Sydney Stein, Jr., Scholar, Brookings. White House, NSC, and State Dept in Biden, Obama and Clinton admins. Author, Losing the Long Game.
Joined January 2025
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I spoke with @RavivDrucker about the debate over Netanyahu's role in the failure to secure a ceasefire/hostage deal before January 2025.
Quite the closing argument for Netanyahu to acknowledge his legacy is the end of US military aid and his re-election would mean sanctions, isolation and reliance on cryptocurrency. No illusions about opposition but they would at least try to avoid this future.
Netanyahu warns of banking sanctions on Israel, floats crypto as possible bypass haaretz.com/israel-news/elec…
One of many critical points in Jon Finer's excellent post-elections Israel policy agenda for Democrats: "A new approach should also start from the principle that U.S. policy will distinguish occupied territory and Israel proper."
nytimes.com/2026/10/23/opini…
Congrats to @gideonrachman on important new book, and impeccable sense of timing...
Colby demanding allies pass a loyalty test to keep US troops in Europe while Hegseth doing all he can to alienate the allies they are trying to recruit.
It was indeed a good and well-received speech but difficult for SACEUR to deliver reassurance/ deterrence message when Trump is doing deals with Putin, lashing out at Ukraine, and floating possible force posture reductions in Europe. Deep and costly disconnect.
SACEUR Grynkewich’s speech went over well in Warsaw. But is his “NATO theory of victory” consistent with the US force posture review, which may lead to big US troop withdrawal from Europe? @USNATO @ACScowcroft @ACEurope
“Neither doubling down nor walking away offers a way out of the cycle that has trapped every recent president. A more disciplined and pragmatic middle course might.” My new @ForeignAffairs essay on the way ahead in the Middle East.
“The U.S. goal should not be to let go of the Middle East but to pursue its interests there in a smarter and more realistic way,” argues @PhilGordonDC.
foreignaffairs.com/iran/amer…
Netanyahu supporters seem to be taking advantage of @Brett_McGurk’s book and interviews to claim vindication for Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza. But while Brett’s front-row account is valuable, that doesn’t mean it is definitive or its perspectives widely shared—including among former members of the Biden administration.
I would say most of my former colleagues think that President Biden should have put more pressure on Israel to conduct the war differently and end it sooner, and few think that the biggest mistake Biden made was to show daylight with Israel. And even Brett’s account makes clear that hostages were not the top priority for Netanyahu and that when U.S. pressure actually was applied—as after the World Central Kitchen strike—it worked.
Brett tells the story of the Biden phone call after that tragedy, but not the story of how Biden called Netanyahu on July 4, 2024 to press him to conclude the hostage deal after Hamas had finally accepted the basic framework, dropping its demand that Israel commit to a permanent ceasefire before any hostages were released. Netanyahu instead added so many of his own conditions—against the advice of his own security chiefs—that the deal became impossible for another six months, during which nearly 9,000 more Palestinians were killed and more Israeli hostages died, including the six that Hamas executed in August. The Israeli changes included a demand that Israel retain forces along Gaza’s entire border with Egypt, which the IDF had seized only after the original proposal, and a new enforcement mechanism to screen Gazans who were returning home to the north which would have required Israeli troops to remain in central Gaza. Both of those new conditions were dropped in the deal ultimately concluded in January 2025.
Nothing in the book or elsewhere changes the reality that October 7 happened on Netanyahu’s watch; that he prioritized “total victory” and the maintenance of his coalition over a hostage deal or an end of the war; that his conduct of the war and management of its humanitarian consequences catastrophic; that it has left Israel more isolated and insecure; and that it has deeply damaged, perhaps irreparably, Israel’s relationship with the United States—which should have done more to change Israel’s conduct rather than enable it. There was never an easy way forward in Gaza, but no version of the story vindicates Netanyahu.
Don't miss important piece by @Julie_C_Smith on growing Russian hybrid attacks and NATO's insufficient response. Instead of turning a blind eye and offering Russia energy deals, Trump admin should pause proposed troop withdrawals from Europe, resume direct military aid to Ukraine, sanction more of Russia's shadow fleet and its enablers, and respond to cyber attacks in kind.
Europe in turn should accelerate the end of remaining purchases of Russian energy, better enforce the oil price cap, seize ships suspected of cutting undersea cables, expel Russian spies under diplomatic cover, enhance anti-drone capabilities, harden critical infrastructure, and begin to transfer not just the interest but the principal of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine.
The goal of both should be to make clear that the response to these Russian attacks is not a "better deal" but greater resilience and imposition of costs.
foreignaffairs.com/russia/ru…
The notion that Trump might use an American lead in AGI to bully allies and extract concessions from them is shocking because it is so plausible—as demonstrated by Greenland, the punitive tariffs, the Ukraine minerals deal, the threats over defense spending, digital-services taxes and diesel releases, and countless other examples.
The United States should be working with its allies to develop common norms and safeguards for AGI development. Instead, it is giving them powerful incentives to develop independent capabilities, regulatory regimes, and partnerships—fragmenting the Western tech ecosystem and weakening the common front against China.
Agree with @thomaswright08 that next US president will need policy not only to deal with China but with allies to avoid dangerous AGI free-for-all--if by then it is not already too late.
Post from Substack (link at end):
I attended The Curve (an eclectic mix of AI labs, NGOs, experts and policy types) in Berkeley for the first time over the weekend.
I’m not an AI expert but I was tangentially involved with some of these issues while at the NSC and like many people in our field I’ve been trying to understand what AI means for US foreign policy and world affairs. I’m currently running a project at Brookings on the national security implications of frontier AI datacenters overseas. The Curve was a fascinating opportunity to really engage and reflect on these issues so a big thank you to the Golden Gate Institute for including me.
The conference was mostly under the Chatham House Rule so without attributing anything here are some thoughts that crystallized over the few days amid a flurry of panels and conversations. Some of the ideas discussed drew on published reports and posts, so I will link to and mention those.
Overall, I came away thinking that slowing the frontier may be possible, relations with China on AI may get worse before they get better, and the United States needs to do much more to make its leadership on AI trustworthy to allies.
There was a sense of anxiety about what is being unleashed (although maybe not quite as much as last year) especially given concerns that Recursive Self Improvement (RSI) may be approaching. One senior figure really struggled to answer a blunt question about why their lab doesn’t just stop all work and wind up. A young engineer told me that he has no idea how the models are likely to act and he anticipates it will only get worse in the next couple of years. Several people talked about whether they should stay in their jobs or quietly leave. That said, I find it difficult to understand exactly what the causal mechanism is for the more extreme risk scenarios and some of those who say they attach a 10% probability to an extinction risk often have trouble articulating how it would happen.
The more compelling near-term risk scenario I heard was that AI will break social systems even at its current levels. As Princeton’s AI and Society Lab argues, generative AI “will break, and in some cases, already is breaking, many mechanisms of proof: effort, authenticity, accuracy, sincerity, and even humanity”. Current systems built around requiring some human effort (like customer service) may be overwhelmed when agents eliminate that cost. Or consider how easy it will be to conduct fraud at scale, especially with speaking machines. There are technical solutions to some of these problems but many involve extreme levels of surveillance to achieve “proof of human”. These scenarios all involve technology that currently exists or is fairly imminent. It feels a little like the first couple of weeks of March 2020—we know something big is coming, there’s just a short delay in its arrival.
Given that anxiety, there was a lot of discussion about “pacing the frontier” to gain more time to get serious about AI safety. I came away with a better understanding of what pacing could mean in practice. One proposal that seemed quite popular with AI researchers was to reallocate how the labs use their compute power. One estimated that the labs spend 58% of their compute on R & D and 32% on servicing customers. Under this proposal they would reduce the R & D number to 9% and increase the servicing customers’ number to 70%, with the remainder used for AI safety. Its proponents argued that this could slow development while preserving the US lead over China. A version of this, using slightly different numbers, was proposed by a number of AI researchers in the LessWrong Forum.
There were other pacing ideas but they were more contested. One speaker proposed that the labs could only use models for R & D that they already released to the public although others felt that could have unintended and damaging effects on the labs. Another idea was to simply stop RSI, as proposed by Ezra Klein in his recent essay, although some experts felt that also was overly broad and could impact practices that are fairly routine and fall short of what most people regard as RSI. There was also the notion of third-party verification to ensure that the labs comply, although exactly how to do that is a little fraught.
On the geopolitics, it seems to me that AI will drive the world toward bipolarity. The United States and China are the only two at or near the frontier. Both will develop models and ecosystems with their own sets of conditions. The rest of the world will need to deal with that reality and seek to negotiate the best arrangements they can. There was a panel on U.S.-China relations and the panelists were level-headed about what can be accomplished. Contrary to what Sam Altman said a few weeks ago, a grand bargain is all but impossible. Dialogue is good and necessary though and some progress may be achievable on specific and critically important issues like managing bio-risk. That passes for the smart conventional wisdom at present and is likely correct in my view but two other points jumped out at me.
The first is that the next president will likely have a dilemma vis-à-vis China. On the one hand, they will want to discuss safety and reach some practical agreements on managing AI. On the other hand, they will also want to restore export controls to preserve America’s compute advantage precisely so they can slow down the development of new models. For a very thoughtful and thorough study of what these measures might look like, see this new research paper by Nicholas Brown and Saif Khan. Beijing is likely to react badly to the export controls and may break off any existing AI dialogues, at least for a while. As one panelist pointed out, the more a new president is public about wanting cooperation with China on AI, the more likely it is that Beijing sees it as a point of leverage that it is inclined to withhold until the new administration makes significant policy concessions.
The second geopolitical insight is that the United States will have work to do to reassure its allies. There is a working assumption that the United States must win the AI race with China, not just for Americans but for free peoples the world over. This underpinned the Biden administration’s approach and it has also animated the writing of AI leaders like Dario Amodei. There is little doubt in my mind that if the Chinese Communist Party got to AGI first it would use it in ways that advanced authoritarianism and hurt democracies. But Americans also need to take a hard look in the mirror. Over the past two years, President Trump has used the leverage at his disposal to bully some of America’s closest and oldest friends, including pressing for the enlargement of the United States to include Greenland and Canada. America’s Five Eyes allies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK) had to wait for months before gaining access to Mythos and it is unclear whether other allies have it yet.
What assurance would allies have that Trump, if he gained access to ever more powerful AI, would not use it to impose severe costs or cut off their access to the models if they did not bend to his will? We need to spend more time thinking about the type of restraints and commitments that the United States should impose on itself – and how they can be made to be credible—as AI becomes more powerful. Allies are already positioning themselves to bargain and gain influence with the United States. They recognize that they probably cannot develop their own frontier models but they are looking for ways to build part of the critical infrastructure (especially compute power) so that they have something to offer and therefore can earn a seat at the table where decisions are made (see this July speech by the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and this Economist essay by the European researcher Judith Dada).
PS: two book recommendations. I picked up The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence by Kevin Roose which is just out and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the competition between the labs. The other comes out on November 10— The Bitter Struggle: Superintelligence, Superpowers and the Fate of the World by my former NSC colleagues Ben Buchanan and Teddy Collins.
thomasjwright.substack.com/p…
Castro’s bill is a smart first step towards finally curbing Israeli settlement expansion. It would require sanctions on new settlements like E1, which is designed to prevent the existence of a future Palestinian state, and give the president the authority to impose sanctions on existing settlements—and the infrastructure they rely on—if Israel refuses to work towards Palestinian statehood.
The bill would also prohibit Americans from importing goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, as some European countries have done. This would only marginally discourage settlement expansion, but it would send a powerful political signal of U.S. opposition to the settlement enterprise. The first Trump administration’s decision to require settlement products to be labeled as “Made in Israel,” unfortunately never reversed by the Biden administration, was a U.S. green light to settlement activity that this bill would help turn red.
There is no chance this Congress will pass the bill, of course, or that Trump would act on it even if it did. But it is a useful framework for a future Democratic administration to put obstacles in the way of ongoing de facto annexation, which both causes enormous harm to Palestinians and threatens Israel's future as a democratic and secure state.
Settlers are driving Palestinians from their homes in a violent land grab. Sanctions can stop it.
I'm introducing legislation—alongside Reps. Dean, Beyer, Casar, Jacobs, Escobar—that imposes sanctions against anyone looking to take Palestinian land in the West Bank or Gaza.
Under the Stop the Settlements Act, anyone pursuing settlements can’t do business with the United States.
In addition, thank you to all of the my colleagues who are co-sponsoring this bill:
Rep. Becca Balint (VT-AL)
Rep. Salud Carbajal (CA-24)
Rep. Troy Carter (LA-02)
Rep. Sean Casten (IL-06)
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT-03)
Rep. Chris Deluzio (PA-17)
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (CA-10)
Rep. Maxine Dexter (OR-03)
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (TX-37)
Rep. Maxwell Frost (FL-10)
Rep. Adelita Grijalva (AZ-07)
Rep. Val Hoyle (OR-04)
Rep. Jared Huffman (CA-02)
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-07)
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37)
Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17)
Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA-08)
Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet (MI-08)
Rep. Jim McGovern (MA-02)
Rep. Analilia Mejia (NJ-11)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14)
Rep. Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Rep. Mark Pocan (WI-02)
Rep. Emily Randall (WA-06)
Rep. Andrea Salinas (OR-06)
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-05)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09)
Rep. Lateefah Simon (CA-12)
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (NM-01)
Rep. Mark Takano (CA-39)
Rep. Bennie Thompson (MS-02)
Rep. Jill Tokuda (HI-02)
Rep. Paul Tonko (NY-20)
Rep. Derek Tran (CA-45)
Rep. Nydia Velázquez (NY-07)
Harris was hardly the only U.S. official to warn, publicly and privately, that an Israeli assault on Rafah would be a “huge mistake” with potential "consequences." Biden had by then already called it a "red line" and later went on CNN to threaten to withhold offensive weapons over it. And he was right to do so to prevent Israel from launching a ground offensive without a plan for the more than one million civilians sheltering there. It is implausible that a U.S. green light would have unlocked a favorable hostage offer from Hamas, which made no such offer even after Israel went into Rafah (or for eight months after that) or that Netanyahu would have agreed to end the war with Sinwar still alive. Whatever the administration's “biggest mistakes,” pressing Israel to change its Rafah plans was not among them.
And if true, further confirmation of the short-term, transactional, amoral character of Trump foreign policy--and of his soft spot for autocrats. If Asian allies not yet convinced of that they should speak with Europeans.
If there was any ambiguity about whether President Trump views China as a security threat, this disclosure by @USAmbChina Perdue puts the question to rest. Trump’s offer to sell weapons to China will be unsettling to American partners at the pointy edge of China’s spear.
I'm glad this agreement was reached and the outcome seems fine. But no one should pretend that getting treaty revisions we could have just asked for was worth the tradeoff of one of the most severe crises in NATO's history, which neither our friends nor adversaries will forget.
A New Chapter for Arctic Security.
Today, President @realDonaldTrump, 🇩🇰Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen & 🇬🇱 Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen signed a landmark agreement to strengthen security across the Arctic & North Atlantic.
“Today, we have signed a good agreement. For Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark and the United States. And for NATO and Europe. The agreement strengthens our common defence and security. And it is deeply rooted in the NATO Alliance. The agreement acknowledges and respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination.” stated Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, about this historic agreement.
📸 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Senate Democrats will introduce bill today that would sanction companies and individuals complicit in building E1 "doomsday" settlement. If Trump actually cared about addressing settlements or settler violence he could support that; if not his "mild" response to UK means little.
🧵New: Israel asked US to intervene on its behalf in response to UK settler sanctions announcement, an Israeli official told @TimesofIsrael
Rubio indicated response could come, but 2 weeks later & Trump still claiming he’s unfamiliar w/ UK decision (1/3) timesofisrael.com/trump-show…
