Iran-Israel Escalation, Harris and Trump Seek Hispanic Vote, Biden in Germany, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Israel and Iran spur concerns of a wider war. Vice President Harris and former President Trump speak to Hispanic voters. And, President Biden travels to Germany to shore up support for Ukraine. It's October 3rd, 2024, and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins. Bob, good to see you. Let's begin with everything going on in the Middle East. In the past several days, Israel has killed a large number of Hezbollah's leaders, including top leader Hassan Nasrallah, and that of course follows the late July assassination of Hamas's leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran during the inauguration of Iran's new president. And soon after Israel began what it's calling a limited ground invasion—although it seems to be growing by the hour—in southern Lebanon, Iran launched nearly two hundred ballistic missiles at Israel, causing only limited damage, thanks to Israeli and U.S. defense systems. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to retaliate and officials are saying they should have hit back harder last April after Iran's last ballistic missile barrage. How far do you think this is going to go?

MCMAHON:
That is the question of the moment, Carla. And there's a lot of grave concern that this has got much further to play out. By playing out, that means full on Iran-Israeli back and forth. The latest set of media reports that are getting a lot of attention is the indications that Israel is ready to hit Iranian targets, whether it's first let's say, gas and oil refineries, and then moving to known nuclear targets. And that's certainly a degree of escalation that would prompt a further response. It's worth noting also, that Iran's response is either triggering what's left of Hezbollah to sent off their missiles closer to Israel, or sending its own ballistic missiles, of which it still possesses quite a bit. But Iran doesn't have an Air Force per se that is going to pose any challenge here. There's different levels of threat that can be posed.

The latest round, the October 1st salvo in ballistic missiles was...I believe it was estimated to be twice as many ballistic missiles that were sent in April, still for the most part away from population centers, although again, you can't dismiss it just for that. It was pretty alarming to see the footage of these coming in and even as the shooting down was happening, these are ballistic missiles, so they can cause a lot of damage. They limited to quite a bit, again, testament to the really effective missile defense that the Israelis have with help from the U.S. and other partners, but this could play out further. Last week we made passing reference to things ratcheting up in the Middle East and within the next day, Nasrallah was killed in a massive attack on Hezbollah headquarters in Lebanon.

Lebanon itself, fighting continues. Israeli bombing continues. They're going big time into Beirut. They are going after what they say are embedded Hezbollah compounds, leadership bunkers and so forth in populated areas. Lebanon is becoming a fast-growing humanitarian crisis, something like a quarter of the country has been put on notice to flee where they currently are because of safety concerns. Lebanon in and of itself is a place where escalation can happen, but then again, Israel is reserving the right to respond to the direct attack from Iran. And there has been a lot of talk about should it, "take the win," given that it withstood this latest round? And all things being equal, it still has gotten the better of Iran. Or is it duty-bound and security-bound to go after Iran again? That's the calculation going on. U.S. officials have said, "Look, we don't have Israel on any leash. It's up to them, but we don't expect this to happen in the short term." But it's not clear.

There was a UN security council meeting called by France yesterday, Wednesday, very alarming language coming from among others, the UN secretary-general, Guterres, about basically saying that we are staring into another abyss right now. A lot of real concern about the big confrontation that everybody's fearing, Israel-Iran. But there is ongoing attacking going on throughout the region, especially in Lebanon right now.

ROBBINS:
The first time around when the Israelis somewhat took the win, they responded to the U.S. urging restraint. It seems to me for Netanyahu, he's going for something bigger, certainly going for something bigger against Hamas and Hezbollah. He's determined to destroy both of these groups. And in the long term, to my mind, impossible. But in the near term, he's made a lot of progress, which is certainly the leadership and stocks of weapons—taken out reportedly half of Hezbollah's stocks of weapons, and they've had enormous, enormous numbers of missiles, so there's a lot more to go.

With Iran, much harder. But there are hard line voices in Israel who are saying, "Indeed. Go after, hit them hard. Don't just show we can retaliate, but hit their economy hard." There's some people saying, "Maybe you'll get the government to collapse if you take out their major source of economic support," such as it is with their oil and gas industry. Other people are saying, "Take out the existential threat of their nuclear program."

Two things from the United States perspective. One is if they were to go after the oil industry, enormous effect I would suppose on the global economy, particularly in the midst of a presidential campaign. Certainly not in the United States interest to have them do that. And the other one is I think the long-term assessment has been from the Pentagon that they can't go after deeply buried nuclear program without support from the United States. And President Biden has made it quite clear he doesn't want them to do that, he said that publicly.

Sorry for that long intro here to my question. how much influence does President Biden have over this and should he be seen as just flailing at this point, or do we have any control here? Do we have any influence here on this? Because certainly Israel can have a major impact on the global economy and potentially in the American presidential election.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's an important question. It was raised at a couple of briefings that CFR convened earlier this week, both a media call yesterday and a day before a meeting with a CFR briefing looking at...It was supposed to be a retrospective on the year since October 7th, but it obviously was dealing with present day. And I think it was Aaron David Miller, one of the speakers at the earlier meeting, saying "the U.S. has been Gulliver striding around the region," but realizing that it has a certain limit to its influence. And part of the concern and part of some of the analysis behind the U.S. not having influence is that doesn't seem to have a strategy in the region that is coherent. The Israelis are getting the targeted assassination successfully done against chief Hezbollah leadership. And these are leaders going back decades, who are responsible for a lot of attacks and a lot of threats against Israel. They are feeling pretty emboldened. They have also pointed out, and it was also pointed out by some of the speakers at the CFR meetings, that Israel took note of the fact that after the 2006 incursion to Lebanon, there was supposed to be a joint UN at Lebanon force that was patrolling this border area at safe zone between Lebanon and Israel, it never happened. Hezbollah muscled its way in and nothing was done about it.

The Israelis are seeing that might makes right in some of these cases. But to your point about the bigger question, Iran, I think you're right. I think the U.S. at the end of the day is going to need to be able to sign off on as well as provide help for any attack in Iranian...Certainly in Iranian nuclear installation. We did see in the attack that killed Nasrallah that the Israelis were able to use these very heavy bunker buster bombs, reportedly U.S. provided, that were very effective. And one thinks it could possibly use those, although it's not clear whether they have the ability to penetrate into what seem to be these deeply embedded Iranian nuclear facilities.

But again, to your question, you also referenced other facilities, other fuel facilities, that's certainly in play. And some Iranian officials have responded by saying, "Well, that could set in motion reprisals that would include us attacking other energy facilities in the area. Let's say Saudis." And then you have this spiral of Mideast energy shortage and all that knock-on effect, which is a crude but somewhat effective way of trying to deter that. We'll have to see where this plays out, Carla. It's very possible something happens even within a day after we tape this podcast, because this is the nature of the escalatory ladder that's going on right now.

ROBBINS:
And I think it really does come down to how many wars on how many fronts is Israel militarily capable of fighting? And what's the strategic goal here? It's one thing to think that you can seriously degrade Hamas and Hezbollah, and I think that's a debatable point, but does the appetite grow in the feeding, to think you can also seriously degrade Iran: militarily, Iran's nuclear program, versus establishing some deterrence here of, "We can't let it go. We can't not retaliate." It's one thing to get into a retaliatory spiral by accident, another thing to think that you have some strategic capability to take on all of your enemies at the same time. I think there's a real possibility here of miscalculation and overreach. We'll have to see what happens.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And we should recall that last two memorable speeches that Netanyahu gave to outside audiences at the U.S. Congress and at the UN most recently, he focused on what Israel sees as this existential threat from Iran. And it was very strong language, which he's said before, but he came out and really singled out Iran as the threat. I think that's very much on their minds right now, the Israeli planners.

And by the way, it's not just Hamas and Hezbollah, they've been attacking the Houthis, who were continuing to lob various projectiles out of their base in Yemen. They feel like they have a transformative moment. And again, back to the U.S., Carla, it's surging military forces into the region. How much does the U.S. want to commit to that? How much longer does it feel it can do that? And how viable will that be as we head into a presidential election, which could bring in a different calculus? Lots of different things in play here, Carla. And let's talk about that U.S. presidential race, shall we?

ROBBINS:
Which of course, none of us are talking about at home constantly.

MCMAHON:
Which nobody's talking about.

ROBBINS:
Yes.

MCMAHON:
That's right. Next Tuesday and Thursday there's a different wrinkle. Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, are going to participate in separate televised town halls that are hosted by Univision, which is a major provider of Spanish content in the United States. This would be their chance to speak to undecided Hispanic voters. A reminder, Hispanic population is the largest minority in the United States and makes up an estimated 15 percent of eligible voters. Carla, what approaches do you see by both the Harris and Trump campaigns to win this vote?

ROBBINS:
Well, first, I find this really fascinating that the growth of this portion of the U.S. electorate is particularly striking, and certainly merits the attention of any national candidate. There are now 36.2 million eligible Latin or Hispanic voters.

MCMAHON:
Wow, wow.

ROBBINS:
And that's a 4 million person increase since 2020, and almost 100 percent increase in the number of eligible voters since 2000. And one in five people who will be voting—assuming eligible voters are going to vote—they'll be voting for the first time in this year's election so there are a lot of hearts and minds up for grabs right there. And Hispanic voters also have a particularly strong presence in two key swing states, Arizona and Nevada. You can see why both candidates will be on Univision this coming week, though the two campaigns have until now taken very different approaches to this community.

Kamala Harris, who has a lot of money, has put a lot of effort into cultivating Hispanic voters: spent $3 million on Spanish radio advertisements; launched a WhatsApp channel at the DNC targeted towards bilingual voters; they've got this big Latinos Kamala Harris Walz call-a-thon, which is designed to reach a half a million voters; she's added a whole bunch of Hispanic senior campaign consultants; she, of course, has a Hispanic campaign manager. But what she's not doing is making a strong identity-based appeal. Her message in Spanish is like her message in English: prosperity, equity, personal safety, reproductive rights, we're not going back. It's the same Kamala, the same message. Trump is doing very little advertising in Hispanic media, and his appeal is what his appeal is in English: the economy, border security, law and order.

So how are the two candidates running right now? In the latest NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll, which was in the field of September 16th to 23rd, and of course a day is a week is a month is a year right now because we're so close to the election, but that had Harris at 54 percent to President Trump's 40 percent among registered Latino voters. This is a significant improvement from July after President Biden's disastrous debate when a Pew poll showed 36 percent of Latino voters would choose Biden, 36 percent Trump and 24 percent said they would vote for R.F.K Jr, who of course has since dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. But even though the news is very good for Vice President Harris, she is still running significantly behind Biden in 2020, Obama and Clinton, who all got far above 60 percent in their actual elections. Now, keep in mind that's exit polling for elections versus polling pre-vote, but she's still got a lot to make up if she's going to come close to what they got at the time.

While pollsters count Latino voters as a bloc, and here we are discussing them as a block, they of course aren't a bloc, this is multi-ethnic. It's a generationally diverse, politically diverse group of people, which complicates the question where you started here, which is how are they going to pitch themselves and are they going to get there? The other thing I think, which is cool that we got looking at the research here, when Pew polled a group of Latino voters in late August, early September about their top issues, their concern sounded like the rest of American voters. 85 percent said the economy followed by healthcare, violent crime, gun policy, immigration and Supreme Court appointments. Latino voters who identified themselves as Trump supporters put the economy, violent crime and immigration in their top three. And Harris supporters put the economy, healthcare and gun policy in their top three. And interestingly for them, immigration was number nine on the list of ten issues cited. I think you're going to expect to see Harris being Harris and Trump being Trump on Univision, but I think we're going to have to watch.

MCMAHON:
And I think it's really important to point out that Hispanic voters are not a voting bloc. It's not like, "Hey, we won the 15 percent of the population that are Hispanic." They're human beings and human beings are complicated, diverse individuals. And so there you have it. It is very interesting these somewhat back to back appearances and the fact that both candidates see the need to do this, and I think would love to have a critical mass of these voters, but it's also going to be worth watching as we've noted before, the way this breaks down in the swing states, which are looking ever swingier and ever more important, just considering things like there's a large Puerto Rican population in the state of Pennsylvania, which is a very important swing state and which has still seem to be up for grabs. How do they view the candidates, for instance? So many things to consider. I'm going to be really interested to see how they carry out their messaging and how it polls afterwards, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Well, certainly it seems contrarian to me that President Trump is doing so well, given the way he talks about immigrants and which has a rather racist tone to it, let's face it. JD Vance pushing out this notion of migrants eating cats and dogs. He was talking about Haitians, the southern borders, "They're coming across," all of these things. The largest bloc of Hispanic voters are Mexican Americans, so one would think that President Trump would not be doing so well with this group. But that is really not the reality of it. Immigration is not a top...Certainly not among Harris voters, it is a top issue among Trump voters.

It's not immigration the way one would think. They're not horrified by that language, those voters, the Trump voters. Being tough on the border seems to play very well with this group of eligible voters. The NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll show that Trump gets higher marks overall with this voting bloc, which is a bloc, but gets higher marks for handling border security, while Harris was more favored for humane treatment of immigrants. She of course is talking about strong border security, and it doesn't seem to be costing her with Harris voters, with Latino voters. Once again, we'll probably hear Harris being Harris, we'll hear the same pitch, and Trump being Trump. I'm going to be watching.

MCMAHON:
Absolutely. And the kitchen table issues that have been broader issues cited throughout the campaign seem like they're going to be the same ones Hispanics care about too.

ROBBINS:
Bob, let's turn to Germany. Next Thursday, President Biden will be there meeting with a Chancellor Scholz, convening with allies at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base, and meeting with his European quartet counterparts. The news from Ukraine is incredibly grim these days. Yesterday, Wednesday, the Ukrainian government acknowledged that Russian forces had taken the town of Vuhledar, which is in the Donbas region, and it has particular strategic value because it's so close to a rail line that links Russian occupied Crimea with the Eastern Donbas. And it's also on the way to Pokrovsk, which is that transportation hub the Russians have been pounding for weeks and that we've talked about before.

We know President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had high hopes that his visit to Washington might turn things around, securing additional aid and commitments, including on the use of long range weapons to target inside Russia. Do we have any idea what more President Biden is going to ask the allies to do for Ukraine in those meetings? And do we have any idea if he's willing to do more himself? This is a really desperate situation.

MCMAHON:
I think, Carla, it's worth noting the fact of the meeting seems to indicate that there is going to be some announcement because I have been searching far and wide for other indications and are really hard to find any update to what we had already heard just a week ago when Zelenskyy was in the U.S. and meeting the president and others on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
First of all, a little bit of a naming convention. This is a quartet meeting which is kicking things off, that is UK, France, Germany and the United States, not to be confused with the transatlantic quintet, which includes Italy, or the Indo-Pacific Quad, which includes India, Japan and Australia.

ROBBINS:
Or the three tenors.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, or the three tenors for that matter, which includes an Irish and Italian...Well, anyway, you get the picture. Another grouping that's important and a bigger meeting, is this meeting of close to fifty countries, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group taking place, that includes all thirty-two NATO members. They meet at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in the western part of Germany. Presumably you're going to hear a lot more talk about ways of firming up Ukrainian defenses. As you noted, the Vuhledar fall is concerning perhaps not in and of itself, but because of a set of dominoes that could be lining up where the Russians take one strategically important hub after another from this whole theater that Ukrainians had been holding onto tenaciously, and where they had inflicted heavy Russian casualties two years ago. Now, the Russians are said to have beefed up with a new crop of well-paid volunteers, according to some reports, and are able to bring more people into battle than the Ukrainians.

It's a tough moment for the Ukrainians. They are eagerly looking for some capabilities, some so-called throw weight capabilities to be able to really create some harm and some pause on the Russian side. Their incursion into Kursk has not had the intended effect, and so they are looking for some firm commitment. And hanging over this are these Russian threats, they've been making them before, but they're now saying, "You NATO countries want to give Ukraine this capacity. This is then NATO declaring war on Russia, and this changes the whole name of the game."

ROBBINS:
I don't know if you saw this, but Mark Rutte, who is the new sec-gen of NATO, within forty-eight hours after being sworn in he made an unannounced visit to Kyiv, and immediately started stepping up the pressure on the U.S. and the rest of the crowd. Standing next to Zelenskyy in a press conference, he defended Ukraine's right to hit deeply inside of Russia. He said it would not be a violation of international law because the right to self-defense is clear. Zelenskyy meanwhile, took the opportunity to...Without naming names, he said that NATO countries are, "prolonging the process." And he also interestingly did something which we've talked about before, he reminded everyone the way he did back in April, that the drones that are flying over Ukraine are Iranian drones. And he called on Western countries to do what they're doing, to defend Ukraine, shoot down Iranian drones the way they're defending Israel. I think both Rutte and Zelenskyy are watching very closely to see what happens in Germany and they're stepping up the pressure here.

MCMAHON:
I do think that air defense part of that mention is significant, it is maybe an area where you might see movement before you see the green light for missiles that could project hundreds and thousands of miles into Russia, because it can be couched in defense terms. There's not a lot of these systems around and countries are loath to get rid of their own defense capabilities. However, there is an acknowledgement, and Rutte's visit was significant so early in his term that Ukraine is fighting so that potentially Western Europe doesn't have to, that's the way some of them are seeing it in terms of heading off aggression. And it's serving as this theater of conflict that is almost buffering the West from a newly aggressive or assertive Russia, shall we say.

I'd also note that interesting reports have came out just in the past couple of weeks about confirming plans for the United States to deliver by 2026, some medium range missiles to German soil. And this would be the first deployment of this sort in decades, and something that European countries, not just Germany but others, are welcoming as they are gauging and worrying about Russian capabilities and the fact that in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave close to Western Europe, that there are missiles staged. And so you're looking at a new and concerning development certainly, but a new Western European sensibility about missile capacity that is also in the air. I think certainly bilaterally, this is...again, this is a bilateral visit first and foremost that Biden's making, and then it's got the quartet and then it's got a bunch of other NATO members. These are the types of things that I'm going to be interested to see how much is shared publicly about that because it's raising things to a new level.

ROBBINS:
The reports about this town collapsing, the Russians have been going after it for a very long time. Beyond its strategic location, the reports have been the Russians apparently outnumbered the Ukrainian forces by six, seven to one. I don't know whether this is a major turning point or just particularly one grim development. But if Biden was going there because one of his last visits he's talking there, everyone's been so focused on Israel that they haven't been focused on this. To me, it feels like we're in a particularly desperate situation. Rutte was the prime minister of the Netherlands for fourteen years, so you can expect him to have a particularly strong voice in this job.

MCMAHON:
Well, including he was there during the 2014 downing of that Malaysian airliner that left a Dutch airport and had a lot of Dutch citizens who were laying around in the fields of eastern Ukraine after they had been shot down by forces there. And that was a period that you can mark an inflection point for Dutch government concerns about Russia and a new level of concern about what threat Russia poses. Yeah, you're right to point that out, Carla.

We should also tack on to that the fact that Biden is traveling after Germany; he's going down to Angola, first U.S. president's visit to Africa since 2015. And this is something he had promised a couple of years ago when hosting African leaders. And it very much plays into another set of geostrategic considerations, which is the competition for hearts, minds and infrastructure let's say, in sub-Saharan Africa, with the United States and China and to some extent Russia. And so Angola plays into that quite largely. Just another element to watch. We try to keep an eye over the horizon landscape here at The World Next Week, Carla, so I just wanted to mention that.

And now we've talked our way into the audience figure of the week portion of the podcast. This is the figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Carla, our audience is keeping things in the Eurasian perimeter with the figure 123, as in "Norway Wants a 123-Mile Fence with Russia." What's this fence going to do and how potent will it be?

ROBBINS:
It's not clear they're actually going to build a fence, but there's a lot of fence building going on these days. Let's first talk about why Norway, or more to the point, its justice minister, is talking about possibly fencing its entire border with Russia. And in this case, the state of concern is Russian espionage and possible sabotage. And in May, Norway's domestic security agency, the PST, issued warnings that Russian intelligence agents were entering Norway at a Artic border station, which is the only border crossing with Russia, and that these spies were looking to gather intelligence or carry out acts of sabotage. And in response, Norway raised the threat level for companies producing weapons for Ukraine, and further tightened restrictions on entries from Russia. And after the Ukraine invasion, they had a major crackdown already on entries. And there are some exceptions for people with close relatives and some students, all of that, but they're really tightening the border in major, major ways.

In an interview last week with Norway's public broadcaster, their justice minister, Emilie Enger Mehl, expressed particular interest in a high tech fence that Finland is building along its border with Russia, which has sensors to detect if people are moving near the border. And it's a very cool thing, apparently. And she was suggesting, "Well, maybe we really need one of these things."

Now, Finland as you know, has a far longer border with Russia. It's 830 miles and it's already building its own 124-mile fence to stop a flow it says, of third country migrants. And it claims that in the first few months after it was admitted to NATO last year, some 1,300 migrants from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, entered from Russia. And instead of saying that this was a humanitarian issue, they claimed that this sudden outflow was a new form of hybrid warfare from Russia. I don't know if that's true, but the Finns have now adopted by a very small margin, a new law that grants border guards the authority to turn away third country migrants who are seeking entry from Russia, and preemptively rejecting their asylum applications. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? And human rights advocates say that violates EU and international law, and Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, have introduced similar laws. Norway isn't talking about this fence for migration reasons but it certainly is in the air.

MCMAHON:
And we do know that Russia and certainly Belarus, have weaponized migrants and sought to cynically take advantage of their desire to flee to the West, and to use that to pressure the countries on their border. But as you say, it does put innocent people in harm's way. And unfortunately, it seems to be very much an objective security concern here on the Norwegian side. And maybe it's the era of the cool border fence, if nothing else, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Yeah. Well, I don't know, it may be the era of the cruel border fence as well. And there's plenty of reasons to be worrying about Russian hybrid warfare. Yes, and if you spend any time on RT or any other Russian media/disinformation outlet, pushing the immigration button in Europe and in the United States is certainly there. The invading hordes and the eating of cats and dogs, that's a favorite trope in Russia as in the United States.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's our look at the dystopian world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on: Mozambique and Tunisia hold presidential elections; Laos hosts the forty-fourth ASEAN Summit; and more than 100 countries take part in the summit of Francophonie countries.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. 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. And please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, 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. And special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson and Kenadee Mangus for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. And this is Carla Robbins saying so long, and don't forget to vote.

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