 Okay, well, Jeff Goldberg from the Atlantic and Bloomberg View, welcome to the Lowy Institute. Thank you. Let me begin by asking you about the Gaza conflict in the last couple of weeks. Now that the dust has settled temporarily, at least, who emerged on top? Well, if you ask Hamas, they emerged on top. If you ask Israel, Israel emerged on top. I think it's fair to say that they both won something out of this. Hamas won, first of all, when you're on your group like Hamas and you fight Israel and you survive, you've won. Israel is the stronger power, so of course it has much more to prove in order to claim the win. So Hamas has that. Very importantly, Hamas got a lot of international support. International, I mean Turkey, the Turkish Foreign Minister came. Gutter is supporting Hamas now. The Egyptians obviously are behind Hamas in a way that they weren't before. So they got a level of international legitimacy. Obviously, they didn't succeed in achieving what they wanted to achieve, which is to kill large numbers of Israelis, among other things. Israel won one crucial battleground, which is that it got to test its new anti-rocket missile system, the iron dome system, and it turned out to work brilliantly. So that is whether or not this was a thought at the time. It kind of brings you to the conflict everybody's worried about, which is the Iran issue. If Iran is watching what happened, they have to say to themselves, well, the Israelis have a pretty good means of protecting their airspace from missiles, so we have to think about that. How does Iron Dome change Israel's calculations in relation to an Iranian nuclear bomb? And how would the Gaza conflict of the last couple of weeks have been different if Iran had a nuclear weapon? Well, I don't think it changed the calculation that much. I mean the issue for any sovereign state is not how often a terror group or an enemy is successful at killing your civilians. The metric is how often are they trying? You can't judge it as a national leader by saying, well, they are trying to kill us, but they keep failing, so we're not going to worry about it. But it obviously brings us closer to the point where the Israelis would seriously contemplate attacking Iran. They've obviously been thinking about attacking Iran for some time, but this is a data point in favor of an attack, which is to say, we have some means to protect ourselves that we didn't know for sure that we had before we saw the system in operation. As to your, you know, the larger Iran question I guess you're asking about, you know, I tend to think that we are moving toward this confrontation. I've been thinking about this quite a bit because I used to think that, okay, now we're certainly heading directly toward a confrontation. I'm now of the mindset that perhaps a year from now we could be sitting down having the same conversation and we might be in the same exact place where ambiguity reigns, where we're not sure how close Iran is to a nuclear weapons program, where Israel is still contemplating doing something to stop it, America still has sanctions in place. I'm not sure where we're going to be in a year. It just seems like everything is building toward this kind of mega confrontation. And on the mega confrontation, what do you think the likelihood, or let me rephrase, what do you think President Obama's preparedness to use force to interrupt the Iranian nuclear program is likely to be? I mean, it depends on the circumstances and what brings it out, but do you think he would press go? Yeah, look, I've always thought that he's serious about Iran, about the issue of Iran's nuclear program. And I take him at his word when he says, A, he doesn't bluff, and B, he means to stop them from gaining a nuclear bomb. Obviously, there are people in the U.S. who disagree with this perspective of saying that there's no way that this guy who was voted into office originally to unwind American involvement in the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, is going to pick a fight with one of the largest powers in the Middle East. Although one could argue that they've been fighting Iran in the U.S., they've been fighting for 30 years in a sub-training way. This would just bring it out into the open in a way. So there's good arguments on both sides of this. But I do believe that Obama understands two things. One is that the threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, which is the world's most volatile region, would be an acute national security challenge to the United States. And I also believe that he knows that he's on the hook in the sense that he said multiple times in multiple different ways, many different formulations, he's not going to allow Iran to go nuclear. If Iran goes nuclear, despite his wishes and promises, he not only undermines his own historical record, the record of his presidency in some huge way, but he also undermines America's global position because you will have a third-rate power, Iran, basically showing up the world's sole remaining superpower. And I think he takes these things into account. I don't think he wants to go have a confrontation with Iran. Nobody really wants to have that. And he's hoping that sanctions obviously work to change their behavior, but I think he's also not overly confident that sanctions alone are going to change that behavior. And I think you wrote during the election campaign that if you were an American voter whose primary concern was to stop Iran from getting the bomb, you should vote for Obama rather than Romney. Yeah, yeah, it caused a bit of a controversy obviously because people think that the Republicans are going to be stronger and their whole argument of the Republicans and Romney in particular was that Obama's weak and feckless on foreign policy. Through Israel under the bus. Through Israel under the bus, which of course is ridiculous, the system is partially funded by the United States, so if that's, you know, they threw Israel under the bus. They threw Israel under the Iron Dome, which was a good thing, not a bad thing. But it's always easier, look, it's always easier in this age for a Democrat to make war and a Republican to make peace. If you look at Obama's record on drone strikes and the number of countries that's involved in it and the assassinations that the Americans are conducting, including in assassination, at least one, of an American citizen who was allied with al-Qaeda in Yemen, think about what the public response would be if he were a Republican. If this were George W. Bush, he's basically carrying through many of the policies of the Bush administration, but carrying through as a Democrat so people don't complain about it as much. So Obama on a whole host of issues has more latitude to deal in a military fashion, in an armed fashion with some of these problems. Republicans can talk a good game, but they're much more constricted.