Richard Goldberg on How American Energy Dominance Is Reshaping the Middle East
Release Date: 09/05/2025
Roy Altman on Why Educated Young People Believe Lies about Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
Roy Altman came to America as a little boy. He came from Venezuela, where his own grandparents had fled to during the Holocaust. Altman and his family arrived in the U.S. with very little and knowing almost no one. Some three decades later, the president of the United States nominated him to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of Florida, where he became the youngest person ever to hold that position. Being an American has been, he says, among the great blessings of his life; a blessing he repaid in public service. Then came October 7. And what disturbed him was not only the...
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Joshua Berman on How the Exodus Story Turns Egyptian Imagery on Its Head
The Tikvah Podcast
There is an irony set at the cornerstone of Jewish memory. The very texts that proclaim the Jewish people’s liberation from Egypt—the Song of the Sea, the Haggadah that we recite at the Passover seder—borrow their most evocative imagery from the propaganda of our Egyptian oppressors. For instance: the phrase “mighty hand and outstretched arm,” which the Torah uses to describe God’s miraculous deeds, appears hundreds of times in the royal inscriptions of the Egyptian New Kingdom, applied to the pharaoh himself. The Torah doesn’t just recount the Hebrew slaves’ deliverance...
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Hussain Abdul-Hussain on the Arab Case for Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
From the moment of its founding, and, in truth, before its founding, the State of Israel has faced the determined opposition of the Arab world. The armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel the day after it declared independence in 1948. In 1967, after a similar attempt again failed, the Arab League met at Khartoum and issued the famous three no’s: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. Terrorism, war, and boycott followed across the decades—the PLO, the intifadas, the missile campaigns, and the Iranian proxy network that exploited Arab...
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Yonah Jeremy Bob on the Mossad’s Secret War on Iran
The Tikvah Podcast
On February 28, 2026, Ali Khamenei was assassinated. He was killed in a joint American and Israeli airstrike, in a bunker so deep the elevator took five minutes to reach it, at a meeting with senior advisers whose location intelligence services had tracked for months. The infrastructure that made this targeted assassination possible—the human networks engaged in the patient penetration of one of the most hostile intelligence environments on earth—had been built over more than two decades. Today, Yonah Jeremy Bob joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to delve into how the Mossad build...
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Mike Pompeo and Michael Doran on the Iran War
The Tikvah Podcast
At 1:15 in the morning on February 28, more than 200 Israeli Air Force jets took off from bases across the region, bound for Iran. They were soon joined by American B-2 and B-1 bombers and the full weight of U.S. air and naval power in the Middle East. Not long after in Tehran, the Iranian supreme leader was dead, along with dozens of the seniormost figures in his government. Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion had begun. Five days later, the Iranian missile arsenal is measurably degraded, the regime is in a succession crisis, Hizballah has entered the war from Lebanon, Kurdish forces have...
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Bill Drexel on Narendra Modi’s Visit to Israel
The Tikvah Podcast
On February 25th, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India became the first Indian head of government to address the Knesset. It was a moment that, years ago, would have been difficult to imagine. India and Israel established full diplomatic relations only in 1992. For most of the preceding decades, India had been among Israel’s harshest critics—a reflexive supporter of the Palestinian cause, a country whose leaders looked on the Jewish state with suspicion or contempt. Something has changed. And Prime Minister Modi’s speech in Jerusalem made clear just how much. Standing before...
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Yehoshua Pfeffer on the Causes of the Bnei Brak Draft Riot
The Tikvah Podcast
Israel has operated in the skies above Tehran. It has struck nuclear facilities near Baghdad and dominated the airspace of its enemies across the region. But according to a newsletter that the Israeli journalist Amit Segal sent out earlier this week, there is one city in the Middle East where the IDF cannot move freely. That city is a fifteen-minute drive from Tel Aviv, and is called Bnei Brak. On February 15, two female soldiers from the IDF’s Education and Youth Corps arrived in this densely populated haredi city for a routine visit to a draftee ahead of his induction. A local...
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Meir Soloveichik and Carlos Campo on Strengthening Religious Freedom in America
The Tikvah Podcast
Recently, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Carlos Campo, president of the Museum of the Bible, joined the CEO of Tikvah, Eric Cohen, for a conversation about cherishing and strengthening America’s heritage of religious freedom. They were convened by the Levy Forum for Open Discourse, now in its fourth season, an initiative that is sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, generously funded by Paul and Karen Levy, and hosted by the Palm Beach Synagogue. More information about Levy Forum programs and video recordings can be found at . This week, we’re sharing a...
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Rod Dreher on the American Right’s Anti-Semitism Problem
The Tikvah Podcast
In November 2025, Rod Dreher published an essay in the Free Press, based on an earlier Substack post he’d written, about anti-Semitism on the American right. Dreher had just returned from Washington, where he'd spent several days speaking with young conservatives working in think tanks and in government. What he discovered was that a significant portion of young men on the right, perhaps as many as 30 or 40 percent, expressed sympathy for Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist podcaster who denies the Holocaust and openly attacks Jewish institutions and Jewish people. The trigger for...
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Russ Roberts on the Return of Ran Gvili
The Tikvah Podcast
On January 26, 2026, after 844 days, the body of Ran Gvili was brought home to Israel for burial. Of the hostages taken on October 7, his remains were the last still kept in Gaza. And when you factor in the hostages taken to Gaza before October 7, Gvili’s return marked the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostage or hostage remains are being held captive, to torture and torment Israelis, in the Gaza Strip. The operation to recover him involved hundreds of soldiers, excavators, and dentists who examined hundreds bodies in a Gazan cemetery. When they found him, the soldiers gathered and...
info_outlineIn the span of just twelve days, the strategic balance of the Middle East was fundamentally altered. Israel systematically dismantled Iran’s drones, missiles, and air defenses, while American strikes turned its most important nuclear facilities into dust. But for all of that, another aspect of the war may not yet have gotten enough attention, and that is the demonstration of what American energy dominance can make possible. What does it mean that oil did not rise over $100 per barrel, as some predicted it might, and how did American policymakers ensure that it didn’t?
The answer to that question lies in part in the creation in February 2025 of the National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC). Our guest today is Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who recently served as senior counselor to the NEDC. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, Goldberg examines what he calls “a National Security Council for energy,” its role in crafting a whole-of-government approach to coordinating American energy policy, and what it tells us about President Trump’s vision for American power.
We are currently living through a three-way strategic competition among the United States, China, and Iran for influence in the Middle East—and energy is the battleground. China is pouring billions into its Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the region while buying Iranian oil in defiance of sanctions. Iran is using energy revenues to fund proxy networks from Iraq to Yemen, threatening the very shipping lanes that global commerce depends on.
The Trump administration’s answer is to turn American energy abundance into a strategic weapon. To this end, it has signed an energy- and AI-cooperation agreement with Israel—designed to combine Israeli innovation with American infrastructure to dominate the technologies of the future. The administration is also working to cut off Iran’s energy lifelines, ending waivers that allowed Iraq to buy Iranian oil and gas. It’s also pushing massive infrastructure projects like the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor that would run through Israel and bypass both Iranian threats and Chinese influence.
Coordinating and advancing these policies is the work of the NEDC, and Goldberg was in the room during the twelve-day war and the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as well as for the signing of that unprecedented U.S.-Israel energy-cooperation agreement during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s July visit to Washington. Now that he no longer holds public office, he can talk about the experience.