Fighting Resumes in Gaza, EU Summit’s Ukraine Challenge, Egypt’s Elections, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Israeli forces press their campaign against Hamas in southern Gaza, the European Council's last 2023 summit features crucial decisions on Ukraine, and Egyptians vote in their presidential elections. It's December 7, 2023 in time for The World Next Week. I am Bob McMahon. 

ROBBINS:
I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's begin with Gaza. As everybody listening surely knows, the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has ended. Fighting resumed promptly. Israeli forces pushed quickly into southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of civilians had fled to after the Israeli push into the north. With expanded ground operations and an ongoing Israeli vow to eradicate Hamas, what do we know about how this will go? What kind of endgame might come out of this?

ROBBINS:
Well, Israel seems to be sticking to that declared goal of destroying Hamas. On Tuesday, the army released a photo of eleven top Hamas military leaders in a tunnel beneath Gaza with circles around five they say they have killed and they also claimed to have killed about half of Hamas' battalion commanders. The current drive into the south is now intended to find and kill the most senior players believed to still be in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, the chief of the Qassam brigades. But even if they do succeed in getting these people, it's not clear that it's going to be enough to break Hamas or even stop a successor group from springing up. So that may be their endgame, but is that really going to be an end game? 

What we do know is that the situation is getting increasingly desperate. Some 80 percent of the population has been displaced since the war began. Humanitarian shelters are four times at their capacity. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres I think summed it up pretty well when he said a very unusual direct appeal to the Security Council warning that "there is nowhere safe in Gaza" and that there's a severe risk of collapse of the entire humanitarian system there. He's calling for the establishment of humanitarian ceasefire, but there's no sign that that's in the works unless maybe the Israelis think there's a chance for another hostage trade. But the situation's pretty, pretty grim. So even the Israeli's closest allies, the Americans, are publicly speaking out increasingly about the diminishing returns of this campaign. We've heard from Tony Blinken, we've heard from the vice president, I think the-

MCMAHON:
The defense secretary too.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, I think Lloyd Austin was the most pointed warning that if you drive civilians into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat. That's a pretty extraordinary warning. It had some people on the Hill going completely nuts about it from Austin. But I think from a military perspective, that endgame, I think a lot of people are beginning to question it. Washington officials with these pretty strong public warnings to Israel are privately admitting that they have very limited influence with Netanyahu. So most of the energy in Washington seems to be focused instead on what comes after with this uncertainty about when we're going to get to that next phase.

MCMAHON:
So you mentioned among other things that ongoing holding of hostages. Is there something like 150 are still being held as far as we know somewhere in Gaza? Is there any sense that there's going to be new traction on trying to open up that, for example? In terms of the U.S. statements, strong words are one thing, but is there any sort of U.S. options under consideration that would try to press the Israelis in terms of its lending of military aid and things like that?

ROBBINS:
Not that we've been able to see publicly. I mean, it is extraordinary enough that you've had these strong words from so many people, from Blinken, from Kamala Harris, from Lloyd Austin. Actually I think it's a sign of how little influence they think they have, that what did they do? They're denying visas to Israeli settlers who've been involved in violence as well as Palestinians who've been involved in violence. That seems like pretty weak beer. Listen, I suppose they could cut off aid, but that would be politically unacceptable. I think that Biden and a lot of people share the desire to break Hamas. Nobody is questioning the horror of what Hamas did in Israel. I think the concern is the diminishing returns from this. I think it's what Austin himself said is that you may be able to break Hamas, but how many more Hamases are you going to create with this if it goes on longer?

Now, are there behind the scenes efforts to persuade the Israelis for another humanitarian pause to get more aid in and potentially restore the hostage negotiations? Interestingly, Netanyahu has a very strong investment in getting more hostages out. He's a very unpopular man in Israel. He was a very unpopular man in Israel before October 7th. He's being blamed for what happened in October 7th. There's one thing the country was rallied around needing to break Hamas, but the country's also rallied around the need to get those hostages out. But I think most of the effort that we're hearing about in Washington is much more what comes afterwards, and interestingly, you're not hearing anything from the Israelis about that.

MCMAHON:
There has been talk of Gaza coming eventually under the stewardship of let's say the Palestinian authority or some reconstituted version of that. That seems to be met with cynicism by many sides. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of other options. There's the other question of if all those people who have fled to southern Gaza feel the need to flee again, where do they go to? There doesn't seem to be any answers to that either.

ROBBINS:
This is a really hard problem, no good solutions, and a lot of it's going to depend on who's running. Is Hamas destroyed? So it's very hard. What's our starting point here? Lots of specific questions. If Hamas is disarmed, at least the military side of it, who's going to keep the peace afterwards? You're going to have to have some sort of a peacekeeping force. The Americans are saying they're not going to do it, and the Arab states are saying they're not going to do it, but the Americans are hopeful that that is going to soften in some way. The Jordanian foreign minister said that they're not going to take responsibility for Israeli created wasteland. "We're not going to come in and clean up Israel's mess," is the way he put it. 

But you're hearing interestingly from the Egyptians this notion potentially to demilitarize Gaza, which they have very strong interest in as wellbeing living next door. Sisi, who we're going to talk about a little bit later, who has not been a player after... He used to be a major player, maybe they're hoping, I haven't heard this from any American officials, but Sisi seemed to be the first one who's raised this notion of some sort of international peacekeeping force. So I think the hope will be UN, maybe Arab League, although getting the Arab League to agree to anything is tough. But that's the first question. The second question of course is who's going to run the place for it to be rebuilt? Because it's going to have to be completely rebuilt.

Let's not forget that Hamas is not just a military force, they're the entire bureaucracy of the place. That's when they talk about a revitalized Palestinian Authority, reformed Palestinian Authority, revamped Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu says he doesn't want that and nobody thinks this Palestinian Authority is capable of it, but who else is going to do it? 

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

ROBBINS:
So that seems absolutely essential. Then of course the other question is who's going to pay for it? I think the Americans if asked them that, they think the Gulfies are going to pay for it. But there's a lot of questions there, but somebody's got to start planning for this.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. Inevitably, any planning is going to have to involve, as you said, some role for the UN. UN and Israel are in very bad way at the moment. You mentioned Guterres' comments before. Israelis are calling from him to resign. They're so furious about some of his comments about the situation in Gaza in particular, the UN main agencies that deals with relief there has been under duress, a number of its employees have been killed. Israelis have accused some of them of speaking sympathetically on behalf of Hamas, among other things. It just seems like if the current set of UN officials involved are not involved, there's going to have to be a reinvention of what the UN has been doing there for it to be able to function.

ROBBINS:
Well, and then you add one more complexity to this, which is who's actually going to be running the Israeli government when this is over with? The things that Netanyahu has been talking about, buffer zones, people in his government who seem to want to basically strip Gaza of all Palestinians itself, or at least some of them, which is really frightening and terrifying. Netanyahu, his case has come back. So he's a very unpopular man, as I said before. So a revamped Palestinian Authority, potentially a revamped Israeli government and the need to find out something that's going to have to stabilize and rebuild this place. So there's lots of work to be done there. So most of the conversation inside the U.S. government is how can we get the Israelis to moderate what they're doing right now, but who's going to run the place afterwards? There's a reason why Sharon left Gaza in the first place. I don't think most Israelis really want to hold the place when it's over with. 

So Bob, let's move north to the EU. Next Thursday is the European Council's quarterly meeting. Heads of state and government of all twenty-seven EU member countries are going to be attending, and they've already had a busy week, they met with the Chinese. This European Council summit has a very big agenda, the war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, they're worried about budget, they've got EU enlargement. So what do you think is most important about this meeting and how focused are they on what's going on here in Washington, particularly our failure to get it together on Ukraine?

MCMAHON:
Yes. So lots of questions to answer. There's a kind of interlocking response I guess. But what we should say at this point, there seems to be a real funk hanging over this summit, or as the Economist's Charlemagne latest column says, "the gloom before Christmas descending on Brussels." Part of that is on one of its big agenda items, which is Ukraine. There's two aspects in particular. One is this was hoped to be by most EU members to be a summit in which they formally would kick off the candidate process for Ukraine in session, along with Moldova and a little bit behind them, Georgia to the EU. Now, this isn't something that happens overnight or months or even couple of years, but it is incredibly important symbolically. We should say we're in the ten year moment of the anniversary of the Maidan protests, which were themselves about Ukraine growing closer to or Ukrainians wanting to become closer to the EU. Then we'll mark another ten year anniversary early next year with the annexation of Crimea that followed that. So it's very symbolically important. 

Also, they had agreed back in June that they were going to at this point formally endorse a 50 billion, with a B, euro payment to help Ukraine on non-military needs and all the many needs it has up to 2027 as a real vote of confidence, a real way of supporting the country going through a tough time. This was supposed to be companion and sort of part of a deal in which the U.S. would continue to be the main provider of military aid. Now, we can talk a whole podcast about what's going on with that front. As we speak, there is not a U.S. military aid deal that looks like it has a chance just yet. There's a huge amount of horse-trading going on in the U.S. Congress about a border security deal that could be-

ROBBINS:
And it failed in a procedural vote in the Senate yesterday.

MCMAHON:
And it failed yesterday. So the U.S. military aid puzzle is very much up in the air. The EU side is a challenge and there's a spoiler in the midst as there usually is in the EU in terms of any movement towards supporting Ukraine and that is Viktor Orban of Hungary who at this summit will be the longest serving EU leader and has sort of perennially come back with spoiler demands, particularly he's been not in favor of both major increases in aid to Ukraine or sanctions against Russia or certainly not at session. He's called the proposal to open negotiations on a session unfounded and ill-prepared. He has said that the aid budget proposed is unsubstantiated, unbalanced and unrealistic. Now we should say it's not just Orban feeling that way, but he's outspoken and he made a formal protest to that regard. He wanted to just take Ukraine off the agenda.

As we speak, the French are preparing to host a dinner at the presidential palace, Emmanuel Macron, with Viktor Orban to talk through these issues. Orban in the past has made some strong statements, whether it's been Ukraine or other issues, because all twenty-seven nations need to sign off on major EU agenda items like these. He has backed down with some massaging of things. The EU has been withholding something like €20 billion  in aid to Hungary to punish the country for what they see as rule of law, serious rule of law violations that EU members are supposed to abide by. They were going to walk some of that back and open up some funding because they set up some improvements on the judicial scene, for example. But he's rules Hungary as head of a one party state basically, and is able to get away with a lot. He's using his leverage to what he can get and we'll have to see whether there's some horse-trading that goes on there.

At the end of the day, let's say Ukraine aid goes through and they paper over differences over the at session, whatever. You could see them work out some sort of plan where they move things to the spring. Most EU members would like to sign off on these two Ukraine items in particular before some heavily contested European Parliament elections that will take place in June where who knows what's going to happen. We're seeing a very serious string of populism and some of it carrying an anti-Ukraine flavor. 

On top of that, I'll add one more thing, Carla, which is the funk I mentioned is also because of the budget situation. Now, part of the discussion about accession was also going to involve reform, and some of that is reform of the EU budgeting and certain payments on non-Ukraine items. Germany, the biggest economy, the biggest funder, is going through its own budgetary crisis after a constitutional court ruling about its inability to use certain funds that it thought it could use to bolster its budget. I won't go into details on it, but it has created a real level of concern, almost crisis in Germany about how it should be planning its money and it has a knock-on effect for the EU as well. So the reform, Ukraine are going to be issues that are going to be heavily discussed. I'm not sure what we're going to see coming out of Brussels next week.

ROBBINS:
God, I don't even want to say it, but if the U.S. Congress can't get it together and pass military aid, I do really believe that they've dug through the cushions in the sofa and they really are getting down to, both legally and reality. I don't know, can they come up with a lease? Maybe there's some other way they can figure out to help the Ukrainians. But can the Europeans make up some of the difference and is that part of the conversation as well? Or is everybody just sort of crossing their fingers, closing their eyes and saying the Americans will do it because after making every other mistake, they've finally come up with the right answer.

MCMAHON:
Aside from Hungary, from what I've seen and heard from people who've been in touch with Europeans recently, they're very much concerned about Ukraine and they are serious about wanting to support it and not just in non-military means. So far there have been very creative ways of finding old military equipment to send their way and so forth. But that could very well be part of the discussion that plays out next week, Carla, which is how are the Europeans going to step up and provide meaningful military aid for Ukraine? I think there's a lot of disheartening mood as well because of the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive that was going to yield all sorts of territorial gains has not been successful. There's been a real stalemate. Russia occupies still about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, for example.

This is one of the things that sparked the comments by Orban and apparently echoed silently by a few other European members that this is not the time to talk about bringing Ukraine formally into the EU fold. Maybe there's something else we can talk about strategically. By the way, that's something that France might end up airing out itself at the working dinner that Macron and Orban are having. The bottom line is I think the Europeans do want to support Ukraine more and want to come up with other ways of doing that even while they're facing their own budgetary pressures in other ways, because it's, at the end of the day, it's all about the fundamentals of supporting a sovereign democratic nation on their eastern flank with a rogue Russia trying to overcome them. So there's certain basics there that are much more immediate for European states than they might be for some in the U.S. Congress at the moment.

ROBBINS:
Sigh.

MCMAHON:
One other thing I would add that is an interesting kind of rare bit of positivity on the European front, which is that earlier today, Greece and Turkey agreed to reboot their relationship. So there was a visit of Turkish President Erdogan to Greece and the cordiality of the talks, and again, the way they left the meeting in terms of agreeing to keep open channels of communication, military confidence building measures, boosting trade, dealing with territorial issues in the Aegean Sea and a possible visit of the Greek leadership to Turkey down the road. These are all new and welcome things in a really testy relationship, historically testy, but also recently kind of worrisome relationship of two NATO partners, among other things. So that's something to just keep in mind as there are still things going on that we don't fully appreciate in terms of continental changes in Europe and then there might be some pragmatism going on as well.

ROBBINS:
So score maybe 0.75 for alliance politics.

MCMAHON:
We'll take 0.75 at this day and age. Absolutely. 

I want to take us back to the Middle East though, Carla. Next door to Gaza is Egypt. Egypt will hold its presidential elections this Sunday. It's been ten years since President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi assumed power following a military coup. He's seeking reelection now for a third time. Many Egyptians blame him for an ongoing set of crises, including really severe economic crisis. We had core inflation reaching an all time high of 41 percent in June and still doesn't meet the Argentinian inflation that we talked about recently but it's not great.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, they're slackers by comparison.

MCMAHON:
It raised a lot of concern among Egyptians about the state of their own governance and their ability to put food on the table literally. So are we going to see elections that result in Sisi's reign ending or something different?

ROBBINS:
Hard to imagine. Sisi has won 2014 and 2018 each time with 97 percent of the vote. 

MCMAHON:
Okay. All right. 

ROBBINS:
He and his supporters of the power ministries, he's a former general who led the coup against the Morsi government, the popularly elected government. These guys are experts at using all of the dark tools to maintain their power, jailing critics, gagging the independent media, cracking down on protests. Since 2014, human rights groups estimate there have been 60,000 political prisoners have been put away. So hard to imagine that we're suddenly going to see a flowering of democracy. Amnesty International, everybody else is warning against more of the same here. So there are candidates running, there's nobody who's up for it. There was one candidate who nobody even thought could knock off Sisi in this, but the most viable candidate, this Ahmed Tantawi, was bullied and his people were harassed and he was forced to even pull out of the race itself. So I think it's more of the same. 

I think the most interesting question is you've seen more protests, people are more willing to speak out against Sisi. So I think the small question is whether there will be protests against it, how overt the fraud is going to be, whether they are willing to accept something less than 97 percent this time, whether they'll be happy with 54 percent. So we can watch this space itself, but it's really hard to imagine that anything other than... I mean, I can go through the list of who the alternatives are and maybe I'll be embarrassed because I'll list a surprise, but there's nobody on that list here that anybody, as far as I can tell, thinks has a chance against the system, not so much against Sisi itself because they've set up a really strong system to keep themselves in power.

MCMAHON:
It's one of those elections that's kind of crept up quietly, which tends to indicate that there's nobody else raising a fuss because Sisi's got things under wraps.

ROBBINS:
That, and also I think it's really interesting that Egypt, which used to be the major player in the region, since Sisi took over, is no longer the major player in the region. The Saudis of the major players in the region, the Gulfies are pretty big players. So when you do hear him speaking out about what's going on in Gaza and even raising this notion of demilitarization and raising some hope that they might help with some sort of a peacekeeping force. I mean, he's just has not been a major player in this, I suppose, focused on his own domestic problems. So it's crept up in part because we don't follow Egypt all that much anymore. It's not the major deal maker. Now, it has helped at different times with problems, but it's just not that.

The real question is what happens after this? This election was moved up several months because he knows that he's got to deal with...he owes money to the IMF, he's got terrible, terrible debt problems and he's going to preside over a country that's going to have even more massive austerity challenges. I think he thought as bad as the situation is now in terms of public anger, it's going to get a lot worse, and how he deals with the economy is going to be a challenge going forward. I think the other question is how much he tries to buy economic support and goodwill internationally about whether he tries to step in and tries to help resolve what's going on in Gaza.

MCMAHON:
Is there any sense that the U.S. sees him as an important player in that going forward? Presumably the U.S. isn't going to speak out too loudly about Egyptian elections in which Sisi is resoundingly brought back to power?

ROBBINS:
Well, that's an interesting question. I think that's one of the things to watch is certainly we all remember this, the way the U.S. turned itself, the Obama administration tied itself into knots over Mubarak. We're going to support him, not support him. He may be a bad guy, but he's our a bad guy. I think people used a nastier term than that. Sisi has been condemned again and again and again by human rights groups and then sort of fallen off everybody's radar. So he may try to buy himself back into people's good graces by helping out in this. We'll see. I mean, that's my prediction. It's my gut feeling. I don't have any great inner knowledge of this.

MCMAHON:
The interesting element, again, as you've staked it out, that there doesn't seem to be much chance of any sort of serious threat. But whether anything from the October 7th events reverberate in Egypt will be very interesting to watch despite it being under wraps.

ROBBINS:
Well, I think Netanyahu's more extreme members than Netanyahu's extreme government would love to shove everybody out of Gaza into Egypt, I mean-

MCMAHON:
To Sinai or whatever.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, Sisi has many reasons why he doesn't want to have to feed more people, but also the fact that he's no fan of Hamas and he knocked off a Muslim Brotherhood government to begin with and does not want "extremists" moving in there. He has made common cause with the Israelis on many things. They're "fighting" extremism. So they haven't been particularly helpful either. They haven't been great defenders of the Palestinians. So we'll see whether he becomes helpful in the post-Gaza phase. 

So Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week. This is a figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at cfr_org's Instagram story. This week they selected one I really wanted them to select, "U.S. Diplomat Charged as Cuban Spy." Is this the plot of a John le Carré novel?

MCMAHON:
It goes beyond even some of le Carré's most involved plots, I would think. It's quite an incredible story, and I think we should first mention a little bit of the bio of the figure of the week.

ROBBINS:
The Ivy League bio of the figure of the week.

MCMAHON:
Yes. Victor Manuel Rocha is a Colombian-born naturalized U.S. citizen with degrees from Yale, Harvard, Georgetown. State Department career begins in 1981. At one point he's the ambassador to Bolivia, that's 2002. He was also, from 2006 to 2012, was an advisor to the commander of the joint command of the U.S. military of the region, the Southern Command, which includes Cuba, which gave him access to all sorts of secret information. I think as one person I heard interviewed on NPR this week said he basically had more access to information than Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, two other famous spies who were convicted at the end of the Cold War for spying.

So we still don't know the extent to which he provided damaging information to Cuba, but I think it's going to be quite something when this emerges. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami on fifteen counts, included charges that he acted as an illegal agent of a foreign government, wire fraud as part of an alleged scheme to "act as a clandestine agent of Cuba and harm the interest of the United States". So there's a great deal of concern about just how much he knew and how much he shared with Cuba and how many people were damaged by it and policies affected and so forth. But he was apparently an unwavering ally of Cuba, an agent of Cuba. It's just kind of stunning to have something like this come to light.

ROBBINS:
They only found out about it, what, in '22. They had caught him in a sting operation. 

MCMAHON:
Yes.

ROBBINS:
A guy who posed as a Cuban intelligence agent contacted Rocha and had several meetings with him in Miami. Rocha was bragging about the importance of what he'd done and kept referring to how he'd strengthened the revolution and talked about how the U.S. was the enemy. It was almost as if he'd been neglected and he'd sort of been left out of the game and he was so happy that someone had recognized him again. That is very much a le Carré plot. People do these things for ideological reasons, but they also-

MCMAHON:
Very much a le Carré character and having those very sort of human flaws. In le Carré's time, it was that amidst the existential battle between the Soviet Union and the West, in this case, it's not existential, but it's still an epic ongoing battle between the U.S. and Cuba. Yeah, as I said, we're going to find out more as details emerge from the Justice Department, but this is quite something.

ROBBINS:
Also, it would be interesting to see how much this continued past the Obama opening to Cuba and whether or not he played any role in giving the Cubans information as part of that negotiation about the opening. Listen, in the end of the day, it's Cuba. It's not a major player internationally. This is not the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It's not China now. It's not even North Korea. They don't have nuclear weapons. But for those of us who care about these things and love the spy game, this is really, really a cool story.

MCMAHON:
Again, gives insights into what sways certain people to do certain things over time and the extent to which the U.S. government is going to need to add further layers to its vetting, which I think some people are extremely already frustrated about.

ROBBINS:
So more to watch there. More to hear.

MCMAHON:
Indeed. That's our look at the clandestine and otherwise world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Hong Kong holds local elections. Javier Milei is sworn in as the new president of Argentina. And Vladimir Putin gives his annual press conference.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous and Kaitlyn Esperon for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria, and this is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
This is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.