Dexter Filkins
speaker
521 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Dexter Filkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Is a Palestinian state even viable anymore or is it just kind of a pipe dream that like everybody just kind of pays homage to? But is it essentially a pipe dream? Like it's not going to happen anymore. And that is what has been happening on the West Bank, which is – They're trying to make it impossible by flooding the West Bank with more settlers.
And so it just makes a settlement every day more difficult. It makes the formation of a Palestinian state, which, you know, has been – has been or had been American policy for many, many years, which is to support a homeland for the Palestinians and that ultimately that is the best – that gives the best chance to have a lasting peace in the region is to give them a homeland.
So every day that becomes less and less possible under the current government of Netanyahu.
Well, exactly. Exactly. And we don't know. Like, right. We don't know. Maybe this is all like a big distraction, you know, as Elon Musk dismantles the government or as, you know, Bibi prepares some big surprise for Iran. Like we maybe we'll find out. But my own sense, because we know we all know Trump. I mean, you know, he did this throughout his entire first term.
Somebody asked him a question and then he gives an outrageous answer. And then, you know, the press corps dutifully loses its mind and and and kind of, you know, writes about it and writes about it and talks about it and talks about it. And then it goes away. And like we've seen we've seen this before.
Yeah, let's see what happens over there. But CIA is a giant place. They have an enormous budget. Let's see what happens. And are there areas of the CIA that could probably be run more efficiently? Probably.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, let's see. Yeah, it's a radical proposal. Let's see how many people take it. But I think, yeah, I mean, when you get a press conference like we did yesterday, It is a great distraction from the other stuff that's going on of kind of Elon taking USAID, putting it in the wood chipper.
Yeah, it's a great way to change the subject while this other stuff is going on that we ought to be talking about.
I think we're kind of still in the same place, which is the Iranian project, this grand Iranian project, the Shiite crescent, which consisted of – even though Hamas is Sunni Muslim, but it consisted of Hamas – Hezbollah, Assad in Syria, it's gone. It's been destroyed.
And again, that was a grand multi-billion dollar, incredibly ambitious project to basically take over these states in the Middle East with Iranian allies. It's dead. So it's an incredible opportunity, not just for the individual states, like whether that's Lebanon or Syria or Gaza or
But it's an opportunity to kind of stand back and say, like, is there a possibility here of a kind of grander, bigger, you know, all-in-one peace deal? And I think that's what, you know, there's been a lot of conversation about that. You know, it's the Middle East. It's really hard to pull anything off there.
But it's like when you talk about bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords and then... Yeah. And then whatever idea ultimately comes in place in Gaza and like, you know, there's a lot of discussion on Gaza, like what is to be done with what is now, you know, a vast stretch of ruin and misery. What can be done?
And so there's a lot there's a lot of I mean, Trump's plan is one of many or Trump's idea is is one of many. But it's got to be rebuilt. The people are going to need a place to live. There's no government in Gaza. The people that were running Gaza are dead for the most part. And so, yeah, like that's all got to be re-envisioned or re-imagined and then kind of implemented.
And it's going to take a really long time. But it's an opportunity because the most malevolent actor in the Middle East for the past 30 years has been Iran. And Iran has – they're still standing there in Tehran. but they're on really weak legs.
Yes, they're still out there. There's a lot of bad guys out there. One of the first things that Trump did as president, he just did it last week, was order airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. There's tons of ISIS still out there. And everybody's been watching him really closely because there's effectively no government in Syria right now.
I mean, literally, Ahmed al-Shara, the leader, the sort of leader of the new leader of Syria, Like he gave an interview to The Economist like a week or so ago, and it was remarkable. He was they found him, you know, or they went to meet him sitting in Assad's old palace, which is, you know, six or seven times the size of the White House. And there's basically no one there.
And it was it was like him and five other guys. And then there was like a room where they went to pray. And it's like there's nothing there. And like the lights aren't on. So so there's a lot of space there for bad guys to run around. Right.
I think the concern – ISIS has been kind of bottled up in the desert for a long time, you know, ever since Obama and then Trump, you know, I think very effectively, you know, destroyed them. Or not destroyed because they're still out there. But they've been infiltrating back into, you know, Damascus and other places.
And so I think there's a lot of concern that, like, they're going to start to move and they're going to take advantage of the kind of big open space and the lack of government authority in Syria. And so – You know, that's a real concern. And then there's like, you know, the group that took over Syria was just part of a coalition of a bunch of other armed groups.
Those armed groups are still around. They don't necessarily, I mean, some have been quite clear about it. They don't buy into the kind of the idea that al-Shara is the leader. And they're like, well, what about us?
Showing 441–460 of 521 · page 23 of 27
← Previous
Next →