Bob Kagan
speaker
1,471 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 29 Jul
Bob Kagan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, we were not dependent on Middle East oil.
It was our allies who were dependent on it.
So basically, it was a project of defending the world order.
And particularly, and I'm not in an abstract sense, but in a really concrete sense, that the allies we were defending in Europe and in Asia depended on access to that energy resource.
The region was also strategically important.
It was a constant sort of crossroads of great empires, etc.
So...
But it was secondary to our interests.
And no one in the region, including Iraq in 2003 or Iran today, ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland.
And of course, in Trump's national security strategy, which was released, I don't know, it must have been all of like four months ago, they deliberately downgraded
As was logical given their focus on hemispheric dominance and homeland security, they deliberately downgraded the Middle East as a region of American concern.
They just said it wasn't that important to us anymore.
And Donald Trump has spent the entire war saying it's not our oil, we don't need the oil, et cetera, et cetera.
So what are we...
So what are we doing it for?
Now, a lot of it is about defense of Israel.
There's no question that Iran posed a direct existential threat to Israel, not to us.
And we have committed to defending Israel.
But again, not because it's in our national security interest to do so, as I point out in the essay and as everybody knows.
Most of the leading American officials at the time thought it was not in our interest to support the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
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