Episode 86: Alliances and rivalries in a new Middle East, with Dan Schueftan

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2026

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The inimitable Prof. Dan Schueftan joins Haviv to break down a "profoundly dangerous" turn in the Middle East. With Saudi Arabia shifting away from its alliance with Israel and the Emirates and Turkey consolidating a "puppet state" in Syria, the regional map is being redrawn. Schueftan warns that the "moderate axis" has blinked, leaving Israel to face a sophisticated Turkish adversary that is ideologically rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood and strategically positioned to disrupt Israeli interests from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

But despite these threats, Prof. Schueftan offers a powerful and much-needed reality check: Israel has never been stronger. Jews are the only people in the region who don't seem to grasp its power. Israel is currently in its best strategic position in history -- a 21st-century military and technological power that has outlasted every previous attempt at its destruction.

This episode was sponsored by Alex Verjovsky. "I want to dedicate this episode to my wife Betty, without whom I would not be the person I am today. When we started our lives together, you believed in me when I had little more than a promise, something I spent the next thirty-something years trying to live up to. As we begin the countdown to our fortieth anniversary, it’s now your turn to enjoy the fruits of that journey. So get ready for another forty years together, exploring, learning, asking questions, and growing old side by side.

"Ask Haviv Anything has become a place of learning and discovery, and one of the few spaces left where ideas, rather than dogmas are openly discussed and we love listening to it and talking about it."

If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Aviv Anything.
0:08.0	Extremely excited to have Dan Shifton, a preeminent Israeli security analyst on the podcast today.
0:14.8	Don returns to us from a trip to the Gulf where he met with senior officials in several Gulf states.
0:20.2	He returns to us from Brussels last week, where he met with NATO officials and has a lot to tell
0:26.7	us. We're in a real profoundly difficult and maybe dangerous moment that not everybody
0:32.6	really understands. The Saudis suddenly kind of surprised everybody. They announced a pivot, a strategic pivot, basically with an airstrike, turning on the Emirates,
0:42.5	beginning to propagandize against Israel, so presumably normalization is off the table for the foreseeable future,
0:49.4	on questions from the Yemen War, from Somaliland, from Syria itself.
0:55.6	Saudi Arabia seems to have switched sides to the side that it has felt for two decades was dangerous to it. The Muslim
1:01.4	Brotherhood side, we're going to ask down what it all means. In Syria itself, there's tremendous
1:06.3	fighting, intense fighting in the north. The world has abandoned the Kurds and, you know, the American
1:12.5	forces are pulling out. There is now a great power game underway in Yemen, in Syria. What
1:20.1	does it all mean for Israel? How should Israel react? Are there good options? Is this a much
1:24.2	more dangerous turn for the region that nobody really expected, I think, a year ago.
1:28.7	We're going to talk about it.
1:29.9	Before we get into it, we have a really special sponsor today.
1:34.2	Alex Verhovsky, long-time listener.
1:37.2	He wrote to us, I want to dedicate this episode to my wife, Betty,
1:41.3	without whom I would not be the person I am today.
1:45.7	When we started our lives together, you believed in me, when I had little more than a promise, something I spent the next
1:51.1	30-something years trying to live up to. As we begin the countdown to our 40th anniversary,
1:57.1	it's now your turn to enjoy the fruits of that journey. So get ready for another 40 years together, exploring, learning, asking questions, and growing old side by side.
	...

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