Quincy Institute's co-founder and executive vice president of programs Trita Parsi debated Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies today on CSPAN's Washington Journal program.
The two sparred a bit over today's presidential elections in Iran, the nuclear deal and U.S. sanctions on Tehran. They also took call-in questions. Watch below:
In the past few weeks, thousands of federal law enforcement officials have descended on Minneapolis. Videos show immigration officers jumping out of unmarked vans, tackling and pepper-spraying protesters, and breaking windows in order to drag people from their cars.
Prominent figures in the Trump administration have defended this approach despite fierce local backlash. When federal agents killed a protester named Alex Pretti on Saturday, for example, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem quickly accused him of “domestic terrorism.”
For observers of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, these scenes can seem eerily familiar. That similarity may not be a coincidence.
Over the past two decades, U.S. immigration officials have maintained a close relationship with the Israeli government. This collaboration has included trips ferrying high-level U.S. law enforcement officials around Israel, joint training for immigration officers, and technology transfers that have put sophisticated surveillance capabilities in the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The result has been an increasing mind meld between security agencies in Israel and the United States.
The primary focus of this collaboration is preventing acts of terrorism — a necessary, if fraught, objective. But, as the Trump administration has increasingly reframed its crackdown on undocumented immigration as a sort of new war on terrorism, it has applied these counter-terror tactics to an ever-growing number of people in the United States. This shift, which has drawn backlash despite broad public support for countering illegal immigration, is now giving Americans a taste of how the Israeli military operates in the West Bank, according to Josh Paul, who previously led the arms transfer office at the State Department.
“There are some striking parallels there,” Paul said. “You have units of a security force that are imposed on the local authorities, imposed on the local police, that engage in checkpoints, detentions, including of children [...] And it seems to operate broadly with impunity.”
When Bill Ayub returned from his trip to Israel, he was impressed — but a bit wary. Israeli surveillance software is “a little more invasive than you would see here in the U.S.,” the former Ventura County sheriff told Jewish Currents in 2022. And the use of force in arrests was “shocking,” Ayub said. “It was like, ‘Wow, you do that?’ [...] We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.”
Ayub is one of hundreds of senior American law enforcement officers who, over the last two decades, have toured Israel and met Israeli law enforcement officials with the help of non-profit organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). Public information about these trips, which focus on counter-terrorism, is limited. But an itinerary from a 2016 ADL delegation showed meetings scheduled with Israeli officials at a notorious prison and in Hebron, a segregated city in the West Bank.
Publicly available information shows that ICE officials participated in eight ADL trips between 2013 and 2016. Joseph Harhay, the current assistant chief of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), joined a JINSA junket back in 2018.
These privately-funded trips are just one facet of the relationship. The Bush administration created ICE and CBP in 2003, when it restructured the federal government following the 9/11 attacks. The agencies, both of which are part of the Department of Homeland Security, became part of a government-wide effort to combat terrorism. “ICE has grown with the global war on terror,” said Anthony Aguilar, a retired Army officer and activist.
Congress quickly looked abroad for help, setting up a DHS office focused primarily on learning from Israeli officials, according to supporters of the legislation. “I think we can learn a lot from other countries, particularly Israel, which unfortunately has a long history of preparing for and responding to terrorist attacks,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said at the time.
ICE and CBP agents have since developed a close relationship with their counterparts in Israel, allowing them to trade notes on tactics and technology. DHS has organized conferences with Israeli security officials, held joint training sessions, and even given grants to Israeli officers in order to do research on areas like countering violent extremism, according to a former senior DHS official.
The official, who said some of the tactics recommended by Israeli officials amounted to racial and ethnic profiling, recalled a senior colleague wondering, “Why are we giving a foreign government funding for this stuff? Why is the Department of Homeland Security doing this?”
ICE officers in particular have regularly participated in training alongside Israeli police, according to Aguilar, who said he personally witnessed some of these sessions at Israel’s National Urban Training Center while serving in the Army. (The former senior DHS official confirmed that ICE officers often train in Israel; DHS did not respond to a request for comment.)
Technology transfer has been another important point of collaboration. Part of this is due to the close ties between the military and surveillance tech industries in both countries. The Israeli military, for example, uses software from American companies like surveillance giant Palantir, which also works with ICE.
ICE, for its part, has purchased sophisticated phone hacking technology from controversial Israeli companies like Cellebrite and Paragon. These tools have helped ICE build what critics call a surveillance “dragnet,” gathering data on large portions of the American public, including citizens.
It is unclear whether the U.S. government has facilitated these transfers of surveillance technology. But we do know that American officials are interested in promoting this sort of collaboration. Since 2015, the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Program has brought together DHS and Israel’s Ministry of National Security to “develop advanced technologies for homeland security needs,” according to DHS. In 2022, the Biden administration launched another initiative aimed at promoting collaboration between DHS and Israel’s National Cyber Directorate.
Other similarities may simply stem from the close relationship that U.S. and Israeli officials have maintained over the years. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, for example, met last year with Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, a controversial official who shares Noem’s commitment to hard-nosed policing.
And some parallels have nothing to do with the U.S.-Israel relationship per se. Israel’s military, for example, has shown a lack of discipline and combat readiness during the war in Gaza, which some experts blame on poor training and a rapid expansion of active duty call-ups. ICE has faced similar discipline challenges amid its head-spinning growth under the Trump administration, which has boosted the agency’s annual budget by roughly 200% and more than doubled its officer headcount in less than a year to more than 20,000 agents. (3,000 ICE and CBP officers have been sent to Minnesota alone.)
“It's kind of every man for himself. They are obviously not operating under any standard operating procedures,” said Aguilar, who observed protests in Minneapolis this week and worked as a military contractor in Gaza during the war. “This is exactly how the Israel Defense Forces operate in Gaza.”
Of course, scenes in Minneapolis have sparked a reaction that the administration will be hard-pressed to ignore. Indeed, President Trump has already started to shift his approach in recent days, demoting a controversial CBP commander and sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to oversee operations with an eye toward de-escalation. Trump has even changed his tune about the killing of two U.S. citizens by ICE, calling both incidents “terrible.”
But, given the extent of U.S.-Israel security collaboration and Trump’s desire to move quickly on deportations, Minnesota may not be the last state to see these sorts of tactics — and technologies — deployed on its streets. “None of this surprises me,” the former senior DHS official said, adding that they still hope internal pressure could encourage the administration to change course. “I'm kind of shocked that people are just now making these comparisons.”
The New START Treaty — the last arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia — is set to expire next week, unless President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin make a last minute decision to renew it. Letting the treaty expire would increase the risk of nuclear conflict and open the door to an accelerated nuclear arms race. A coalition of arms control and disarmament groups is pushing Congress and the president to pledge to continue to observe the New START limits on deployed, strategic nuclear weapons by the US and Russia.
New START matters. The treaty, which entered into force on February 5, 2011 after a successful effort by the Obama administration to win over enough Republican senators to achieve the required two-thirds majority to ratify the deal, capped deployed warheads to 1,550 for each side, and established verification procedures to ensure that both sides abided by the pact. New START was far from perfect, but it did put much needed guardrails on nuclear development that reduced the prospect of an all-out arms race.
The deal that sealed ratification of New START in the Senate a controversial pledge to invest $85 billion in U.S. nuclear warheads over 10 years, an arrangement that some critics argued would cement U.S. possession and development of nuclear weapons for the long-term, thereby making it harder to forge a future agreement to bring warhead stockpiles below New START levels.
New START’s strictures on the number of deployed weapons did not prevent the U.S. or Russia from investing in a new generation of nuclear weapons. In the U.S., for example, the Pentagon is moving forward on a plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines — with new warheads to go with them — at a projected cost of $946 billion over the next decade. At least $140 billion of that sum will go to developing and building a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Sentinel. The new ICBM — which is being developed by Northrop Grumman after it received a sole source contract in September 2020 — has undergone tremendous cost growth of over initial estimates. The overrun prompted a Pentagon review of the program, but the assessment led to a decision to go full speed ahead.
Even more crucial than the cost issue is the fact that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world,” former Secretary of Defense William Perry, because a president would only have a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. Independent analyses by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other expert groups assess that the U.S. could retain the ability to dissuade another nation from launching a nuclear attack on the United States without ICBMs in its arsenal.
Russia is also developing a new generation of nuclear weapons, and threats by Russian leader Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine — however impractical that may be — have raised fears, but have not spurred an effective push for new limits on the possession and use of these potentially world ending weapons.
These developments have prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock — an estimate of the risk of a nuclear conflict — to 85 seconds to midnight. Its statement in support of that judgment urged the leaders of the major nuclear weapons states to shed their complacency and take action to rein in nuclear arsenals and reduce the risk that they will be used. They assessed the current situation as follows:
“A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks.”
The lapsing of New START runs contrary to U.S. public opinion on the matter. A poll released this month and commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative found that 91 percent of Americans — including 85% of President Trump’s supporters — believe that “the United States should negotiate a new agreement with Russia to either maintain current limits on nuclear weapons or further reduce both countries’ arsenals.”
Letting the treaty’s limits lapse is also out of step with the positions of the majority of the world’s nations, 74 of which have ratified the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while another 25 nations have signed the treaty but yet to formally ratify it.
Reversing current trends and restoring a commitment by the major nuclear powers to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear weapons arsenals will require more constructive relations among the U.S., Russia, and China. But even at the height of the Cold War major agreements to curb nuclear weapons development and deployment were reached, from the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970.
Keeping New START limits and negotiating new deals to limit nuclear arsenals and deployments is in the interests of every nation, and should supersede disagreement on other issues. Whether it will is an open question.
On 27 January, President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account to warn that, should Iraq’s former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki return to office, “the United States of America will no longer help Iraq and, if we are not there to help, Iraq has ZERO chance of Success, Prosperity, or Freedom.”
The post was startling, coming from a country that has long called for free and fair elections in Iraq, unfettered by external pressures. His remarks have roiled an already uncertain post-election process. and provoked protests in a country undergoing its sixth general election since 2003.
A collection of Shia parties called the Coordination Framework named al-Maliki as its nominee last week. A parliament session was to take place on Tuesday to elect a president after which the president would appoint the prime minister. That session was canceled, however, because of lack of a quorum. Maliki is favored to win, but it's not a done deal, yet. That is why Trump's remarks are having such a negative effect.
“In Iraq, we often speak of three informal vetoes over the prime minister:Washington, Tehran, and the clerical establishment in Najaf,” said Marsin Alshamary, a specialist in post-2003 statebuilding and democratization in Iraq, and assistant professor of Political Science at Boston College. “What is different this time is that the intervention is no longer behind closed doors, but openly public.”
While Trump argues that Maliki’s previous tenure weakened Iraq, empowered Iran and damaged U.S. interests, his comments are widely perceived by Iraqis as a blatant intrusion into domestic political debate, especially menacing by recent developments in Venezuela, Trump’s renewed threats against Iran, and insisting the U.S. will "have Greenland" — reinforcing perceptions that punitive pressure remain central tools of his foreign policy.
Maliki is poised to become the next Prime Minister. So it is worth revisiting how Maliki first rose to power, and the role Washington played in building up both his authority and his image.
When Maliki first emerged on the Iraqi political scene, he was endorsed by President George W. Bush in 2006 as “the right guy for Iraq.” From 2006 to 2008, he was at the helm of the Iraqi state during its sectarian civil war and in 2008, he sent in the Iraqi military to curb the power of Muqtada Al-Sadr’s militia. While these were only some of the factors that ended the bloody sectarian war, Maliki nevertheless emerged as a powerful Iraqi nationalist figure.
Yet the image of Maliki as a stabilizing nationalist figure would not endure. The policies and decisions that consolidated his authority also sowed the seeds of a far more dangerous unraveling. By June 2014, Al Qaeda in Iraq returned to the country in the form of ISIS and to many, Maliki was the catalyst, beginning with armed clashes between the Iraqi security forces — heavily politicized since his election — and Arab Sunni protestors in 2013, generating even greater indignation among the Arab Sunnis of Iraq who felt discriminated against since the fall of Saddam.
The fallout was not limited to the battlefield. As the security crisis worsened, the cracks in Iraq’s political and institutions became increasingly apparent. Another post-election stalemate akin to 2010 emerged, centered on Maliki's personality. This stalemate would endure until summer, meaning that Iraq had failed to form a government as ISIS conducted its offensive into Mosul in the summer 2014.
Since announcing his resignation in August of 2014 because of losing support from his coalition caused by the rise of ISIS, Maliki has nonetheless remained a political heavyweight in Iraq. Not an election goes by without talk of his return to the forefront of Iraqi politics. His recent return to the political stage has been a surprise to few, even with the strong performance of Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani.
Yet Maliki does face significant challenges as prime minister, even if the U.S. president had stayed quiet. Maliki alienated Iraq’s Kurds by withholding oil revenues. He alienated Iraq’s Arab Sunnis by authorizing the use of military force against protestors in 2013.
Nor does he command unified support within Iraq’s Shia community. Since their first clash in 2008, Maliki and Muqtada Al-Sadr have remained bitter rivals. Sadr, whose coalition won a plurality in the 2018 elections but was outmaneuvered by Maliki’s Coordination Framework from forming a government (as Maliki did in 2010 to Ayad Allawi), still wields a large and mobilized following, hardly a recipe for consensus, and more likely to perpetuate intra-Shia polarization.
However, in Iraq, sovereignty is the sacred cow of politics: any perceived attempt to manipulate outcomes from abroad courts the very dynamics that allow figures like Maliki to regain prominence. President Trump and his advisors may have fallen into that trap.
This is not the first time Trump has tried to impose outcomes in Iraq through blunt displays of power. In the early hours of January 2020, he ordered a drone strike, killing Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force and the architect of a regional network of Iraqi militias. Even more significant, in the same strike he killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the revered deputy commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces and leader of Kataib Hezbollah militia, both seen as national saviors in the fight against ISIS.
While the killing of Qassem Soleimani produced ripples throughout the Iranian Middle East proxies, the effect inside Iraq was more muted. Killing Muhandis, on the other hand, resonated throughout Iraq leading to attacks on the U.S. embassy and intensifying the strength of the militias there — the very militias Trump now demands Iraq to demobilize.
Whether delivered through social media or military force, Trump’s intervention is likely to prove counterproductive. Nouri Al-Maliki remains a divisive figure within Iraq, but history shows that overt foreign pressure, especially when framed as threats, tend to shift the discussion away from accountability and toward sovereignty.
By publicly warning Iraqis against their own political choices, Washington risks triggering a backlash that turns Maliki into a symbol of resistance to external pressure. Rather than weakening his standing, such interventions can lend the former PM renewed legitimacy, harden positions and narrow the space for internal compromise.
In attempting to influence Iraq’s political future through public coercion and conditional support, President Trump’s Truth Social post is likely to engender the opposite outcomes he sought, undermine U.S. credibility and reinforce the very dynamics of resentment, dependency and polarization so familiar in Iraq. In attempting to force Iraq to move forward, Trump may push Iraq back into the hands of Nouri Al-Maliki.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.
