,” adding that the then-White House official immediately offered full U.S. support for Israel.

McGurk emphasized that, early in the war, there were significant fears that Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, or even Iran itself, would also mobilize against Israel, which would constitute an “existential threat.” 

He recounted a call between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the first days of the war. “Netanyahu said, ‘Joe, we’re in the Middle East, and in the Middle East, if you’re weak, you’re roadkill.’ Everybody sharpened their knives, and that’s what was happening,” McGurk said.

He said that intelligence showed early signs Hezbollah was preparing a ground invasion, and that Israeli and American officials had intensively discussed the possibility of a preemptive, Israeli attack in Lebanon, ultimately deciding against it due to Hezbollah’s strength at the time and Israel’s need to focus on Gaza. McGurk said he still believes that was the right decision.

McGurk, seen as one of the strongest champions in the Biden administration for the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, said he’d been in discussion on Oct. 6 with visiting Saudi and other Middle Eastern leaders about “some things that were potentially going to be quite positive over the coming six months a year.”

He also pushed back on narratives from critics that the normalization efforts were a “white whale” that the U.S. chased in spite of reality. Instead, he said, the talks began because the Israelis and Saudis both approached the U.S. and asked them to mediate. He said the constant media leaks about the talks had hampered the process, and that they should have been conducted more privately.

“I think ultimately it will happen,” McGurk said. “What knocked it off was Hamas.”

Addressing the global spread of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment, Herzog said that “we [Israel] should do a better job” of pushing back on anti-Israel narratives, describing the public and diplomatic debate as an additional front in the war Israel is fighting.

Senor added that the Oct. 7 attack “brought something to the surface that was not about the way Israel should operate in Gaza,” appearing to be a “trigger moment for trying to drive Jews underground” in a way he had not expected.

Looking particularly at college campuses, Senor urged Jews to turn to alternative schools than the higher education institutions where they have faced harassment and discrimination, and to invest in those institutions rather than the ones that have not served them well in recent years.

ASPEN, Colo. — Former Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo argued at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that post-war reconstruction of Gaza will require new tools, methods and partners.

Adeyemo, who served in the Biden administration, said that a lasting solution will require a political settlement that provides the Palestinians with “some type of self-determination” and ensures Israeli security, but that some level of reconstruction and stability will need to precede both of those things. He said one estimate placed the cost of a reconstruction effort at $50 billion.

“We’re going to need to think about this differently with new tools, in new ways, because the thing that you want to do, not just in Gaza, but as we think about reconstruction differently, is we want it to be reconstruction that’s creating economic opportunity in the places that we are reconstructing,” Adeyemo said.

He said that will require a coalition, including new countries as well as private sector partners, because some of the actors involved in previous reconstruction efforts in Gaza have less of an appetite to spend money on the effort than they have in the past. International donors, led by Qatar, pledged upwards of $5 billion for the reconstruction of Gaza following the 2014 war with Israel.

Adeyemo added that it’s crucial that the reconstruction leads to a stable economy in which civilians aren’t reliant on extremist groups. He offered as an example that in prewar Gaza, obtaining fuel for an air conditioning unit required a relationship with Hamas and paying taxes to the terror group.

“Fundamentally, that was because of underinvestment in infrastructure,” Adeyemo said. “So as we think about infrastructure, I think the thing that you will want to think about in postconflict areas, Gaza or others, is, how do you do it in a way that not only restores basic infrastructure and basic equipment, but actually thinks about long term economic development in these areas?”

Former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that Israel is now in the strongest geopolitical position in its history following the seismic changes throughout the Middle East that have taken place in the past two years.

Burns is a co-chair of the Aspen Security Forum and was a top member of President Joe Biden’s national security team.

“Israel is in such an extraordinary position. … Think about Israel being born, created May 14, 1948, besieged over decades by attacks and enmity from all of its Arab neighbors, now the strongest country in the Middle East,” Burns said as he opened the forum’s second day of events. “Israel’s in the strongest geopolitical position it’s ever been in, after the extraordinary events in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran, in Syria over the last two years.”

In his opening remarks at the conference the day prior, Burns said that Iran is “in its weakest strategic position since the Iranian revolution.”

“Consider the impact these turbulent series of events of the last few years have had on Yemen and on poor Lebanon, which is searching for true stability and independence, on the people of Syria. Consider the impact on the people of Gaza and the desperate situation that the people in Gaza are suffering right now,” Burns added.

Susan Rice, who served as national security advisor during the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Tehran’s nuclear program while defending the 2015 agreement during a panel discussion on Monday at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.

Rice, who was on stage with former Trump administration National Security Advisor John Bolton and former CIA director David Petraeus, disagreed with her two colleagues that Trump’s Iran strikes were largely a success. 

“I think the resort to military action when diplomacy had not been exhausted was a strategic mistake,” Rice said. “And the reality is, and we’re back to this point today, only diplomacy and a negotiated settlement can ensure the sustainable and verifiable dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program. You need inspectors on the ground. You need verifiable constraints that are very significant, and you don’t achieve that by ripping up the 2015 nuclear agreement and replacing it with nothing.”

Rice joins a chorus of former Obama and Biden administration officials who have criticized Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, despite many experts concluding the damage to the program was significant. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, for instance, said that “based on the assessments of senior officers in IDF Intelligence, the damage to [Iran’s] nuclear program is … systemic … severe, broad and deep, and pushed back by years.”

Last week, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken wrote an op-ed in The New York Times: “The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded.”

At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, former Biden administration National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told moderator Fareed Zakaria: “We still need a deal because Iran still has, it appears, stockpiles of enriched uranium, still has centrifuge capacity, even if the installed centrifuge capacity has been destroyed or damaged or who knows what, and still has know-how and therefore still has the possibility of reconstituting its program.”

Bolton, on the same panel as Rice, argued that the time was ripe for military action against Iran.

“I think the regime is weaker than at any point since the 1979 revolution,” Bolton said. “But I think we will never have an opportunity this good to remove not just the nuclear program but the Iranian support for terrorism, which dates back to 1979 when they seized our embassy employees and it went downhill from there.”

Bolton outlined several ways in which Iranians are dissatisfied with the regime, including economic stagnation and state of women’s rights in the country. 

“The answer is regime change. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that there aren’t any even possible successful efforts by Iran to do something with what they have,” Bolton said.

Turning to Israel’s war in Gaza, all members of the panel argued that Israel needed to shift its strategy to successfully eliminate Hamas. Bolton said that, despite successfully degrading the terror group’s organizational structure, Israel had not successfully fulfilled all of its war goals, which include eliminating Hamas and securing the release of all the hostages.

Bolton argued that an additional objective of the war should be to “provide a better future for the Palestinians without Hamas in their lives. The only way you can achieve all four of these is … by going in and conducting a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign. You clear every building floor room and block all the tunnel entrances, let the people that belong there back in with biometric ID cards, and then you have an entry control point to the rest of Gaza. With security, anything is possible.”

Daniel Shapiro, a deputy assistant secretary of defense under the Biden administration, U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Obama administration and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in an interview with Jewish Insider on Friday morning that Israel’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely halt any further efforts toward a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program. 

Shapiro also said that major questions ahead for the region will be if and under what circumstances the U.S. would directly join Israeli strikes on Iran, and whether the strikes prompt Iran to attempt to make a sprint to a nuclear bomb.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Insider: What are your biggest takeaways from these strikes?

Shapiro: These strikes lay bare the depth of Iran’s miscalculation following Oct. 7. Just stack it up: their top proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, is gone or deeply damaged. The Assad regime has gone. Their own state-to-state attacks against Israel in April and October were pretty ineffective, and then Israel did significant damage in response last October. 

But since the state-to-state taboo has been broken, Israel demonstrated last night that it has full penetration of the Iranian system and the ability to wreak havoc across the system. Iran really has never looked weaker, and its ability to respond meaningfully is going to be tested. 

So far, they haven’t mustered a very effective response. I’m sure they will. They will continue to respond, but the first wave of 100 or so UAVs was not very effective. 

Now the story doesn’t end here. Israel’s already conducting additional attacks. Iran is going to be very motivated to try to sprint to a nuclear breakout at one of their hardened underground facilities. And the United States, I’m sure, is going to assist Israel with defense against any retaliation. 

But the prospect of a diplomatic resolution that President Trump very much wanted, that would end Iranian enrichment, I think, is pretty much dead, and it’s more likely that he’ll be faced with a decision on whether to use the U.S. capabilities to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities and to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. 

So that’s a big decision that may be still ahead, and could be the type of dilemma that splits his advisors, his political base, and probably will raise accusations from some corners that Israel is trying to drag the United States into the war.

JI: Let’s say the U.S. doesn’t get involved and doesn’t strike those facilities … What are the implications of that?

DS: The United States has unique capabilities to deal with the underground, deeply hardened sites. It could mean, if the United States is not involved, that those sites survive and are the place where Iran would be, if they chose, trying to execute their nuclear breakout.

That doesn’t mean that’s the only way to address those sites, and so if Israel is intent on really eliminating any threat of a nuclear Iran, it may turn to other methods … I think it’s going to be probably a very intense conversation between Netanyahu and Trump about the pros and cons of U.S. participation.

JI: Do you think that this is going to prompt Iran to move to nuclear breakout?

DS: I think they’re going to be very motivated to try to sprint to a breakout. They’ve often always seen their nuclear program as a pillar of the regime’s survival … If they’re looking for a way to gain a deterrent that would preserve what can be preserved, there’d be a strong case within their system to try to sprint to achieve a nuclear weapon. But there’s also chaos in their leadership right now, because so many of the top leaders were killed last night. So I don’t think that’s a decision that’s necessarily being made immediately.

JI: As we’re looking ahead to potential Iranian retaliation, [how do you think] some of the other states in the region are going to respond? So far, it seems like Jordan [intercepted some] of that first wave of drones … Do you think we’ll see the same sort of coordinated regional response effectively in defense of Israel like we saw last April?

DS: I think countries will act to defend their own airspace and their own assets. I think generally, they will not want to be advertised as participating in a defense of Israel, per se. But that doesn’t mean, even in defending their own airspace, they don’t in some way participate. … 

But I think most of the countries want to distance themselves from this action … They want to not give Iran any motivation or excuse to attack them or to associate them with the strikes … I suspect in private rooms, there’s probably some cheering going on in Arab capitals when they’ve seen the extent of the damage to the Iranian military.

JI: How do you read the response we’ve been seeing from the Trump administration so far?

DS: I think President Trump wanted more time to pursue his diplomatic initiative and to try to reach an agreement. And so I think this was not his preference to have this action take place this soon. 

However, it’s inconceivable Israel didn’t provide some forewarning, and if he didn’t give a firm red light, he probably gave sort of a yellow light. Israel may have argued that Iran was taking, or had taken, or was on the verge of taking some new steps that would shorten the already very short distance to nuclear breakout, or would advance their weaponization research. …

The initial statement from Secretary Rubio was intended to make clear that the United States was not a direct participant, and to try to dissuade Iran from responding in any way against the United States, and to warn them that if they did, it would be a very, very heavy price. …

The big question ahead, as I mentioned at the beginning, is, would the United States, under any circumstances, participate in strikes against Iran? And if so, what would be the trigger for that? Would it be the appearance that Iran is trying to do a nuclear breakout at the Fordow facility? Would it be in response to any kind of Iranian action against U.S. bases?

JI: In an alternate history where Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are in the White House, how do you think they would have handled this? Would they have given the same “yellow light?”

DS: I think it’s impossible to answer the hypothetical without knowing more about the information that Israel may have presented.

Some Senate Democrats are warming to the Trump administration’s decision to reimpose a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist group in Yemen — a move that the Biden administration refused to make throughout its term after previously delisting the group as terrorists in 2021 — while others remain skeptical.

A growing number of Democrats last year came to support the elevated terrorist designation for the group as Houthi attacks on Israel, U.S. forces and shipping vessels in the Red Sea escalated. The Trump administration issued an executive order in January that sought to reimpose the designation and formally took the step this week. The Biden administration applied a different terrorist label but the FTO designation would have granted additional authorities. 

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), a longtime supporter of redesignating the group, offered his full endorsement of the move.

“I support that,” Fetterman told JI. “And if his [Trump’s] next Truth Social post is about wasting them, I’d support that too. I think it’s time to really cut the s**t and take them out if they’re going to mess with our ships and have an impact on our economy like that, absolutely. They are terrorists, undeniably. I fully support destroying that organization, what’s left of it.”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said that “the previous debate about whether they should or shouldn’t be so designated really had to do with the ability to deliver humanitarian aid in the middle of what was then a massive crisis in Yemen.”

“They certainly have done plenty of things that deserve the designation,” Coons continued. “That doesn’t trouble me.”

Coons had opposed the Trump administration’s decision in early January 2021 to initially designate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said she thinks the U.S. should have sanctions on the Houthis but didn’t directly address the FTO designation.

Others, such as Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), remain skeptical.

Kaine said that he found the timing of the move to be “kind of interesting, because the Houthis have stopped firing on U.S. shipping in the Red Sea, which they said they would do if there was a cease-fire, which has been great.”

“We’ve got to extend the cease-fire so that continues, because we have been so freakishly lucky. We were batting 1.000 while knocking down all the drones and the missiles [in the Red Sea],” Kaine told JI. “They are a terrorist organization, but they’ve stopped firing on U.S. shipping. We want them to continue not to, so I felt like the timing was a little bizarre.”

Kaine, who serves on the Foreign Relations and Senate Armed Services committees, said he was concerned that the reauthorization could prompt the Houthis to reengage on that front, even if the cease-fire and hostage-release deal between Israel and Hamas remains intact.

“If they started to behave badly again we could always reimpose the designation, and maybe they’d start firing again even with the cease-fire,” Kaine said. “But we’re in a moment where they dramatically scaled back what they were doing. I’m not sure that’s the time to punish somebody when they’ve started for some reason to do the right thing.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told JI that the Houthis are a terrorist organization, and were already labeled as such under a different designation.

“The question is how we treat them as a terrorist organization without making them stronger,” Murphy said. “The question is whether this particular designation makes it so impossible for us to provide famine relief inside Yemen that it actually grows the Houthis’ power.”

He said that the designation “doesn’t help us if the consequences result in a group getting stronger,” and that he wants to ensure the delivery of humanitarian support that can “blunt some of the reasons why people sign up to fight with the Houthis.”

Republicans, meanwhile, celebrated the move.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a post on X on Wednesday, “I’m glad to see the Administration sanction Houthi leaders for their terrorist activity and weapons trafficking. Now, we need to cut Chinese support for the Houthis. China purposefully undercuts U.S. sanctions and serves as a lifeline for Iran and its terror groups. This needs to end.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the decision was “long overdue” and that he was “glad he [Trump] did it.”

“In the name of avoiding escalation, every time Democrats try to do that, you get more of it,” Graham said. “Here’s what I think: if they keep shooting at our ships, wipe them out. They use the same logic — don’t give them tanks, don’t give them planes — in Ukraine. You just get more escalations,” Graham said of the criticism from the other side of the aisle. 

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said she was “completely” in support of the Houthi’s FTO status being reinstated and was not concerned about such a decision escalating the situation in the Red Sea. 

“My goodness, when you look at what the Houthis have already done, in firing missiles nonstop at our commercial traffic in the Red Sea and at destroyers. They are definitely a terrorist organization. From my perspective, they’re an Iranian proxy,” Collins told JI. “I’m glad that they’ve been reclassified.”

Victoria Nuland, the Biden administration’s nominee to be under secretary of state for political affairs, avoided committing to a specific strategy to address Iran’s nuclear program while highlighting the administration’s determination to bring Tehran into compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on Thursday.

Nuland previously served under President Barack Obama as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, as well as a foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. In 2014, she led the U.S. response to the Ukraine crisis.

In an exchange with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Nuland declined to definitively endorse the position on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Murphy and more than two dozen other Senate Democrats expressed in a letter to Secretary of State Tony Blinken earlier this week. The letter called for a swift reentry into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a contrast with a recent bipartisan letter from 43 senators which called on the U.S. to negotiate a more comprehensive deal addressing nuclear and non-nuclear issues.

“I think we’ve got to pursue all of these problems in tandem. Whether that is a question of a comprehensive agreement, I think there are many players and many different pieces of this,” Nuland said. “Walk and chew gum would be my answer.”

Nuland also made clear that the nuclear issue is the administration’s priority. 

“What is most urgent today is that Iran is breaking out — again — of its nuclear box. It is enriching at 20%, it is using these advanced centrifuges. We’ve got to get them back in the box on the nuclear front. But at the same time we can and should be countering their malign regional influence,” she said. “Its breakout time is shortened, so [the] first job [is to] get them back in the box. And then together define what ‘longer and stronger’ means.”

Intelligence officials have predicted that last weekend’s blackout on the Natanz nuclear facility may have extended Iran’s breakout time by nine months. In the wake of the incident, which Iran has claimed was an Israeli attack, the regime announced it would begin enriching uranium to 60%.

Critics of the Biden administration’s approach argue that it is not viable because Iran may not agree to follow-on negotiations. According to Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the administration’s talking points also fail to articulate whether Iran’s other malign activities will be part of the negotiations to lengthen or strengthen the Iran deal or whether they will be negotiated separately.

“I think Nuland is keeping the administration’s options open… even though so far they’ve already committed to return to the JCPOA as their priority,” he said.

Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that Nuland’s answers were vague and accused the Biden administration of being “desperate to make a deal with Tehran.”

During the hearing, Nuland pledged to engage with Congress consistently during negotiations with Iran, and particularly on any final deal.

“Whatever agreements we reach with Iran need to be supported in a bipartisan fashion, not only on this committee but across the Congress and across America. That will ensure that they are binding across administrations and for the long term. So we have to do our job and consult at every phase and hear your ideas and incorporate them,” Nuland said. “I would pledge to be here as often as we need to be to ensure that we all support what’s happening.”

Even among critics of the 2015 nuclear deal and the Biden administration’s approach, Nuland is highly regarded. Dubowitz called her a “tough negotiator” and “very clear-eyed and sober-minded” about the threat from authoritarian regimes. Pletka called her “a pro, not an ideologue” and “a smart woman and a shrewd diplomat.” But, Dubowitz said, Nuland is unlikely to be a major player on Iran policy, given her background in Russia issues and the proliferation of Iran experts already within the administration.

“I assume Nuland is going to have some role in this,” he said, “but I don’t think she’s going to be a major influence on Iran policy or a major shaper of the direction of Iran policy.” Pletka echoed Dubowitz’s sentiments, saying that Nuland is unlikely to have a major influence on the U.S.’s overall direction on Iran.