The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 11, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #8 ｜ Conservative Perspectives with Gary Connolly


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

175.16148

Word Count

3,959

Sentence Count

199

Hate Speech Sentences

48


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to a new episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Modad. I am joined today by
00:00:06.720 Graham Connolly. He's a barrister in Sydney who's advised the Australian government on
00:00:12.620 national security and law issues. He served in the Naval Intelligence at the Royal Australian Navy,
00:00:20.740 South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, so he knows the topics that we want to talk
00:00:27.800 about rather well. He regularly writes about national security and governance and he gives
00:00:33.840 always a realistic conservative perspective, I'd argue. You should check out his blog at Strategy
00:00:40.680 Council and his Twitter at Grey Connolly. Just to clarify, these are his own views that he'll be
00:00:46.460 sharing with us tonight, not those of the Australian government. Grey, how are you? Very well. Thank you
00:00:52.760 for inviting me on and very much looking forward to the discussion. My pleasure, my pleasure.
00:00:57.220 Sure. Maybe we can, well, the issue of the hour is the Middle East and what's going on with Iran.
00:01:05.660 We're recording this on the 20th of June. There will be a lag before it comes out. But maybe we can
00:01:11.460 start with your perspective on Russia and Israel, because you're in an unusual position where you
00:01:20.500 have been quite understanding of the position of both the Russians and the Israelis, things online tend
00:01:28.960 to be either or here. The Russia supporters end up being Hamas supporters and the Ukraine supporters
00:01:36.760 end up being Israel supporters. So I wanted to understand the worldview and mindset that lets you be
00:01:45.880 a little bit more distinctive than the rest, please. Well, okay. I come to the debate slightly
00:01:52.400 differently from everyone else. And I think perhaps this is because I was always a history major and
00:02:00.200 things like that. If you look at both Russia, Israel, look at Iran, you look at a lot of these
00:02:07.080 countries, Turkey as well, you're dealing with basically an historical civilizational power.
00:02:13.440 In other words, you're dealing with countries that have long memories, and they have a long,
00:02:17.840 continuous, popular memory, and an understanding of how their world exists and how it should be.
00:02:26.220 And I think one of the reasons why I am slightly unique, apart from my natural tendency just not
00:02:31.260 to join herds, I have a great dislike of mobs and people just following in with tribes and
00:02:37.800 tribalism. I find it self-defeating, and I find it almost undignified.
00:02:41.640 I think for mature adults to follow herds. But if I could put it in simple terms, both the Russians
00:02:51.460 and the Israelis, and I think this is a problem that people who are against Israel don't really
00:02:55.600 understand. Israel is, it is the sort of the Jewish national home, but there are also large numbers of
00:03:02.820 Christians and Arab Israelis who have fully bought into the Israeli project, and who consider themselves
00:03:08.080 every bit as Israeli as anyone else in the nation. And similarly, Russia in its own way is actually
00:03:15.820 much more than just some sort of Slavic Orthodox country. I think one of the things that's been missed in the
00:03:21.200 last 20 years is how much, for instance, Putin in his case has done to try and reach out particularly to
00:03:27.860 Muslim, to Muslims and other minorities in Russia itself. And so you have in these sort of civilizational
00:03:34.840 nation states, you also have a sort of multi-ethnic and a multi-faith
00:03:40.600 perspective. And I think that means therefore the nation state to, the one thing the nation state has
00:03:47.160 to do in both those countries to hold those polities together is provide security and order.
00:03:51.920 And it does that by two ways. Obviously there's the kinetic side, there's the large armed forces,
00:03:56.740 there's the security state, but there's also that national idea that sort of, and everyone
00:04:00.940 belongs to that. The one thing that both those sort of nation states that are civilizations cannot
00:04:06.500 accept, and this would, I think would apply equally to the Turks, certainly would apply to China,
00:04:10.740 certainly I think would apply to Iran, regardless who runs it, is the idea that you cannot have the
00:04:15.720 nation state challenged by an external actor and made to feel threatened. And the simple analogy,
00:04:21.480 I use with people is, and I've heard other people use this, so this is not my idea, but I like it.
00:04:26.480 It's that if I, if you live next door to a bear and I tell you not to poke the bear, particularly a
00:04:32.760 mother bear, it's not because I'm pro bear. It's because I think nothing good is going to happen here.
00:04:38.780 And in their own ways, what the West has handled Russia and the way that particularly the Palestinians
00:04:43.800 have handled Israel is a way of poking a bear, a much bigger animal that will simply devour them.
00:04:49.960 And so insofar as I see the logical, so to go back, I see the history going backwards of how these sort
00:04:58.180 of civilizational states form themselves, and I see the present and how they work, and I can see the
00:05:03.760 obvious consequences of stupid things, then I am kind of understanding of them for the simple reason
00:05:10.520 that as an Australian, if what happened to Israel happened to Australia, I would want to reserve the
00:05:15.900 right for Australia to do whatever it needed to do to recover its hostages and to engage in a,
00:05:24.020 you know, engaged in a responsible but nonetheless devastating use of armed force to make sure it
00:05:28.040 never happened again. So I guess what I'm trying to say to you is I have a much more, I have a much
00:05:33.760 more, I guess, conservative realist view of the world. I don't have it like in a kind of mean way or an
00:05:39.180 economically driven way. I just have a conservative realist way that comes out of just the human nature
00:05:43.600 and the nature of a nation is really a large family. And it becomes even more complex when you
00:05:48.560 have that multi-faith, multi-ethnic polity, because the state actually has to do much more to hold it
00:05:54.120 all together, because you don't have the benefits of necessarily homogeneity. You have to do more to
00:06:00.040 hold it together. And so the state has to energetically do that. So I think that's just one thing that was
00:06:05.260 missed in both the Russian and the Israeli cases is these were both sort of civilizational powers
00:06:13.180 that when confronted had to, you know, vindicate their rights. And I've never really understood
00:06:25.400 how anyone thought the Israelis would endure what they did and that they would not respond in a
00:06:30.900 devastating manner. I mean, Hamas had to know what was going to happen to them. Similarly, the idea
00:06:35.280 that you would expand NATO and then start dangling Ukrainian membership of NATO and not expect the
00:06:43.640 Russians to react was just insane. And I just think it would matter who ran Russia. And I've said this
00:06:50.740 millions, I've said this over and over again. I've said this on Twitter, I've said this over again.
00:06:53.820 In the Russian political sphere, Putin is looked upon as a, as a, as a legalist, something of an
00:07:02.240 obscurantist, someone who any Russians think is not strong enough in defending Russian interests and
00:07:09.040 Russian rights. He's far too mild. You know, a friend of mine who said once, yeah, who's, who's from
00:07:16.240 a Slavic background, he always says that Putin is probably the best leader that the West is going
00:07:19.560 to get from Russia. It's just downhill after him, probably. Yes. And if you thought out any of the
00:07:23.980 czars, I would have exactly the same policy. Yes. It was very obvious to me after 7th October that
00:07:30.660 the Israeli retaliation was going to be absolutely devastating. I think now though, the stated policy
00:07:38.020 of the Israelis is to get the Gazans out of Gaza permanently with the exploration of where,
00:07:46.040 which countries could they go to and how to kick them out. And I think with the strikes on Iran now,
00:07:51.900 the possibility of breaching the border with Egypt and forcing the Palestinians into Egypt,
00:07:57.640 whether they like it or not, is more of a realistic possibility. I think that what people
00:08:03.660 have a problem with is that the view that the West would tolerate something like that is,
00:08:12.600 is no longer held, that the West would tolerate the mass expulsion of a population is, it's just
00:08:18.720 not accepted in the West anymore. And that the cost of it in terms of relations with the Muslim
00:08:24.720 worlds are quite severe. And that in the West, the response to various terrorist attacks was never that.
00:08:32.980 So I remember after 9-11, friends of mine calling me from the United States and saying,
00:08:37.200 we're leaving the US because they're going to be running around massacring Muslims.
00:08:42.000 The expectation was of some kind of collective punishment. And that never materialized. And any
00:08:48.540 attempt to do something of the sort was instantly condemned. So the objection tends to be that,
00:08:54.580 well, given all of the terrorist attacks that have happened in the West, there was never this
00:08:58.240 kind of reaction to expel all Muslims from the West en masse. So I think that that's the,
00:09:04.960 that's the complicating factor in Israel's case, or that's the additional dimension in Israel's case,
00:09:10.320 that the destruction of Hamas is one thing. And God knows it's necessary to sort of eliminate these
00:09:17.840 kinds of movements. But it's also a fact that they're a reflection of these societies,
00:09:23.560 that they are organic to these societies rather than simply Iranian agents. And that given that
00:09:30.080 reality, what if it were to happen in the West? Well, after the Madrid bombings, after 7-7,
00:09:36.640 after the Manchester Arena bombings, et cetera, this wasn't done in the West. So I think that's the
00:09:42.680 complicating factor here.
00:09:43.880 Okay. But if I could put it back to you, it's that, I mean, I'm an Australian. I live on a massive
00:09:48.080 island. So I have, I have a certain degree of security that an Israeli living in a very small
00:09:53.780 country. I mean, I often make a joke about Europeans when they talk about climate issues. It's like,
00:09:59.320 well, no offense, your country would be a farm here. And, you know, I don't mean that in a
00:10:05.400 necessarily derogatory way. It's just, you have to appreciate scale.
00:10:08.260 That was in French again.
00:10:09.680 Yeah. And that's, that's right. But I mean, I don't mean that to be rude, but I mean,
00:10:13.360 the Israelis live on a very tight margin of security. And I'm not for like, I'm not for
00:10:19.260 something extreme. I think one of the big problems of the obvious participation of UN agents in the
00:10:24.200 acts of Hamas over the last few decades has been that what, how you, how you would hope to solve
00:10:30.380 this would be the United Nations would conduct a fair plebiscite on Gaza's future with the local
00:10:38.040 inhabitants. There would be parties contesting a real election for a post-Hamas existence. There
00:10:42.980 would be sponsors in the normal world. That is how you would, how you would do it. You would have
00:10:47.760 almost a form of UN trusteeship, but you can't do that because the Israelis just don't trust the
00:10:53.020 United Nations at all. I mean, certainly the Americans, even if, even if Trump wasn't the
00:10:57.680 president, I don't think the Americans would either. And so you just have all this bad blood.
00:11:02.100 I can, I can see your point. I've never, I've never taken the view that necessarily Iran
00:11:06.200 owns everything about Hamas. I'm personally a skeptic of how much Iran knew about October 7th.
00:11:12.660 I've often wondered if the Iranians, because if you know something about the way, if I put it this
00:11:18.420 way, the Iranians do terrorism. Uh, and I mean that not in a pejorative way, I just mean that in
00:11:23.580 the standard of tradecraft. Yes. Um, it's a very, October 7th, isn't a, isn't the norm of how the
00:11:32.920 Iranians, I'm not saying the Iranians are good, but I'm just saying there are things that terrorists
00:11:37.220 do that necessarily the Iranians don't do. So for instance, after September 11, you know,
00:11:41.000 the Iranians condemned September 11, they absolutely condemned it as un-Islamic. Yeah.
00:11:45.040 There was just, there was just something very, very, uh, just barbaric about it that offended,
00:11:49.980 I guess, the sheer mind in a way that I don't think for say, uh, Salafist takfiris, you have
00:11:55.460 that same problem. Um, I mean, I'm, I mean, I, I, I was in, um, just a small, I hate going
00:12:03.400 back to my past experiences, but in Iraq, um, you know, Al Qaeda in Iraq was well known for
00:12:08.920 instance, to use mentally disabled or, um, or, or people with disabilities as unconscious
00:12:15.500 suicide bombers. And they actually would send them into marketplaces and they would detonate
00:12:20.340 them remotely. And the person carrying, had no idea the backpack they were carrying,
00:12:23.960 I mean, the sort of just brutal way of doing things very much. The Iranians had much more,
00:12:30.760 I guess, um, a different kind of trade craft, if I can put it that way. So I've always been
00:12:34.580 something of a skeptic of what Iran really knew about October 7th, because it just, I
00:12:38.760 just can't help thinking that the Iranians would have said, don't do this. This is just
00:12:42.060 dumb. This is stupid. The way we do things is we do through mass irritation. Um, don't
00:12:47.640 forget, I've always said this, Will, in 2006, because I was in the Middle East in 2006, when
00:12:52.720 they launched the Hezbollah against Israel, yes, the Israelis took some punches, but the Israelis
00:12:58.360 smashed Hezbollah. I mean, they absolutely smashed Hezbollah to the point where Hezbollah took
00:13:03.300 such a beating, they really didn't recover for a number of years. And, um, certainly
00:13:08.140 in my understanding is in Lebanon itself, the beating that Hezbollah took, which affected
00:13:12.620 the civilian populations in Lebanon was something also that was held against Lebanon as well.
00:13:16.960 So it was held against Hezbollah as well. So I guess I just have always been something
00:13:21.120 of skeptic of what Iran did. Now what Iran did after October 7th was dumb in saying, oh,
00:13:24.880 well, these are our sort of, uh, axis of resistance in the region. We have to support
00:13:28.740 them. Um, instead of taking, I think the more sober minded view that a proper empire would
00:13:34.140 take. And that is the dog wags the tail, the tail doesn't wag the dog. And we're going
00:13:38.000 to let you take a beating here to search, you learn a lesson and which is what Iran didn't
00:13:41.800 do. And, uh, and so the Iranians in a sense have only got themselves to blame in that regard.
00:13:47.260 But I've always, I've always, I've found like the idea of what do you do with Gaza, uh, post
00:13:52.660 all this is, I mean, you're not going to turn it into Dubai on the Mediterranean. You, you're
00:13:57.760 going to have to find some way that's realistic to, to sort this. And I just think the idea
00:14:01.960 of expelling or relocating the population is obviously, um, unfeasible. I mean, it's unfeasible.
00:14:06.800 It's unfeasible. Also Egypt are not going to take the Palestinians. Um, so they're not
00:14:11.340 going to take them. My, my growing concern gray is that the Israelis don't see any limits
00:14:16.680 on their military power. Um, and don't see, don't seem to have a sense of restraint in
00:14:24.600 this cabinet under this leadership. So if you looked at 67 Israel, uh, they were shocked
00:14:31.920 at the territory that they recovered, that they captured, uh, and they thought, well, maybe
00:14:37.420 we should give some of it back and in exchange for peace that never happened. It couldn't
00:14:41.220 work, et cetera, et cetera. Fair enough. The voices who would think this way no longer exist
00:14:46.080 in Israel. The, the, the, the, the, the levy ash calls who could think in this particular
00:14:50.400 way and who could see, hold on, are we overextending ourselves? Uh, there must be some sort of shared
00:14:56.960 legitimacy no longer exist in Israel. And the refrain that the Israelis have kept on repeating
00:15:03.720 was that the Arabs only understand force. We must always use force. And it seems to me
00:15:08.500 that in fact, this is in a way flipped and that the Israelis only understand the use of
00:15:14.940 force now. So the attempts to break the West bank, the, the attempts to break the camps in
00:15:20.800 the West bank and to completely eliminate any kind of capability in the West bank. On the
00:15:26.660 one side, it's understandable. On the other side, it guarantees the Hamasification of the
00:15:32.240 West bank. Um, the idea that the population would be expelled. Well, the only way to do
00:15:37.420 it is to go after the, uh, to, to, to force open that border and see how the Egyptians retaliate
00:15:44.340 and militarily they can't do anything. Uh, and that's becoming a risk that's acceptable.
00:15:49.700 So there's a big panic among people in the Middle East who I speak to that Egypt is next. And I tend
00:15:55.400 to share that view that the Israelis have lost the sense that we need to maintain a level of
00:16:01.780 stability and they are more on the side that says we will use as much force as it takes to
00:16:08.140 build fortress Israel. Okay. So I, I can understand what you're saying. I think one,
00:16:12.980 one of two things I would say in response is, and this is not to dispute anything that you've just
00:16:17.720 said is that after what Israel suffered and the fact they've still got hostages that have been
00:16:21.800 kept now, um, what were almost in July, um, the, the Israelis, the Israel, I think the Israeli view
00:16:30.440 would be as long as you're holding our hostage, we're bringing the hammer down. And until we get
00:16:34.920 everyone back, the hammer keeps falling. I think that would be the Israeli view in respect to the
00:16:39.360 West bank. If that is correct. And I will defer to your knowledge here. That would be, I think,
00:16:43.360 a big mistake because, um, you need to be able to distinguish, uh, you know, sort of mortal threats
00:16:49.600 from irritants. And insofar as the West bank has been curious by what it has not done since October
00:16:55.280 7th. I mean, I think that that's a mistake. Um, I do think the one thing that as going back to my
00:17:01.260 civilizational PowerPoint, um, I think the one thing with the Israelis is that, and, uh, I, I grew up in,
00:17:07.800 I grew up in Sydney and I mostly grew up in a Jewish part of Sydney in the Eastern suburbs.
00:17:11.500 So this is, I won't give you a long disquisition on the geography of Sydney, but it's a, it's an
00:17:16.200 interesting city full of people from everywhere. So I grew up in the Eastern suburbs. It's a very
00:17:21.080 nice, um, it's a very affluent part of Sydney, but it's, it's also historically, it's a very Jewish
00:17:25.900 area. And, um, I remember a colleague of mine saying about exactly what you're talking about,
00:17:30.900 about the difference in Israeli politics. And he just said, every, everyone is Bagan now.
00:17:37.020 Another year, everyone's Medican Bagan now. Yeah. Medican Bagan who said, I am a Jew. I do not
00:17:41.300 come to you on my knees. I come to you. Um, you know, you will respect us kind of, and I have to
00:17:48.320 be honest, I think it's just unreal not to understand among the, uh, not just Israelis,
00:17:54.860 but the Jewish diaspora over the world, just how much what happened has affected them. And I think
00:18:01.860 would have been completely different if Hamas had attacked, say like Israeli outposts or checkpoints,
00:18:06.140 say like Hezbollah do, and they, they, perhaps they have duck soldiers and they hold them
00:18:09.920 in the sort of way that people are held there, et cetera. That might be one thing, but they went
00:18:14.780 after women, they went after girls, you know, just barbaric. And when you see that, the primal,
00:18:21.560 yeah, no, I'm just saying the primal response of people is, sorry, this is gloves come off.
00:18:27.340 You've, you've, you've crossed the civilizational red line. Yeah. And I, I just think that is
00:18:32.600 something that I just, I think it's unreal to sort of not, not, not understand it. Now
00:18:37.820 it's not to excuse that. I mean, like after September 11, there were terrible things done
00:18:41.780 in the aftermath of that that were justified by, well, you know, these people flew planes
00:18:45.840 into buildings, therefore, yeah, they've got where they're coming. But I'm just saying,
00:18:49.060 I think, I don't think there's going to be any kind of sensible restraint on what anyone
00:18:54.740 is doing until, until all, until all the hostages are back. And I think from the Israeli's perspective,
00:18:59.420 The issue with the hostages, the, the, the issue with the hostages has been that Hamas's
00:19:03.100 conditions for releasing them went from, we want hundreds of prisoners in exchange for each hostage
00:19:09.800 to, okay, so long as we get a full guarantee to end the war and some guarantees about reconstruction
00:19:16.600 and aid, which sort of implicitly guarantee Hamas's survival. So the, the issue with the hostages,
00:19:24.740 now, isn't that Hamas is still keeping them, it's that the Israelis reject the possibility of Hamas
00:19:31.880 continuing in existence. The problem with that mindset, as far as I can see it, is that Hamas
00:19:39.240 is a, unfortunately, a genuine expression of what the Palestinians want now. It wasn't always what
00:19:47.200 the Palestinians wanted, but it is now. And that removing them is practically impossible.
00:19:54.900 So we've, the, the way that this conflict has played out, I mean, I think it was Hilaire Belok
00:20:01.480 that said something about a, the anger emanating from a crisis, not making you fundamentally change
00:20:09.300 your strategy and thinking as a precondition for being able to exercise wise policy. I wish I
00:20:16.600 remember how he said it because it would have sounded a lot better, but that's as best, that's the best
00:20:21.460 that I can do with it. And it seems to me that here, strategically, the Israelis have put themselves
00:20:28.660 in a particular bind where they have the military power to do whatever they want, including do things
00:20:34.000 like strike Iran. But the consequences of that are going to be a deeper hostility in the Muslim world
00:20:43.480 than already existed. And I grew up in Jordan, where being called a Jew was the worst thing that you,
00:20:49.480 that you could be called. So this is starting from a high bar, and yet it's getting considerably worse.
00:20:55.180 And the empowerment of Turkey, which is going to be considerably more competent than Iran,
00:21:00.840 by its very nature and its military tradition. And because as the Arabs like to say, the Sunnah are
00:21:08.740 for government and the Shia are for flagellation. The Shia can't rule well, the Sunnis can, and they
00:21:16.180 have a more capable and impressive military history. So while accepting what you're saying on the emotions
00:21:25.000 associated with it, it just seems to me, from a Western perspective, and I'm not a Westerner, but
00:21:32.020 this is the Western mood, morally unacceptable to mass expel the Palestinians, who can't be compared to
00:21:41.800 sort of Aborigines or to American tribes, because this is an advanced Islamic civilization, not a
00:21:50.900 people living in prehistory. And the second one being a Sunni world that is more confident in its
00:21:59.820 endless hostility to Israel, and that has a more effective leader in Turkey.
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