Barak Seener, author of 'Israel 2048: a Bluprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power' https://henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/israel2048/
What will Israel look like in 2048, when the Jewish state celebrates its 100th anniversary?
On this episode of the Universal Zionist Podcast, Rabbi Tuly Weisz sits down with geopolitical strategist Barak M. Seener, Senior Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and founder of Strategic Intelligentia. Seener is the co-author, with Dr. David Wurmser, of the landmark report "Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power."
Seener argues that October 7 ended what he calls Zionism 1.0, the defensive, reactive posture Israel held from its founding through October 6. In its place, Zionism 2.0 has emerged, defined by preemptive action, air dominance over Tehran, and power projection thousands of kilometers into Yemen. But he warns that Israel's vulnerability is conceptual, not kinetic. Without a national mission rooted in Jewish civilizational identity, Israel will remain tactically dominant yet strategically exposed, mistaking operational victories for strategic ones while its enemies reconstitute faster than Israel can degrade them.
The conversation turns to identity. While the West drifts from its Judeo-Christian foundations, Israel is rediscovering its biblical identity for the first time since 1948. Seener explains why the cyclical pattern of the Book of Judges is the key to understanding where Israel stands right now, and why compression has always led to expansion in Jewish history.
Rabbi Weisz then presents ten predictions for 2048, and Seener responds to each. Among them: the Abraham Accords expanding to replace NATO as the region's security architecture, Israeli universities becoming the world's top study abroad destination, a demographic realignment sending diaspora Jews toward Christian communities, Israeli hospitals serving the entire Middle East, biblical borders from the Nile to the Euphrates, and a new category of citizenship formally recognizing Christian Zionists and supporters of Israel worldwide.
The episode closes on the boldest predictions of all: Jerusalem hosting the 2048 Summer Olympics, and the dedication of the Third Temple. Seener agrees with one and pushes back on the other, arguing that the Temple must not come as a response to Jewish persecution alone, but as something all the nations of the world cry out for together.