Well if he meant Israel I don’t know which proxies he could mean. My reading is that he meant the expansion of Iran and it’s proxies necessitates US leadership in the region. Which is a statement critical of Iran (and, in context, supportive of Israel), and not something I agree with (the US has unilaterally meddled enough in Western Asia), but it’s not a Zionist call for greater Israel. He definitely fumbled his words there, so I might be wrong.