Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 74

Overcoming the China Challenge

In order to avoid further foreign pushback, China’s official media have recently been instructed to downplay the significance of “Made in China 2025,” the master plan announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2015 with the goal of making China the “master of its own technologies.” Whether officially acknowledged or not, “2025” accurately reflects Xi’s ambitions to gain “self-sufficiency” in a host of advanced industries. China seeks not only mastery but global dominance in a wide array of advanced-technology products, including artificial intelligence, computers, electric vehicles, jet airplanes, machine tools, pharmaceuticals, robots, and semiconductors. Many of these technologies have dual-use capabilities, helping China’s military and economy simultaneously.

What is troubling about what might be supposed to represent a natural exercise in self-help is that the 2025 strategy involves more than just pulling China up by its own bootstraps through fair and above-board means. China also bestows massive subsidies to build up its national tech champions, manipulates technology standards, demands the handover of technology from international companies doing business in China, picks the pockets of foreign firms in China and around the world to acquire valuable technology, favors Chinese companies in its domestic market and subsidizes them when they compete internationally, and subsidizes the acquisitions of foreign advanced technology enterprises. U.S. and foreign enterprises across virtually every advanced technology sector—from aerospace and biotechnology to information and communications technology (ICT) products, internet, clean energy, and digital media—have been harmed by China’s aggressive use of mercantilist techniques and will continue to be harmed if China cannot be pressured to roll back its egregious predatory practices.

The U.S. government has been slow to respond to the Chinese challenge for a number of reasons: the comfortable belief in the inherent superiority of the innovative and competitive American free market; the lack of support by many companies for a more active and assertive national innovation policy; and policy attention to the near-term cybersecurity dangers of Chinese ICT companies—Huawei, ZTE, and others—rather than to the long-term dangers that they and others will dominate the world market. The United States may have a narrow lead in the so-called fifth industrial revolution (information technology, including computing and the internet). Whether we will lead in the emerging sixth industrial revolution, based on technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems, is an open question. “Made in China 2025” targets these and related industries for global leadership. It would be a major strategic blunder and a huge risk to assume that China will fail and the United States prevail in the competition for leadership of the next technology revolution without concerted and sustained American government action.

The Trump Administration is rightly pressuring China to roll back its unfair practices, but success is far from assured, especially as the Administration has not enlisted its allies to widen the pressure—indeed, it seems to have gone out of its way to alienate those allies. Instead of putting all of its eggs in the tariff-heavy trade enforcement basket, it’s time for America to rise to the challenge by developing its own comprehensive plan to maintain competitive advantage in the advanced technology industries that are most critical to U.S. economic and national security. The Administration and Congress should develop their own strategy to unleash the power of American innovation and entrepreneurship. Call it “Invented and Made in America, 2028.”

Given the extent of China’s “2025” initiative, the United States must act or it is likely to see its output and employment significantly eroded in advanced industries as diverse as aerospace, biopharmaceuticals, computers, internet, and semiconductors. Meanwhile, it could be far outpaced in the international market in emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, 3-D printers, grid-scale batteries, drones, robotics, electric vehicles, and quantum computing. China’s strategy is very specific: It calls for Chinese companies winning 80 percent domestic market share of high-end, computer-controlled machines; 70 percent for robots; and 60 percent for big data. And once those domestic gains are in place, China’s strategy is to aggressively support its companies as they seek out and capture global market share, weakening U.S. companies in the process.

If U.S. policy continues to rely only on the market to support innovation by its universities, government labs, and companies, not only will America miss out on the millions of high-wage jobs the industries of the future will produce, but its defense capabilities will be severely weakened. When U.S. servicemen and women go into conflicts today, they have the advantage of technologically superior weapons systems and knowledge networks. But keeping that advantage depends on the U.S. economy maintaining global technological superiority, not just in defense-specific technologies but in a wide array of dual-use technologies. It is a highly risky proposition to assume that the United States can count on a military edge if the Chinese continue to advance, largely through unfair, predatory practices at the current pace. Ensuring that U.S. capabilities stay well ahead of the Chinese should be a key focus of “Invented and Made in America, 2028.”

As a first step, Congress should pass S. 2757, the bipartisan National Economic Security Strategy Act of 2018. By requiring the Administration to develop a national economic strategy to support the national security strategy, the legislation will not only help the Administration make stronger connections between economic security and national security, it will help identify key challenges and policy needs. By focusing attention not only on the strengths and weaknesses within American industry but also on threats from other nations, policymakers will be better prepared to take the decisive steps that are required. The National Economic Security Strategy should be written with broad public and business participation to raise awareness of the issues and to solicit the best ideas from the country.

Based on this strategy Congress should pass legislation targeting the core technologies most important to America’s future national and economic security, and then appropriate at least an additional $50 billion annually to support their development, with increases to that level phased in over the next ten years. These funds would be invested in pre-competitive research and development and shared technology test-bed facilities including increasing funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and in programs like the successful, but underfunded, Manufacturing USA Institutes and DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Even a $50 billion investment would not match the government R&D spending, as a share of GDP, of the late 1970s, when the United States led the world in the development of game-changing innovations in aerospace, semiconductors, computing, and information technology. That investment rate would have produced a $243 billion investment in 2018, $100 billion greater than the current government investment.

Congress should also establish a much more generous R&D tax credit. While business R&D investment in the United States jumped by two-thirds on an inflation-adjusted basis from $328 billion in 2000 to $458 billion in 2016, the rate of R&D growth as a share of GDP over the same period has been anemic, inching up from 2.61 percent to 2.74 percent. Moreover, businesses are investing a much smaller share of their revenues in crucial, if riskier, early stage basic and applied research than in later-stage development, and the global share of business R&D performed in the United States has fallen significantly in the past decade.

One reason for this performance is that the U.S. R&D credit, which provides an incentive for companies to expand research funding, is anemic compared to those of our competitors, ranking 25th-most generous among 35 OECD nations. Expanding the R&D “Alternative Simplified Credit” from 14 percent to 30 percent would give companies in the United States much more incentive to invest in the future. Both the R&D credit—which is focused more on earlier-stage experimentation rather than later-stage development—and the increased Federal funds for collaborative R&D would help spur more crucial and more risky earlier stage business R&D expenditures.

The U.S. government took similarly bold steps after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Funding for Federal R&D nearly tripled from 0.67 percent of GDP in 1956 to 1.9 percent of GDP in 1967, with much of that going to development of advanced technologies (that share today has fallen below 0.74 percent). The current economic and potential future military threat that China poses today warrants no less of a commitment.

Skeptics may argue that America can’t afford big new investments, given its towering national debt, or that the government should not be picking winners and losers, or they might say there’s no need to worry about China, because government-directed economies always fail.

But the economic and national security costs associated with losing technology leadership would be far greater than deferred debt payments. Moreover, the direct and indirect investments would go a long way to boosting lagging U.S. productivity growth, which in turn would reduce the growth of the debt-to-GDP ratio. Government investments in research and development have historically contributed to economic growth many times greater than the original investment.

The development investment program proposed here would not be supporting individual firms favored by policymakers. The expanded tax incentives to support research would be available to all companies in America. The direct R&D funding would go to universities and Federal labs or to industry-led consortia open to all firms and requiring industry funding. For example, DARPA has long funded, along with the semiconductor industry, a highly successful, but underfunded, program (the Focus Center program, now called STARnet) to support cutting-edge research at universities into the future of semiconductors.

The Chinese authoritarian model of business development may fail, but hope is not a strategy. China’s economic growth in the past three decades is unprecedented, and the United States should not underestimate its ability to adapt and to continue its rise. It has shown skill in taking advantage of the dynamism of a substantial private sector by throwing government resources behind companies that innovate and export. Yet too many analysts still liken China’s economy to the Warsaw Pact economies of the Cold War era; socialist, state-directed economies that could never really progress. A better analogy would be to those countries’ illegally juiced Olympic teams. China generally lets its “capitalist” companies make business decisions on their own and then supports them with purloined technology, massive subsidies, and protected domestic markets. Chinese companies are much more formidable competitors than the Russian and East European companies of the past century.

America shouldn’t copy China’s heavy-handed interventionism any more than it should have emulated the East German swim team. But helping U.S. firms with industry-government partnerships for pre-competitive research and providing a more generous R&D tax credit are not the same as “picking winners.” It is a reasonable and essential strategy to counter China’s massive, government-backed campaign to dominate the critical advanced-technology industries in which the United States still clings to a diminishing competitive advantage.

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Shocked and Surprised

The release of sections of Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Trump Administration officials, followed almost before anyone could take a deep breath by the New York Times’ Anonymous op-ed entitled “The Quiet Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” describes a systematic derangement of normal American politics that seems to be without precedent. People everywhere, here and abroad, claim to be shocked and surprised.

Yes, well, it is hard even for many well educated Americans to wrap their heads around all this. Many of the comments Woodward attributes to a range of senior officials are truly breathtaking in their frankness. And Woodward, having been there for Watergate and beyond, is credible to the vast majority of Americans in ways that adversary culture gadflies like Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore—the Oliver Stones of American journalism—are not. So it’s not so easy to shove this stuff under a mental rug. Once you’ve read these remarks you can’t unread them. They are unusually sticky.

But for me, expressions of surprise and proclamations of the unprecedented trigger yet another Niagara Falls moment welling up from deep in my gut: Slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch. . . 

Why? My dislike of sanctimonious ignorance, mainly. America, even amid the West generally, is supposed to be different—exceptional even. We are always telling themselves, and any others who will listen, that we boast the world’s oldest democratic constitution. The United States epitomizes rule of law, not rule of men, and, in that sense, it is the ultra-modern state as Max Weber famously described the differences between charismatic, traditional, and institutional authority.

So we in the United States cannot have what historians of Asia have referred to as the “bad emperor” problem—top-heavy, highly personalistic political cultures whose entire orientation can turn on a penny, for better or more often for worse, when the old ruler passes from the scene and a maverick with aspirations far outrunning experience takes over. So old and pervasive in history is the bad emperor problem that it even makes cameo appearances in the Hebrew Bible, the best known being from Exodus: “. . . and there arose in Egypt a pharaoh who knew not Joseph.” (Everyone knows what happened next.) Even with a presidential as opposed to a parliamentary democracy, the U.S. political order is immune to such shocks.

Or so we used to think, and on that basis proceeded to lecture others—Arabs especially, especially after 9/11—that they should strive to be more like us. We always misunderstood the reasons for our institutional differences, and wildly underestimated the difficulties of change in what was, to be frank, an unwitting, unacknowledged faith-based (if secularized) orientation to the topic. But now little seems to remain from the anxious triumphalism of that time, little of the American “model” to commend itself to others. And after the 2008-09 financial meltdown, a good deal of which can be traced to the intrusion of highly normal corruption patterns into institutions thought to have been made safe from them, the economic aspect of the model is little less appealing than the political one.

Indeed, many foreign observers, especially those living in countries that are not liberal democracies—those who in typical American self-absorbed fashion we rarely if ever even think about at times like these—are doubtless enjoying the spectacle. Some may not see what the big deal is: rife incompetence in high places aided and abetted by conspiratorial mentalities in low places; treachery, insubordination, and even treason within inner circles; plotting and scheming in the military-intelligence sector of the sort that rhymes with the word “coup”—so what’s new? The thought that America is really not so exceptional, except perhaps in its penchant for condescension, has to be sweet for many who have been the target of our lecturing and hectoring over the years.

We feel it here, too. As I’ve noted before, we have now elected two Presidents in a row, from very different slices of the electorate, that have not avowed American exceptionalism as all their predecessors did. The difference between Obama and Trump in this regard is mainly one of tone: Obama was demure, respectful, and knowledgeable if disenchanted, while Trump is arrogant, dismissive, and ignorant as the summer day is long. But take them together and the shine seems to have come off the exceptionalist apple in a big way. We seem to have arrived at a new, non-exceptionalist, normal. One doesn’t have a “resistance within” in the old exceptionalist normal. To be surprised at the existence of one is to cling to the hope of exceptionalism—good work if you can get it, I suppose.

The truth is that disconcerting, perilous, and out-of-the-ordinary events of several different sorts have pockmarked U.S. political life from the beginning. The self-congratulatory myth of our own exceptionalism has its benign uses, to be sure—and every healthy polity needs such myths. But we’re fools to take such antiseptic pabulum too seriously, not least because they create shock and surprise where there should not be shock or surprise.

First consider briefly a few structural deformities that were with us from the outset. The Framers—wide-eyed idealists that many of them were—managed to ignore the whole business of parties, despite Madison’s discussion of “factions” in The Federalist (No. 10); the Constitution doesn’t mention them at all. And that is partly why the original constitutional structure, wherein the second-place finisher in the election for President automatically became Vice President despite their likely political enmity, had urgently to be changed once the hyper-partisan era of the Alien and Sedition Acts (passed in 1798) came upon us. That was accomplished though the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804. We usually don’t teach K-12 students this—too complicated, and maybe too embarrassing, perhaps?

Until the Civil War, too, because of the “three-fifths” clause, slave states had an artificially large share of the Electoral College. Three-fifths of the slave population counted in the census numbers but no slaves voted or were in any meaningful way citizens, thus also giving Southern states about a third more congressman than Northern states before the Civil War than political reality would have dictated. (We seem not to teach this either.)

Second have been gran-mal political shenanigans. For perhaps the best example, but not the only one, note that the Tilden-Hayes election of 1876 ended with the winner (Tilden) not becoming President. That was thanks to a backroom deal that ended post-Civil War Reconstruction and allowed the institutionalization of segregation in the Old Confederacy in return for Republicans maintaining control of the White House. The deal voided for most practical purposes the Civil War amendments to the Constitution (the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments), and amounted to a quiet confession that Reconstruction had failed. (We definitely don’t teach this, because it would cast doubt on the crypto-religious interpretation of the war that enables us to make some sense of its massive slaughter.) As such it was only the first American nation-building fantasy following a military occupation: You can’t rapidly change people’s minds and institutions at the point of the bayonet, unless the people themselves want to change.

Now, third, let’s skip to a more modern vignette, one closer to the news of the day about the resistance within. Donald Trump is not the first President whose staff has countermanded his direct orders, or hid papers from him so he could not sign them. At the very beginning of the Reagan Administration in January 1981 several new members of the infant Administration did not have proper security clearances yet, so two holdovers from the Carter Administration—not political appointees, but Foreign Service officers—were asked by the first National Security Advisor to President Reagan, Richard Allen, to take official notes at the Administration’s first two NSC meetings. The main issues for both meetings were the Soviet threat to Poland, Poland’s debt crisis and danger of default, and Central America. The latter was especially important for the President because of campaign statements he had made.

After receiving an intelligence briefing informing him that Cuban military aircraft were flying arms to Nicaragua destined for rebels in Salvador, President Reagan made it clear that he might order the Air Force to shoot down any aircraft coming out of Cuba with arms destined ultimately for Salvadoran rebels. Reagan specified nothing about where the planes might be: over Cuban or Nicaraguan airspace, or over international waters. After the meeting, one of the note takers—a man named Timothy E. Deal—went up to Richard Allen and asked if he really wanted the President’s comments on this matter in the official record. Deal thought it unwise and Allen agreed, answering: “No, let’s leave that out of the meeting summary.”

Later on, after Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt and then into the second term when his energies and mental acuity declined somewhat, a series of informal protocols allowed for the bypassing of the President on a fairly regular basis. At the same time, Reagan occasionally deferred major judgments to trusted aides, sometimes surprising and shocking those aides.

And this sort of thing was by no means unique to the Reagan Administration. To cite just three examples, Edith Galt Wilson became de facto President after her husband’s stroke on October 2, 1919, at least according to many accounts. A kind of privy council ran the national security dimensions of the U.S. Government when President Eisenhower fell ill during his tenure: He suffered a heart attack in 1955, underwent abdominal surgery in 1956, and had a stroke in 1957. Most notably, Richard Nixon’s staff held a great deal from him during the waning days of his presidency, when the President seemed often not to be in his right mind.

Neither Edith Wilson nor Eisenhower’s advisers had to deal with someone who was, in the common vernacular, “crazy.” They were not therefore faced with managing from the inside what the Israeli scholar Yehezkel Dror famously referred to back in 1971 as a “crazy state.” Nixon was under acute but temporary stress, and his closest aides—including Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, Jr.—did have to worry about outcroppings of “exotic” behavior from the beleaguered Nixon.

Donald Trump, however, is an altogether different story. Trump was never competent, either by experience or temperament, to be President. He showed clear signs of personality disorder, as a classic textbook narcissist. Anyone who agreed to work for him knew this, but figured either that once in office Trump would delegate responsibilities out of an awareness of his own limits, or that, if he didn’t, there but for the grace of God someone had to protect the country from his mania.

Some of the latter are true patriots. In June I spoke privately with an U.S. Army General serving in Europe, not yet retired so his name must remain unstated, who related a conversation he had had only shortly before in Washington with Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Secretary Mattis will remain in office so long as the President wishes him to, or at least does not explicitly wish him not to, I was told, not because Mattis craves the limelight but because he cares deeply about the security of the nation.

Does that include a willingness to lead or participate in a resistance from within? Could that come to include in extremis invoking the 25th Amendment, wherein a President can be relieved of office due to, among other conditions, “incapacitation”? Anonymous tells us in the New York Times that the resistance within eschewed from the start talk of invoking the 25th Amendment. Incapacitation, however, is a word that can mean many things. What if a group of senior officials comes to conclude that President Trump is mentally incapacitated, but the President disagrees? What if they proceed anyway, with the participation of senior military and intelligence officials? How does that differ from a coup?

Of course, many senior Republican figures said publicly during the campaign that Trump was not fit for the office and signed letters refusing to support him or work for him if he got elected. So in a way the “resistance” from within Republican quarters started before the Administration even began. Recall, too, that Republican Senator Bob Corker claimed back in October 2017 that the White House amounted to an adult daycare center. Others who left the Administration long before this month—H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, and others—have held similar views, but had the decency not to run them up a flagpole. Still, people do talk, and word spreads.

The result is that it is hard to explain the surprise people have claimed to feel in recent days. Of course it is surprising in its details, because nothing so blatant and staged has ever happened before—and no one believes that the near-simultaneous revelations of the Woodward book and the Anonymous op-ed are an unrelated coincidence. But at the same time it is not surprising at all. What is happening was always inherent in the idea of a Trump presidency.

A psychological parallel with mourning may be at play. When someone is gravely ill, say with terminal cancer, we know they are going to soon die; but the actual death still comes as a surprise, as a shock, even though we ought to have been prepared for it. It’s just human nature. Most people just can’t assimilate the unusual even when they have every rational reason to be able to do so.

Not surprising? Always inherent in the idea of a Trump presidency? Yes; but also no for an increasing number of Americans. What do I mean?

Everyone knows that America is deeply polarized politically between “red” and “blue.” And it is, at least to some extent, although most Americans are probably still more centrist and tolerant than the more extreme ideologues who now dominate both major parties. But the polarization that matters right now is not that between “red” and “blue” but rather between “rooted” and “floating” people. The polarization that matters is not political but social.

Rooted people have at least a basic sense of what normal politics in Washington actually is like—because they read about it fairly regularly, work in or around large organizations that in some ways resemble modern governmental institutions, and care about such things even if they are not involved in them personally. Most floating people don’t read much of anything, are not conversant with symbol manipulators in complex organizations, and many inhabit a phantasmic fictional world of never-ending conspiracy theories peddled by mass entertainment media. Rooted people know the difference between reality and fiction. They may sense bias in the New York Times, say, but they know the difference between natural bias in real news and full-frontal faked news—and they know that the faked stuff comes from Fox and the White House, with some minor assistance from Russian bots. Floating people, often enough, really can’t tell which is which, so if they are disgruntled or confused they will incline to credit the insurgent anti-establishment Trump, not spokesmen for a reality on which they lack a firm fix in the first place.

Confronted with Woodward and Anonymous, rooted people gasp at the depth of dysfunction and the subterranean machinations that exist to protect against its more dangerous manifestations. That does not make them wholly immune to emotional overreaction and rancid ideological thinking, to be sure. The “hate Trump” crowd, similar to the “hate George W. Bush” crowd, is just the more or less equal opposite to the “hate Barack Obama” crowd—all these people evoke Niagara Falls moments in me. But floating people react mainly by invoking “deep state” conspiracy theories. Not that some egregiously partisan behavior inside the FBI isn’t a problem, but there simply is no American “deep state” comparable to that in places like, say, Egypt.

Yet floating people now have a prominent model for emulation, a powerful validator of their predispositions. We Americans have a President who, when shown unredacted signals intelligence evidence of Russian interference in the November 2016 election, simply replied, without elaboration, that he “had a different view”—clearly suggesting that he thought that senior U.S. intelligence officials had shown him faked documents. A floating person got elected President, thus norming a floating worldview for many Americans who had heretofore demonstrated some reluctance to go all in on a conspiratorial mindset.

The ratio of rooted to floating Americans has shifted markedly toward the latter at a time of eroding social trust and rising ambient fear at the pace and nature of social change, and that shift is the ur-source of the American polarization that matters most right now. Some refer to this shift generically as populism, but the term doesn’t begin to explain what is really going on. One way to think more usefully about the term is to define it as a level of mobilization in a mass-enfranchised democracy that dips below the mean of the deep-literate population—which has always existed. That’s a bad thing for those who see in the mobilized non-deep literate a horde of pitchfork-wielding deplorables, but it does not speak well for their faith in democracy. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for those who see in this mobilization a justified reaction to an elite that has become venal, condescending, complacent, detached, and very bad at making core public policy decisions.

As for me, populism thus defined does make me wary, not that I have much respect for the elite against whom that populism is aimed. (I haven’t voted for a major party candidate for President in a long time.) I have faith in Madisonian democracy—a form of the species that buffers the affairs of state from the urgencies of the mob. I share the sense in which Alexander Hamilton reportedly answered a democratic idealist with the words: “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast.” I have no problem with a dedicated elite devoted to public service having the lion’s share of authority in a republic, not by right but by benign custom. I do have a problem—even a Niagara Falls moment—whenever I hear some nitwit say that the problems of a democracy can all be solved by more democracy.

Consider in that light this sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek remark from H.L. Mencken, back on July 25, 1920 in the long-since defunct Baltimore Evening Star: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”

Alas, some predictions come true. But why did it have to be this one?

Will Donald Trump remain President until the end of his term? Or does the Woodward/Anonymous spectacle hint at a different future? Obviously, one cannot examine the spectacle in isolation from both the Mueller investigation, which since the flipping of Michael Cohen has made demonstrable progress, or from the upcoming midterm elections, which cannot help but be a referendum of sorts on the Trump presidency. And of course no one knows what will happen, for the future is a winking satyr bent on making fools of us all. I suppose it is safe to say that it is also an incubator of much shock and surprise to come.

That said, it seems to me that neither a kind of soft coup nor an impeachment conviction is in the offing.

The resistance within will not move to invoke the 25th Amendment unless it concludes that its efforts to constrain Trump are failing massively and portend clear and present danger, and that an effort like that could both succeed and be worth the damaging precedent it could set. It’s possible, but unlikely.

Impeachment would require significant Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, for it is after all a political phenomenon, not a legal one. That may happen thanks to the midterms; but it probably won’t.

If that’s right, the basic result will be the even deeper paralysis of normal American government function for at least the next two years. The focus on what, for lack of a better term, has to be called a domestic crisis will deepen. The American role in the world will thus be at times distracted, at times manic, and at most times in unpredictable oscillation between the two. Adversaries and allies abroad alike will have little of dependable purchase from Washington. That can stimulate risk aversion abroad, but it can also be a goad to dangerously opportunistic behavior.

Whatever happens, rest assured: Many will express great surprise. And when they do, depending on how they do it, slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch…….

1.See for example Colin L. Powell, My American Journey (Ballantine Books, 1995), p. 366.

2.Y. Dror, Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem (Lexington Books, 1971).

3.Quoted and attributed in the Memoir of Theophilus Parsons (1859), pp. 109-10.

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Leonard Bernstein’s Multitudes

“Please G-d, leave us this one mystery unsolved: why man creates. The minute that one is solved, I fear art will cease to be. And in that artless and unmysterious world, I would also preferably cease to be.”

Near the end of a small exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, this quote from Leonard Bernstein is featured without context. Only a year—1964—is given, when the grand composer, conductor, and writer wrote or spoke these words. They are a fitting end to a powerful illustration of Bernstein’s life.

Bernstein would have turned 100 on August 25, 2018, and the worldwide celebration of his centennial will continue for at least another year. The choreographer for Bernstein’s masterpiece West Side Story, Jerome Robbins, would also have turned 100 this year, and the musical has been featured everywhere from Washington’s Kennedy Center to London’s Royal Albert Hall to small community theaters.

Many places lay claim to Bernstein in one way or another—called the “Boston boychik” as a young man, he studied music in Philadelphia and later directed the New York Philharmonic, where he led more concerts than any previous conductor. While attending Harvard, he met Aaron Copland, who became a key mentor and musical influence. Within days of the founding of Israel in 1948, he conducted an orchestra of Holocaust survivors living in displaced-persons camps near Munich; on the program was George Gershwin’s soulful Rhapsody in Blue, and Bernstein reported that he “cried [his] heart out.” He also led concerts in Israel throughout its fight for independence, often in war zones. (After one performance in Rehovoth, he was called offstage due to a possible air raid, and later returned to the piano. He remarked, “I never played such an Adagio. I thought it was my swan song.”) In 1989, he gave a concert in West Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. And at the request of Pope John Paul II, Bernstein performed at the Vatican in 1973 and again in 2000.

As the exhibit emphasizes, he was unabashedly Jewish—he rejected a mentor’s suggestion to adopt a stage name, described himself as “the Sinatra of Palestine,” and wrote poetic letters about the land of Israel—yet he also composed Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Dancers, and Players with guidance from Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and left-wing activist. Originally commissioned by Jackie Kennedy as a tribute to her late husband at the Kennedy Center’s opening in 1971, Bernstein later conducted the semi-religious work at the Vatican for John Paul.

These plays on religious identity might have reflected Bernstein’s perennial fascination with and perhaps contempt for spiritual and ethnic divisions; there was a subversive element to both Mass and Kaddish, his extended riff on a traditional Jewish prayer. The original concept for West Side Story, in fact, pitted Catholics and Jews against each other in a conflict relating to Easter and Passover. While Bernstein later changed it to reflect a more contemporary schism—between Latinos and whites—his instinct to infuse Romeo and Juliet with religious tension is telling.

Of course, Bernstein was not only interested in religious friction; the museum includes a nod to Tom Wolfe’s 1970 essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” in which he famously shredded Bernstein for, Wolfe suggested, parading Black Panthers around as a kind of disruptive fashion accessory. This criticism stung, and may also have contributed to enhanced scrutiny of Bernstein’s activities (he had already had his passport temporarily revoked during the McCarthy era). It was revealed during the 1980s that the FBI had launched a far-reaching attack on Bernstein’s reputation.

Long before Bernstein took home a piece of the Berlin Wall (on display in the exhibit), hosted the Black Panthers, or battled J. Edgar Hoover, he abruptly eclipsed the American music scene. At the age of 25, with only a few hours to prepare, Bernstein stood in for the ailing maestro Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall and guided the New York Philharmonic through Don Quixote. His debut made the front page of the New York Times. Sam Bernstein, Leonard’s father, kept a scrapbook chronicling his son’s road to “becoming” Leonard Bernstein; the exhibit displays it open to a Boston Sunday Post feature with the headline “Father in Tears at Boy Conductor’s Triumph.”

In much the same way that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work transfigured American theater when he was only 28, Bernstein astounded the classical music world and later Broadway. At the age of 26, his first collaboration with Jerome Robbins premiered in the theater district and closed after 462 performances. On the Town was noted at the time for its racially diverse cast and its blend of jazz, blues, mambo, boogie-woogie and classical ballet; most remarkably, while the United States was at war with Japan and holding Japanese-Americans in internment camps, Japanese-American ballerina Sono Osato was cast as a central love interest.

By the time West Side Story premiered on Broadway when Bernstein was 39, virtually everyone knew his name and his passionate, near-extravagant conducting style. The musical proved to be his most popular and culturally significant work. The museum includes the copy of Romeo and Juliet that Robbins and Bernstein personally pored over and annotated in preparation for the show. It lies open to page six of Act 1, Scene 1, on which Bernstein had written a suggestion for a song on racism called “It’s the Jews.” In the prologue, Bernstein had written: “an out and out plea for racial tolerance.” This plea may ultimately have taken shape in the musical’s climactic “Somewhere.”

Today, Bernstein’s signature work is undergoing another transformation. In April, director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner held several open casting calls for their upcoming movie remake of West Side Story, to be filmed next summer. During an interview with Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty, Kushner reflected on the “tricky” task of reshaping the film, which he noted “was written by four white Jewish guys.” He seemed to be deflecting real or imagined criticisms of his own role on the project: “It’s. . . not exclusively about Puerto Ricans. It’s about white guys and Puerto Rican guys and white girls and Puerto Rican girls. So what does that mean, we should have two directors and two screenwriters?” Kushner mused. “I’m a big believer in identity politics and political correctness. Why shouldn’t we want to be politically correct, if by correct you mean not toeing the party line but toeing the line of history, being on the right side of history, being moral and ethical.”

While Kushner concluded that he was “absolutely not” doing something wrong by writing West Side Story, his free-flowing deliberations about cultural appropriation seem counter to the story’s central message of overcoming divides and to Bernstein’s own approach to art, through which he often encouraged uncomfortable encounters. Despite his deep ties to Judaism—and despite the fact that many of his musical influences were Jewish, including George Gershwin and Aaron Copland—Bernstein never appeared to feel creatively limited by his identity. West Side Story does not “belong” to any particular group or genre. Its songs have been performed in pop venues and European opera houses, and recorded by artists as diverse as The Supremes, Barbra Streisand, and Aretha Franklin. It is also worth noting that “Officer Krupke,” West Side Story’s musical skewering of an insincere “touchin’ good story” that blames bad behavior on external forces, is politically incorrect by nearly any standard.

Bernstein and Kushner’s different approaches might also reflect a change in the perceived status of Jewish people in America and elsewhere. Bernstein’s career began around the start of World War II. Throughout the war and for years after, it is likely that few Jews would have thought to apologize, as Kushner seemed to, for holding “privileged position[s].” But while Bernstein never ceded his identity or personal concerns, he seemed not to want his work to serve or represent just one camp.

In any venue or work, it would be difficult to capture the full measure of Bernstein—his enthusiasms, his humor, and the achievements that his father described as a gift “to an America that has done everything for me.” But the museum’s exhibit, though modest, is striking. Beyond his music and politics, there are lovely glosses on his wedding, excerpts from his tongue-in-cheek review of his son’s bar-mitzvah reading, and accounts of his devoted friendships. One walks away with a sense of recognition, of warmth, the feeling that you might know what to say to Bernstein if you met him in the street.

The post Leonard Bernstein’s Multitudes appeared first on The American Interest.

The Spies Who Came in from the Cold

The two Russian intelligence officers accused of poisoning Sergey Skripal in Salisbury are ready for their close-up. On Thursday, in a piece of televised political theater astonishing even by the Kremlin’s usual standards, Russia’s foreign propaganda channel RT aired an exclusive interview with the two men charged with a chemical attack on British soil. Everything about this video is unusual: from who pitched the idea in the first place, to who carried out the interview, and when, to the substance of what was said—and left unsaid—during the interview itself.

On September 5, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that two Russian nationals who travelled under the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were responsible for the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey with the nerve agent Novichok. The government concluded, said May, that the two Russian nationals were officers from the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU. The Brits presented surveillance camera footage from London’s Gatwick Airport, where the two arrived from Moscow, as well as footage “of the two men which clearly places them in the immediate vicinity of the Skripals’ house” just moments before the attack.

A week later, on September 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on Boshirov and Petrov at the Vladivostok Economic Forum.

“Of course, we took a look at who those people are. We know who they are, we’ve found them,” said Putin, barely hiding a smile. “I hope they’ll come out voluntarily and speak out. It’d be better for everyone. There’s nothing special or criminal in there, I assure you. We’ll see in the nearest future,” Putin predicted. When the moderator asked if Boshirov and Petrov were civilians, Putin replied in the affirmative: “Of course, they are civilians.”

The very next day, RT aired an interview with the two men conducted by RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan. Simonyan commented on the interview on her personal Telegram channel, claiming that the two had called her on her cell phone (“everybody knows my cell phone number”), that they refused to come to a studio or to any other crowded place and insisted that it be filmed at her office, with only one camera.

At the start of the interview, Boshirov and Petrov admit that they are the ones caught on British surveillance cameras. Answering why they went to Salisbury, they say that they initially planned to “get laid in London,” but their “friends recommended visiting this wonderful city” to see the famous Salisbury Cathedral. The two suspected assassins then rave about the cathedral, saying it “is not only famous throughout Europe, but in the whole world,” before rattling off facts about its “123-meter high steeple” and its housing of the oldest working clock in the world. (They failed to mention the best-kept surviving copy of the Magna Carta, also kept in Salisbury Cathedral).

When Simonyan asks if they have any pictures taken at the cathedral, they say yes. But when she suggests they provide the pictures, they get confused and the video is clearly cut off. This is one of many lies surrounding this interview, which Simonyan announced would be aired uncut.

Boshirov and Petrov claim to be medium-size business owners who work in the “fitness industry,” but refuse to go into further details so as “not to harm their clients.” Alexander Petrov, the brawnier of the two, is eager to talk about dietary supplements, a topic he returns to throughout the interview.

When Petrov talks, he always looks at Boshirov, as if looking for his approval or permission to speak. Boshirov, on the other hand, often dismisses or interrupts his partner to qualify his answers. Of the two men, Boshirov appears to be the brain, and Petrov the muscle.

When asked why they traveled to Europe so often, the two visibly flounder. At first they say they went mostly for business; seconds later, they claim it was for leisure. They claim to have stayed mostly in Switzerland. When Simonyan asks why they stayed in the same hotel rooms, they obliquely hint at homosexuality, asking her not to intervene in their private lives.

The two men offer a meandering explanation as to why they left Salisbury on March 3rd for London, supposedly due to bad weather and “muddy slush” on the streets of Salisbury. (Needless to say, this is hardly convincing coming from two Muscovites.) The interview culminates when Boshirov and Petrov say “we came back to Salisbury on the 4th in order to finish this matter.” “Which matter?” asks Simonyan. “Well, to visit these…these landmarks.”

When asked if they passed by the Skripals’ house, as the surveillance footage shows, they say they don’t know where the house is and might have passed by it unknowingly. Simonyan fails to challenge this statement in any way—even though the Skripals’ house is located 1.6 miles away from the Cathedral, in a residential area without any tourist attractions.

Both men deny having had Novichok on them or working for the GRU.

Besides Simonyan’s lies about not cutting the interview, there have been several other false statements surrounding the segment. For one, the interview was not shot in Simonyan’s office, as she claims. Months before she hosted Swedish journalists in her office for an interview, and it looked totally different. The tiny room where the interview with Boshirov and Petrov was conducted doesn’t have a single TV screen—very abnormal for the head of a major television network.

Nor can Simonyan’s cell phone number be found in open sources, as she claims. The Bell, one of Russia’s few independent media outlets, asked scores of investigative journalists to try and find the number and came up dry.

Simonyan also failed to ask obvious questions of the two men: where they were issued their travel passports and why the documents’ serial numbers differ by only one digit; why they had tickets back to Moscow on two dates, March 4 and 5, as some media reported; why they don’t have profiles on social media and there is almost no information about them on the Internet; and whether they’ve been questioned by Russian law enforcement, since Putin said the two “have been found.” On the contrary, at some points Simonyan rushed to help them out when they stumbled over their answers, prompting them about what their business has to do with Europe.

And finally, in the video Simonyan refers to the time of Putin’s remarks as “today”—which means the interview was shot the very same day, September 12.

What can be concluded from this whole charade? First of all, Ruslan Boshirov and Andrey Petrov are undoubtedly Russian intelligence officers, who are now being brought to light for some mysterious reason as part of a larger Kremlin plan. And secondly, RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan has shown once again that she is not a journalist but a simple Kremlin operative—one who appears to have willingly played her role in the cover-up of an attempted murder. It is hardly a secret that RT is a Russian state propaganda organ; the TV channel was recently forced to register as a foreign agent in the United States. But for those few viewers who still claim to see journalistic value in RT, this interview should come as a reminder that its real work is far more sinister.

The post The Spies Who Came in from the Cold appeared first on The American Interest.

Afghanistan: Peace Prospects at the Abyss

America’s war in Afghanistan will soon enter its 17th year. Most Americans tired of the war long ago, but its odd invisibility in American domestic politics has allowed it to carry on, mostly out of sight, with little real political pressure to change a stalemated status quo.

This condition of stasis may not last much longer, however. The war’s 17th year promises both opportunity and peril—and the former is due at least partly to the latter. Afghanistan’s growing political dysfunction and the opportunism of its neighbors create a risk that it could go the way of Syria, or of Afghanistan itself in the 1990s: a breakup of the state into warring factions with rivalrous neighbors sucked in to support conflicting proxies. Anyone can see what this has done to Syria since 2011, and South Asians old enough to be in leadership positions remember what Afghanistan was like after Najibullah fell in 1992. This specter presents a credible threat of equal opportunity disaster: the simultaneous realization of every actor’s worst-case scenario. Few would choose this condition, but it does focus the mind; the threat of a Syrian abyss may be the goad that enables long-stalled negotiations to end the fighting on terms the United States can accept.

Indeed, the prospects for an acceptable peace in Afghanistan are now better than they have been in a very long time—perhaps since the Bonn Conference of 2001. But there are still many ways the negotiations could collapse and turn the worst-case scenario from goad to reality. Only some of the risk factors are under U.S. control, and certainly Americans lack the leverage once offered by 100,000 troops and $100 billion of annual expenditure. But U.S. choices do make a difference, and poor ones could slam shut a door that might otherwise be opening, dooming Afghanistan to a replay of the 1990s.

Three critical contributions are now needed from the U.S. government: patience, flexibility, and sustained politico-economic engagement. None have been hallmarks of the U.S. experience in Afghanistan since 2001, and skeptics could be forgiven for wondering how well these policy traits fit the current moment in American domestic politics. But none are impossible, and an acceptable end to a long, horrible war now rides on them.

Why Care?

The most basic question, as usual, is perhaps the most important, and it is the one at the root of much of the war’s frustrating current condition. Does Afghanistan matter enough to the United States to warrant continued engagement at any significant cost?

The problem here is that Afghanistan poses stakes for Americans that are real, but limited. First of all, and most obvious, if the Kabul government falls, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, or other terrorist groups could re-establish base camps in Afghanistan from which they could target the United States or other Western countries, as al-Qaeda did in 2001. This is a real threat. But there is nothing unique about Afghanistan as a base for terrorists to attack the West; dozens of ill-governed spaces around the world could serve this purpose.

The more important U.S. stake in Afghanistan is the stability of its nuclear-armed region, and especially Pakistan. Nuclear-armed Pakistan, with a nuclear-armed Indian rival on its eastern border, has been enmeshed in a counterinsurgency war of its own since 2004. Pakistan and Afghanistan are separated by a notoriously porous border, home to a large ethnic Pashtun population that is closely associated with both the Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies. Americans have long worried that Afghan Taliban base camps among Pakistani Pashtuns make the Afghan insurgency hard to defeat, but a much greater danger is if Afghan base camps make the Pakistani Taliban harder to defeat. A virulent insurgency in any nuclear-armed state is a serious danger to international stability; a virulent Pakistani insurgency with established base camps across a porous Afghan border amid the detritus of a failed Afghan state is a much bigger danger. The risk that collapse in Kabul could destabilize an already unstable, nuclear-armed region is a real threat to American interests.

That said, this peril, too, has its limits. Many things would have to break badly for an Afghan collapse to lead to nuclear violence. Kabul would have to fall; Islamabad would have to fall; the Pakistani security forces would have to split; nuclear weapons would have to fall into terrorist hands; and these terrorists would have to find a way to deliver one to a major city. The compound probability here is small, but it is not zero. And the resultant catastrophe if the breaks go badly for the United States would be of historic magnitude. This does not make Afghanistan a problem worth sending 500,000 American soldiers to solve—but neither does it make Afghanistan irrelevant or unimportant. Afghanistan lies somewhere in the middle on the scale of security interest magnitude: a real, but limited, threat to U.S. interests.

Expensive Means to Limited Ends

Real but limited U.S. interests in Afghanistan have created a long and frustrating debate over how to respond. Because U.S. interests are real, neither the Obama nor the Trump Administration have been willing to just pull out. If they did, and things went badly, a catastrophe would be their fault. Neither Administration has been willing to take the risk of going down in history as the people responsible for a nuclear detonation in Times Square. But decisive victory in the war would be very expensive in lives, dollars, and time; this cost has long seemed to exceed what the stake was worth. The result has been a long, floundering search for some real-but-limited means to secure real-but-limited stakes wherein the cost would be commensurate with the benefit.

Mostly, this search has led to assorted variations on “light footprint” strategies where the United States provides training, advising, equipment, commando raids, and air power, while the Afghan government provides the ground forces and suffers most of the casualties. The Obama Administration experimented with a heavy footprint alternative, ordering a surge to an ultimate strength of 100,000 U.S. troops by 2011. But the surge announcement was accompanied by a promise of reversal and drawdown to begin after less than two years, and for most of the Obama presidency the U.S. military was in the process of lightening, not thickening, the U.S. presence.  

The logic of this reinforce-then-drawdown approach was that the surge would hit the Taliban hard enough to reverse their momentum and put the war on a glide slope toward ultimate Taliban defeat. In the meantime, U.S. aid would build a greatly expanded Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) to whom the war could then be handed off as U.S. troops gradually withdrew. A sustained, open-ended 100,000-soldier presence seemed more expensive than the war was worth, but perhaps a brief phase of excessive effort followed by much cheaper indigenous war-making could secure limited interests at a price worth paying.

The first part actually worked: The U.S. surge did reverse Taliban momentum, and U.S. troops were able to stabilize threatened Afghan districts when deployed in sufficient strength and kept in place to defend what had been cleared. The problem was mostly the second part of the plan. 100,000 soldiers seems like a lot, but it was enough to clear only about half of Afghanistan’s threatened southern and eastern districts at a time. To clear all of threatened Afghanistan in the allotted time would have taken at least twice that number of troops; alternatively, the same troops could have cleared twice the ground by swinging from the south to the east once the south was cleared, relying on the ANSF to hold the cleared south afterwards, but that would have taken at least double the time. With only limited perceived stakes on the table, the Obama Administration was unwilling to double either the troops or the time. And the result was that the surge ended with the job left unfinished. The ANSF was handed not a war on a glide slope to Taliban defeat, but a war against a Taliban enemy that still held large stretches of strategically important Afghan real estate.

The job of defeating an enemy this strong was—and remains—beyond any plausible ANSF capability. This should not be surprising. In weakly institutionalized political systems like Afghanistan’s, state militaries are often riven with corruption that saps combat motivation, undermines equipment availability, and interferes with the development of technical military expertise. Without a judicial system or legislature that can adjudicate conflict among armed elites, regimes in places like Afghanistan commonly rely on an internal balance of power to create political order and prevent factionalism from spilling over into armed violence. In such settings, the primary purpose of the army and police is not to defend the borders or defeat an insurgency—it is to maintain this internal balance within the political elite, and to do this typically requires a mixture of cronyism and corruption in the armed forces.

Corruption buys the loyalty of the largest armed militia in the country: the army. Cronyism reinforces the armed forces’ loyalty by installing as senior commanders not trained technocrats but relatives, co-ethnics, political supporters, or representatives of allied political factions. Together such techniques bind the armed forces to the civilian leadership; just as important, they limit the threat that a powerful, technically proficient, politically disinterested army would pose to every other armed body in the country—most of which are in the hands of warlords and other elites. If the Afghan army really did professionalize itself by replacing cronies with technocrats, rooting out corruption, and promoting based on merit rather than political alignment, it would pose an existential threat to dozens of warlord militias that now extract resources for the benefit of their followers, and see the right to do so as their due given the strength of their armed following. Even worse, the first wave of new military technocrats would threaten their own corrupt, cronyist superiors. In a political system where order is the product of the internal balance of armed power and not judicial or legislative institutions, the very process of reform is dangerously destabilizing. The result is a military that is actually very good at its primary purpose—maintaining internal political stability among armed elites—but is very poor at what Americans mistakenly suppose is its purpose: defeating an insurgency.

The unsurprising result of this is that light-footprint U.S. training and assistance has had deeply disappointing effects. U.S. equipment and logistical support is commonly redirected into the black market for the financial benefit of officers; training is used as a form of largesse to reward loyalists; U.S. financial aid underwrites ghost soldiers who exist on the payroll but not in the field. There are exceptions: Elite ANSF commando units too small to be a threat to the internal balance of power, for example, can be allowed to professionalize and often perform well in combat. But the ANSF as a whole cannot defeat the Taliban insurgency—and more U.S. advisers or a bit more U.S. aid cannot change that. Thus, reliance on a much-cheaper indigenous ANSF cannot secure even limited aims inexpensively.

Stalemate and its Discontents

What reliance on the ANSF can do is to preserve a rough stalemate—or at least, preserve it as long as outsiders pay most of the bills. The ANSF will never be the U.S. Marine Corps, but neither are the Taliban, and the ANSF now fields over 300,000 soldiers and police. The ANSF also benefits from increasingly intense U.S. air support, which dropped more than 2,500 bombs in support of ANSF operations in the first six months of 2018 alone, a pace that would more than double the war’s previous annual peak of 2,170 in 2011. An ANSF that vastly outnumbers the Taliban insurgency and is backstopped by this kind of U.S. firepower has proven generally (if barely) able to hold most of the ground it took over from the Americans after 2011.

At the same time, the Taliban have expanded their control in traditional strongholds such as the central Helmand River Valley, and have mounted short sallies into urban areas such as Konduz or Ghazni before being ejected by counterattacks (mostly by Afghan commandoes and U.S. special forces). But they have yet shown no ability to take and hold any of the major urban areas that are the core of government power in the country. Seven years after the U.S. drawdown began, the Taliban still control less than 15 percent of the country’s 407 districts (they contest another 30 percent). The trends have been turning gradually in the Taliban’s favor, but at this rate it would take decades for them to complete the job were military factors alone to be the deciding ones. If the ANSF stays in the field and operating, the military prognosis is thus a continued grinding stalemate for many years to come.

The problem is that the ANSF probably can’t stay in the field forever. Their morale is increasingly a concern: ANSF loss rates are high and growing, and the Afghan government is finding it ever harder to fill the ranks.

Their funding is another major concern. A 300,000-person security force is vastly larger than what the Afghan government can afford on its own. The ANSF’s FY 2013 operating budget of $6.5 billion was more than twice the Afghan government’s entire federal revenue. The lion’s share of the money needed to keep the ANSF in the field must thus come from abroad, especially from the U.S. Treasury, which now pays almost $5 billion a year for Afghan soldiers and police. In a sense, this is a bargain: It’s vastly cheaper than the $100 billion a year the U.S. government spent when there were 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan. But the political constituency in the U.S. Congress for Afghan soldiers is minimal, and the current Commander-in-Chief is clearly frustrated with any cost at all. It took a major sales job from the Defense Department earlier this year to persuade Donald Trump not to pull all U.S. troops and funding from the war, and a mercurial and impulsive President could easily change his mind. If the plan for securing U.S. interests is to fund the ANSF forever to keep the war on indefinite life support, it’s a plan that could be ripped to shreds by a single White House tweetstorm.  

Were the ANSF to be defunded or break under the strain of stalemated war-making, Afghanistan would quickly collapse into chaos. The government in Kabul would fall, but an immediate Taliban restoration would be less likely than an atomized, multi-sided civil war in which factions of the old ANSF fought over the rump with warlord militias, the Islamic State, and the Taliban’s respective factions—much as happened in Afghanistan in 1992, the last time central government authority collapsed.

In the midst of such chaos, deals would very likely be made between local Afghan factions and Pakistani insurgents to call in old IOUs or broker new alliances that would enable access to strategic base areas on the Afghan side of the border for militants seeking to topple the regime in Islamabad. Such arrangements have already appeared on a small scale in border areas where Afghan government control is weakest. This would define defeat: The central war aims for which the United States has fought since 2001 would be forfeit, and the sacrifices and costs of the past rendered vain.

If the war simply drags on, sooner or later this will be the result. The only plausible alternative to eventual outright defeat at this point is not military victory, which is impossible at expenditure levels that Americans will ever accept, but a compromise political settlement with the Taliban.

To date, however, the negotiation prospects have looked bleak. A handful of initial contacts showed some promise, but a combination of confusion on the allied side (as Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. officials failed to communicate successfully on the arrangements for talks) and a leadership succession crisis on the Taliban side (when the Taliban spiritual and political leader Mullah Omar’s death was announced) froze the process in 2015. Talks remained stalled for more than two years afterwards.

Change on the Horizon?

This politico-military deadlock might now be breaking, however—for better or worse. In November 2017, unofficial Track-Two meetings between Taliban representatives and former U.S. officials Christopher Kolenda and Robin Raphel signaled significant softening in the Taliban position. It dropped its prior insistence on total U.S. withdrawal as a precondition for talks, and it promised to oppose terrorism in a postwar Afghanistan. The U.S. government then dropped its former insistence that any talks be Afghan-led, and agreed to the Taliban’s demands for direct, bilateral meetings between U.S. government and Taliban representatives in Doha (formal “negotiations” must still be Afghan-led, but the U.S. government is now willing to conduct direct bilateral “talks”). The Taliban reciprocated a temporary ceasefire announced by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in June, and the resulting truce led to an outpouring of Afghan support for an end to the fighting. Widespread demonstrations in favor of peace led to scenes of Taliban fighters and government policemen celebrating in the streets over ice cream. These are baby steps, at best representing the beginning of what would be a long peace process if one formed at all. But against the backdrop of years of stalemated warfare with little or no progress toward settlement, the pace of change in the last few months has been breathtaking.

Why now? And does this apparent thaw have a future?

Part of the explanation for this recent movement may lie in the resolution of the Taliban succession crisis following the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death in 2015. Omar had actually died two years earlier, but the Taliban kept his demise secret to avert precisely the internal political crisis that broke out when the Afghan government announced his death to the world on July 29, 2015. His immediate successor was then killed in an American air strike in November 2015, yielding further turmoil. Eventually, former cleric Hibatullah Akhundzada emerged as the new leader, but with potential rivals in the wings he dared not risk appearing weak by promoting settlement negotiations; instead, he escalated the war. Over time, however, the new leadership has consolidated power, making successful negotiations plausible.

Another part of the explanation may lie in the end of the U.S. government’s previous insistence on shooting itself in the foot with repeated public deadlines for troop drawdowns. For the six years between President Obama’s West Point speech of December 2009 and his Administration’s announcement in July 2016 that further withdrawals would be halted, U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan was always subject to a timetable stipulating dates for incremental withdrawals. Each of these drawdown dates created the possibility that a weak ANSF might collapse with the next reduction in U.S. support, giving the Taliban an incentive to withhold concessions and wait to see whether they could get what they wanted for free. When President Obama finally ended this policy in 2016, the Taliban faced the prospect of a potentially permanent U.S. presence, which the Trump Administration eventually reinforced with its own declaration this year that there would be no announced date for withdrawal. One could debate this promise’s credibility, but at least there are now no looming deadlines to encourage the Taliban to wait.

Perhaps the most important explanation, however, may be the looming peril of state collapse in Afghanistan if the war continues much longer. Internal politics in weakly institutionalized states are often fragile, and Afghanistan’s are increasingly so. The country’s last presidential election, in 2014, was deeply flawed. Many Afghans believe the winner, Ashraf Ghani, stole the election through large-scale fraud; to avert potential violence in the streets, U.S. officials brokered a compromise in which the second-place finisher, Abdullah Abdullah, was granted an ambiguous official status as the country’s “chief executive.” The rival camps were encouraged to divide subordinate offices between them, and both agreed to hold a constitutional convention within two years to formalize Abdullah’s new office.

The result has been four years of increasing acrimony as the two camps have bickered over the spoils of office and effectively paralyzed the government. In the process, Abdullah has been increasingly marginalized, and the constitutional convention has been indefinitely postponed. Meanwhile Ghani has pursued an anti-corruption campaign that Abdullah’s supporters see as a means of targeting them. Last year a coalition of warlords, including one of Ghani’s own vice presidents, Abdulrashid Dostum, formed an alliance to oppose him, escalating the dispute along lines reinforced by the warlord alliance’s access to armed followers and deep connections to elements in the ANSF.

Presidential elections are now scheduled for early 2019; if held, they are liable to be even more divisive than the last round. The competing camps are now deeply embittered even as the U.S. government’s ability to play honest broker has atrophied. The Taliban’s increased influence in the Pashtun south and east, too, is an even greater threat to electoral legitimacy. In a country where Ghani’s Pashtun political base is located disproportionately in the increasingly Taliban-threatened south and east, where voting is dangerous, while Abdullah’s Tajik and Uzbek base lives disproportionately in the safer north, where voting is easier, any result can be seen as illegitimate by the loser. After seeing themselves as railroaded following a stolen election in 2014, locked out of real power, and persecuted by the illegitimate winner, Abdullah’s northern base is in no mood for a repeat—yet Ghani’s Pashtun base would see an Abdullah victory as stolen via the inability of their voters to reach safe polling places. In this increasingly combustible mix, no electoral outcome will be stable; it is all too easy to imagine violence breaking out along factional lines in ways that outsiders could not tamp down this time around.

If a disputed election in an increasingly polarized and distrustful political system results in factional violence, the ANSF itself would come under severe pressure. The armed forces have long harbored competing northern Uzbek/Tajik and eastern Pashtun factions as one of the more consequential of its various internal fault lines. If pulled in different directions by orders to suppress a defeated party’s violent post-election demonstrations, the pressure could finally push an already-strained security force beyond its breaking point.

At the same time, Afghanistan’s neighbors are playing increasingly meddlesome roles on behalf of their own preferred proxies. Pakistan, of course, has long been deeply involved in supporting its Taliban allies in Afghanistan. But Russia, too, is playing an increasingly direct role in support of both the Taliban and several of Russia’s preferred non-Taliban warlords. Moscow is doing this partly as a means of hedging Russian bets against possible Afghan state failure, and partly to impose costs on the United States amid a deteriorating U.S.-Russian relationship. Iran, with similar incentives, is playing a similar role with its own internal allies. India has longstanding ties to a variety of northern Afghan factions dating back to the civil war of the 1990s and beyond; the Trump Administration has dangled the threat of supporting a larger Indian role in Afghanistan as a cudgel to inspire Pakistani cooperation against the Taliban, but unless deftly handled this threat could just pour gasoline on glowing coals. Pakistan’s chief interest in Afghanistan has long been to avert Indian encirclement via an Afghan-Indian alignment; a more prominent Indian role with northern proxies could easily inspire a less cooperative Pakistani response.

Together, these dynamics pose a serious risk that the coming election could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, splitting the government and security forces, pulling meddlesome neighbors even deeper into proxy warfare, and putting Afghanistan onto a short road to Syria-scale chaos. If so, the worst-case scenario for all the major players would simultaneously come into play. It would obviously be bad for U.S. interests. But it would be little better for Russia, Iran, or Pakistan—each of whom would now confront a failed state with ungoverned spaces offering safe haven to their own enemies either directly on their border (for Pakistan and Iran) or in close proximity (for Russia). Faced with this possibility, moreover, each must protect itself with aid to sympathetic proxies—but simultaneous aid to opposed Afghan proxies would just deepen the crisis at higher levels of armament.

For Pakistan in particular, this scenario would pose grave dangers, creating both hostile insurgent camps in Afghan sanctuary plus Indian assistance to anti-Pakistan militants to Pakistan’s strategic rear. Pakistan has long sought to thwart the American project of creating a strong Afghan state that might align with India and threaten Pakistan with strategic encirclement, but a failed state on its border that drew India into the maelstrom could be even worse.

Even the Taliban apparently recoils at this prospect. In their Track-Two conversations with Kolenda and Raphel, Taliban representatives cited the rising danger of a Syria scenario as a major concern and as a reason to negotiate. Patriotism aside, a rational Taliban strategist would have good reasons to take this view. Internationalized proxy wars like Syria’s are notoriously hard to terminate once they metastasize. The Syrian war has raged for seven years now, and historically such conflicts have typically lasted seven to ten years, often laying waste to whatever was there before and leaving little behind but bitterness and ruin for whoever inherits the remains. The Taliban came into existence in the first place to end just such a conflagration in the 1990s, but despite their relative success then, they never fully pacified the country: Their Northern Alliance enemies still held about 15 percent of the country when the United States intervened in 2001 and toppled the Taliban regime. A repeat performance now could be even harder for them, with deeper outside involvement brewing that could involve the United States, too, this time around as a backer of its own preferred warlord proxies.

This time, too, the Taliban would have to contend with the Islamic State in Afghanistan—an enemy of both the government and the Taliban, a bitter rival to the Taliban for the status of defender of the faith, and a growing threat that has fought multiple pitched battles against the Taliban even while waging war against the government and the Americans. The Taliban might once have thought they could defeat the ANSF and take control of a coherent state; that now seems unlikely. Hence they have good reason to explore negotiated alternatives to another decade of what would become a multi-sided, internationalized civil war. The Taliban have already been at war with the United States for 17 years, losing untold thousands of their followers, forcing them to live as exiles in Pakistan and raise their children as Pakistanis for almost a generation, and running an annual risk of personal violent death in American air strikes (just ask Akhundzada’s predecessor Mullah Mansoor). The Taliban would not surrender just to save their country from a Syria scenario, but a compromise settlement that could avert all this without looking like a surrender instrument ought to be increasingly worthy of serious Taliban attention. It makes sense for them to explore a deal while there is still a government to deal with.  

The Way Forward

What, then, should the United States, and others, do to exploit this opportunity and avert a mutual worst-case scenario? Several initiatives would help.

First, the United States must be prepared to accept serious compromises, and to encourage its Afghan government ally to do the same. The Taliban may be willing to parley, but they will not sign a surrender instrument. Compromise with an actor like the Taliban is not an appealing prospect, but military victory is a chimera and stalemate cannot be maintained forever. That leaves compromise or outright defeat as the only realistic prospects.

What does that mean in practice? Compromise will require legalizing the Taliban as a legitimate actor in Afghan politics, releasing Taliban prisoners from Western prisons, withdrawing all foreign troops and closing all U.S. bases if the Taliban continue to insist on this, and eventually offering them some extra-democratic set-aside of guaranteed offices, ministries, and/or parliamentary seats.

With today’s hyper-partisan U.S. domestic politics, compromise on this scale could be hard to sell; in 2012, a much-smaller proffer to exchange some Afghan prisoners for the Taliban-held American Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl collapsed under Republican outrage at a Democratic President’s willingness to make such a deal (Bergdahl was finally released two years later). But if a U.S. President can manage the domestic politics, an international agreement might be within reach: Afghan President Ghani has already offered to legalize the Taliban, exchange prisoners, review the Afghan constitution, and provide passports and safe passage for Taliban negotiators. The actual difference in the two sides’ bargaining positions has now grown surprisingly small: The Taliban have already signaled willingness to forswear terrorism, break with al-Qaeda, and to accept an Afghan state governed by something similar to today’s Afghan constitution, all critical elements of longstanding U.S. and Afghan government positions. And the June ceasefire demonstrated that the Taliban are sufficiently unified to make a deal stick if it can be reached. Still, the remaining differences are hardly trivial (including the nature of any eventual power sharing deal and the specifics of what a sufficiently Islamic state would comprise), and an actual deal will require concessions from allied governments as well as the Taliban.

Second, the United States will have to remain engaged both politically and economically in any postwar Afghanistan to stabilize the terms of a negotiated settlement. A legalized Taliban with a role in Afghan governance would not violate core U.S. interests, but an outright Taliban takeover would. A meaningful U.S. postwar assistance budget conditioned on Afghan government behavior is an important hedge against that possibility. A post-settlement Taliban’s best chance for complete power would be if the current government’s kleptocratic scale of corrupt extraction from the economy eventually alienates enough voters for a legalized Taliban to win national elections. Thoroughgoing reform is beyond American means today, but conditional aid on a plausible scale can at least discourage the worst kinds of government land grabs and other grand-mal corruption, and thus help keep a lid on a legalized Taliban’s electoral prospects.

Ongoing conditional aid can also provide a disincentive for rearmament or other Taliban violation of settlement terms: If a deal is generally better for the Taliban than war, and if Taliban participation in a coalition government affords them a share of international largesse, then a threat to withdraw aid can offer the incentive at the margin needed to discourage violations. Of course, this does not mean the U.S. government must spend $100 billion a year to keep Afghanistan stable. But Afghanistan was a major recipient of international aid for much of the 20th century, and a stable postwar Afghanistan will probably have to be, too—which means the U.S. government will need to continue to provide aid, and to remain sufficiently engaged politically to know whether and when to threaten aid withdrawal if its preconditions go unmet.

Finally, an acceptable end to the war will require strategic patience from American statesmen. This will not be a quick or easy negotiation. Progress has been surprisingly rapid recently, but to bring this to fruition will probably take years, not months. A gradual process of confidence-building measures is required, to be followed only later by concrete talks over difficult issues such as power sharing, constitutional change, disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Before any deal can be signed with the Taliban, too, domestic support within Afghanistan must be built for prospective settlement terms, a process that could be long and fraught in itself. If Americans tire of a long process that moves slowly and fails to yield a quick, showy deal, then no deal will be had.

To provide this kind of time will require a near-term agreement to postpone Afghanistan’s upcoming election and to substitute an interim caretaker government while negotiations with the Taliban unfold—perhaps with Ghani frozen in place but with a promise that he would not run for re-election afterwards, or perhaps with some other formula. The now-scheduled elections could easily serve as the match that sets Afghanistan’s political tinder ablaze; if so, the state could collapse long before negotiations could conclude. The risk of such a conflagration is an important incentive for all parties to negotiate seriously, but the timelines of political risk and negotiated solution are now badly misaligned. An election in early 2019 would undermine peace prospects no matter how it comes out. If the election yields chaos it will derail a long negotiation; if the election yields a stable transition it will remove an important goad for talks. Any caretaker arrangement will itself have to be negotiated, and U.S. leverage to strong-arm recalcitrant power brokers will be needed for any such setup. Without strong, sustained U.S. involvement it is hard to see how Afghanistan’s many factions could be brought in line behind any given choice for a caretaker, even a temporary one.

Moreover, this internal negotiation over the terms of any caretaker government may require an early ceasefire with the Taliban to enable it to unfold: ANSF effectiveness in the midst of prolonged uncertainty over who is in charge could well be even lower than today, risking serious losses if exposed to Taliban offensives before a new caretaker is appointed and lines of command clarified. A truce of this kind would be far from a final settlement to the war, and so could begin quickly, as the June ceasefire did. But it is important that it begin. If the Taliban decide not to facilitate a settlement with an early truce and instead try to exploit Afghan political instability for short-term battlefield gains, then settlement could become impossible—and if so, then the Taliban, like everyone else, will witness its worst-case scenario of chaotic state collapse unfold. To the extent that the Taliban’s recent interest in negotiation is sincere, this interest will have to include a willingness to accept a truce while the Afghan government assembles a negotiating partner for them. None of this is impossible, but neither is it easy, and the elections create a demanding timetable. To get a ceasefire by early 2019 and a delay in Afghanistan’s elections, the first steps must be taken soon.

Successful talks could also require international mediation, perhaps via the United Nations, and an explicit role for Pakistan among other Afghan neighbors in a parallel regional negotiating track. This, too, could be tough to swallow for a U.S. Administration that has been no friend of the United Nations and which has positioned itself to get tough on a duplicitous Pakistani ally rather than to welcome them into multilateral negotiations.

Given all this, skepticism about the prognosis for a negotiated end to the war is still a defensible position: Any talks will be long, hard, and perhaps ultimately unsuccessful; in the meantime, the United States will have to continue military assistance and economic aid on something like today’s scale. Some may judge the cost of playing out this string to be higher than the real-but-limited stakes involved for the United States. The cost-benefit calculus for war in Afghanistan has always been a close call. But the costs are now a great deal lower than they were in 2009-11, and the prospects for a tolerable settlement are now better than they have been in years, perhaps since 2001. An Afghan Syria is now a distinct possibility. But so is a settlement that could terminate the war, limit the danger of Afghan instability spilling over into the region, and end the suffering of an Afghan people who have suffered much over generations of almost continuous warfare. These are important benefits, to Afghans, to other South Asians—and to Americans.

The post Afghanistan: Peace Prospects at the Abyss appeared first on The American Interest.

Putin’s Fraying Mandate

Sunday, September 9 in Russia was marked by three large political events: the Moscow mayoral election, regional elections, and opposition rallies across the country. The day ended with a sky-high victory for Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin, the worst results for the ruling United Russia party since 2007, and a harsh police crackdown on protestors.

Sergey Sobyanin was elected Moscow’s mayor for the third time, an outcome all but guaranteed by the lack of any credible alternative, the exclusion of all serious opposition candidates from the race, and the deployment of massive administrative resources, including billions of rubles from the city budget, to promote his campaign. Sobyanin earned a rock-solid 69.54 percent of the vote, with the closest runner-up, a Communist Party candidate, getting 11.65 percent. The turnout, however, was slightly lower than in 2013, when the opposition leader Alexey Navalny was allowed to run—even though this time the polls stayed open two hours longer and Muscovites were allowed to vote from their out-of-town dachas.

However, the communists did much better in other Russian regions, shockingly bringing the ruling United Russia party to its lowest levels since Vladimir Putin became its leader. Four acting governors failed to win in the first round. In the Primorye and Khakasia regions, the United Russia candidates lost to the communists—in the latter case by double digits—and in the Khabarovsk region and Vladimirskaya Oblast the governors won less than 50 percent, running neck-and-neck with candidates from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, another in-system opposition party present in the Duma.

In three regions United Russia lost elections for the state houses of representatives: In Ulyanovskaya and Irkutskaya Oblasts and Khakasia, the communists are now the ruling party. In Zabaikalie United Russia is close to losing.

No less shocking was a brutal crackdown on protesters across the country, with the most brutal behavior shown by the police and National Guard in Saint Petersburg. Although significantly fewer people showed up at these protests against pension reform than at the May anti-Putin rallies (also organized by Alexey Navalny), the numbers of those arrested were close.

On Sunday 1,018 people were detained, among them over 400 in Saint Petersburg, almost 200 in Ekaterinburg, and 43 people in Moscow. The photos and videos of the police brutally beating up men (sometimes four on one), harassing a retired woman, and arresting (among others) a retired man who needed an ambulance, a young man without an arm, and a 10-year-old boy have spread rapidly across the Internet.

In some cities the rallies were approved by local authorities, but in Russia’s three largest cities they were not. This is not the first time that Alexey Navalny has used public holidays or major events to bring his supporters to the streets. Last year the oppositioner held a rally in the capital on Moscow City Day when big crowds were out to celebrate, the idea being to prevent the police from cracking down and arresting people who could be bystanders. The police were confused, but nevertheless made some arrests. This year, September 9 marked both Moscow City Day and election day, and the arrests in the capital were few but brutal. A more vicious situation unfolded in Saint Petersburg, where the authorities had initially approved the rally request but two days prior had retracted the permit. Navalny’s headquarters called for gathering anyway, generating some fair criticism that many rally-goers may have been confused and not realized the consequences of attending: criminal prosecution with imprisonment.

While both Moscow and Saint Petersburg have become used to massive arrests and police brutality at rallies, Ekaterinburg was caught by surprise. The major independent media outlet in the Urals, znak.com, writes that “in one day the local police lost citizens’ trust.” The author notes that the city’s citizens had previously seen massive arrests only on television, but on Sunday they saw them with their own eyes. “A very thin but important fabric has broken. . . .I’m talking about respectful relations between the public and the police that we’d had before. […] Not a single Ekaterinburg citizen can still say, ‘This doesn’t happen here, our police don’t do crackdowns,’” the article argues.

An unexpected pivot took place two days after the rallies, when the National Guard head Viktor Zolotov published a video address to Alexey Navalny in which he challenged the oppositioner to a duel. General Zolotov, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Putin, used lowbrow slang to attack Navalny, calling him “an oppositional pug-dog” and “an item manufactured in American labs” (along with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko). “Nobody has given you a quality kick in the ass. . . I simply challenge you to a duel, in the ring, on the judo mat, anywhere, and I promise to make mincemeat of you,” said Zolotov. He also mentioned former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the late Boris Berezovsky, calling them all “clones and puppets.” Referring to Khodorkovsky, who was pardoned by Putin in 2013 after a 10-year imprisonment and who now resides in London, the general falsely claimed that Khodorkovsky “wrote tearful and repentant letters to the President in order to get released,” and that after he was pardoned, he “fled and started his destabilization policies.”

The stated reason for Zolotov’s stunning video address was Navalny’s investigation into corruption within the food-supply procurement process for the National Guard. (The contractor was chosen by Medvedev’s government without a tender and the groceries are supplied at double the price they would cost at an average store in Moscow.) But whatever his intention, Zolotov did exactly what Vladimir Putin has been refusing to: He recognized Alexey Navalny as a politician with presidential ambitions. Putin prefers to not even use Navalny’s name; as his spokesman once explained, Russia’s President doesn’t want “to share his popularity with Navanly.”

Viktor Zolotov was not the first one to address Alexey Navalny in a video clip. Before him Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov did the same, forever becoming an Internet meme. Zolotov now faces the same fate: Since the video was released, everyone from champion swimmers to Russia’s leading arts luminaries have mockingly issued their own challenges to Zolotov on social media. Even BBC Russia has taken to mocking the video. For all the jokes, though, Zolotov’s video could constitute a serious threat: National Guard officers are often the ones beating up protesters at Navalny’s rallies, and it is unclear why their leader would dedicate his time to taunting a “pug-dog” like Navalny unless he meant it.

Navalny, in any case, cannot respond to the challenge even if he wanted to, as he is now in jail. On August 27 he was arrested and put in a detention center for 30 days, in order to prevent him from attending the Moscow rally.

But even with Navalny isolated, the Russian people seem to be growing disillusioned with the Kremlin, and increasingly vocal about voicing their discontent. As I’ve written before, the pension reform has already sent Putin’s approval ratings tumbling to their lowest levels since 2011-2012, leaving the Kremlin with only two options: to back down or crack down. The former hasn’t happened, notwithstanding Putin’s prepared-in-advance softening of the retirement age raise. In a rare national address in late August, Vladimir Putin announced that Russian women could retire at 60 years instead of the initial proposal of 63 years. For men, the proposal was unchanged: They would retire at 65 years old, which is one year less than the average man’s life expectancy. 

The trick failed to cement public trust in Putin; polls showed that his approval ratings remained at the same level after the address. Nor did new U.S. sanctions help consolidate Russians around their leader, as the regional elections proved. Whatever rally-round-the-flag effect was once created by sanctions seems to have dissipated.

On top of that, the Russian ruble has continued to fall, reaching a new low of 70 rubles per dollar. Investors seem to finally believe that a second round of sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 is inevitable, in retaliation for the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom. After Theresa May presented evidence in parliament, it is now firmly established that two officers of the Russian military intelligence service GRU tried to murder ex-Russian spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a nerve-agent attack. And the New York Times may have uncovered a motive: According to a Times report, Skripal had cooperated with Spanish authorities in a major money-laundering case involving the Russian mafia, a Senator and several others with personal connections to Vladimir Putin. The revelation about Skripal recalls the saga of another ex-spy from Russia, Alexander Litvinenko, who also cooperated with the Spanish and was poisoned to death with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. The current international scandal, combined with the effect of existing sanctions, has already spooked foreign investors: The Economic Development Ministry recently updated its prognosis on capital flight in 2018 from $18 billion to $41 billion.

Although political experts predict that United Russia’s governor candidates will regain control in the second round of elections, this weekend’s events show that a page has turned, and increasing numbers of Russians are souring on the Kremlin. In the short term, this will not do any good for the Russian people: The reaction from the authorities will only worsen, leading to more political prosecutions. But in a long-term perspective, the Kremlin has started losing—and its famous PR skills can only disguise that truth for so long.

The post Putin’s Fraying Mandate appeared first on The American Interest.

Putin’s Fraying Mandate

Sunday, September 9 in Russia was marked by three large political events: the Moscow mayoral election, regional elections, and opposition rallies across the country. The day ended with a sky-high victory for Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin, the worst results for the ruling United Russia party since 2007, and a harsh police crackdown on protestors.

Sergey Sobyanin was elected Moscow’s mayor for the third time, an outcome all but guaranteed by the lack of any credible alternative, the exclusion of all serious opposition candidates from the race, and the deployment of massive administrative resources, including billions of rubles from the city budget, to promote his campaign. Sobyanin earned a rock-solid 69.54 percent of the vote, with the closest runner-up, a Communist Party candidate, getting 11.65 percent. The turnout, however, was slightly lower than in 2013, when the opposition leader Alexey Navalny was allowed to run—even though this time the polls stayed open two hours longer and Muscovites were allowed to vote from their out-of-town dachas.

However, the communists did much better in other Russian regions, shockingly bringing the ruling United Russia party to its lowest levels since Vladimir Putin became its leader. Four acting governors failed to win in the first round. In the Primorye and Khakasia regions, the United Russia candidates lost to the communists—in the latter case by double digits—and in the Khabarovsk region and Vladimirskaya Oblast the governors won less than 50 percent, running neck-and-neck with candidates from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, another in-system opposition party present in the Duma.

In three regions United Russia lost elections for the state houses of representatives: In Ulyanovskaya and Irkutskaya Oblasts and Khakasia, the communists are now the ruling party. In Zabaikalie United Russia is close to losing.

No less shocking was a brutal crackdown on protesters across the country, with the most brutal behavior shown by the police and National Guard in Saint Petersburg. Although significantly fewer people showed up at these protests against pension reform than at the May anti-Putin rallies (also organized by Alexey Navalny), the numbers of those arrested were close.

On Sunday 1,018 people were detained, among them over 400 in Saint Petersburg, almost 200 in Ekaterinburg, and 43 people in Moscow. The photos and videos of the police brutally beating up men (sometimes four on one), harassing a retired woman, and arresting (among others) a retired man who needed an ambulance, a young man without an arm, and a 10-year-old boy have spread rapidly across the Internet.

In some cities the rallies were approved by local authorities, but in Russia’s three largest cities they were not. This is not the first time that Alexey Navalny has used public holidays or major events to bring his supporters to the streets. Last year the oppositioner held a rally in the capital on Moscow City Day when big crowds were out to celebrate, the idea being to prevent the police from cracking down and arresting people who could be bystanders. The police were confused, but nevertheless made some arrests. This year, September 9 marked both Moscow City Day and election day, and the arrests in the capital were few but brutal. A more vicious situation unfolded in Saint Petersburg, where the authorities had initially approved the rally request but two days prior had retracted the permit. Navalny’s headquarters called for gathering anyway, generating some fair criticism that many rally-goers may have been confused and not realized the consequences of attending: criminal prosecution with imprisonment.

While both Moscow and Saint Petersburg have become used to massive arrests and police brutality at rallies, Ekaterinburg was caught by surprise. The major independent media outlet in the Urals, znak.com, writes that “in one day the local police lost citizens’ trust.” The author notes that the city’s citizens had previously seen massive arrests only on television, but on Sunday they saw them with their own eyes. “A very thin but important fabric has broken. . . .I’m talking about respectful relations between the public and the police that we’d had before. […] Not a single Ekaterinburg citizen can still say, ‘This doesn’t happen here, our police don’t do crackdowns,’” the article argues.

An unexpected pivot took place two days after the rallies, when the National Guard head Viktor Zolotov published a video address to Alexey Navalny in which he challenged the oppositioner to a duel. General Zolotov, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Putin, used lowbrow slang to attack Navalny, calling him “an oppositional pug-dog” and “an item manufactured in American labs” (along with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko). “Nobody has given you a quality kick in the ass. . . I simply challenge you to a duel, in the ring, on the judo mat, anywhere, and I promise to make mincemeat of you,” said Zolotov. He also mentioned former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the late Boris Berezovsky, calling them all “clones and puppets.” Referring to Khodorkovsky, who was pardoned by Putin in 2013 after a 10-year imprisonment and who now resides in London, the general falsely claimed that Khodorkovsky “wrote tearful and repentant letters to the President in order to get released,” and that after he was pardoned, he “fled and started his destabilization policies.”

The stated reason for Zolotov’s stunning video address was Navalny’s investigation into corruption within the food-supply procurement process for the National Guard. (The contractor was chosen by Medvedev’s government without a tender and the groceries are supplied at double the price they would cost at an average store in Moscow.) But whatever his intention, Zolotov did exactly what Vladimir Putin has been refusing to: He recognized Alexey Navalny as a politician with presidential ambitions. Putin prefers to not even use Navalny’s name; as his spokesman once explained, Russia’s President doesn’t want “to share his popularity with Navanly.”

Viktor Zolotov was not the first one to address Alexey Navalny in a video clip. Before him Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov did the same, forever becoming an Internet meme. Zolotov now faces the same fate: Since the video was released, everyone from champion swimmers to Russia’s leading arts luminaries have mockingly issued their own challenges to Zolotov on social media. Even BBC Russia has taken to mocking the video. For all the jokes, though, Zolotov’s video could constitute a serious threat: National Guard officers are often the ones beating up protesters at Navalny’s rallies, and it is unclear why their leader would dedicate his time to taunting a “pug-dog” like Navalny unless he meant it.

Navalny, in any case, cannot respond to the challenge even if he wanted to, as he is now in jail. On August 27 he was arrested and put in a detention center for 30 days, in order to prevent him from attending the Moscow rally.

But even with Navalny isolated, the Russian people seem to be growing disillusioned with the Kremlin, and increasingly vocal about voicing their discontent. As I’ve written before, the pension reform has already sent Putin’s approval ratings tumbling to their lowest levels since 2011-2012, leaving the Kremlin with only two options: to back down or crack down. The former hasn’t happened, notwithstanding Putin’s prepared-in-advance softening of the retirement age raise. In a rare national address in late August, Vladimir Putin announced that Russian women could retire at 60 years instead of the initial proposal of 63 years. For men, the proposal was unchanged: They would retire at 65 years old, which is one year less than the average man’s life expectancy. 

The trick failed to cement public trust in Putin; polls showed that his approval ratings remained at the same level after the address. Nor did new U.S. sanctions help consolidate Russians around their leader, as the regional elections proved. Whatever rally-round-the-flag effect was once created by sanctions seems to have dissipated.

On top of that, the Russian ruble has continued to fall, reaching a new low of 70 rubles per dollar. Investors seem to finally believe that a second round of sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 is inevitable, in retaliation for the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom. After Theresa May presented evidence in parliament, it is now firmly established that two officers of the Russian military intelligence service GRU tried to murder ex-Russian spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a nerve-agent attack. And the New York Times may have uncovered a motive: According to a Times report, Skripal had cooperated with Spanish authorities in a major money-laundering case involving the Russian mafia, a Senator and several others with personal connections to Vladimir Putin. The revelation about Skripal recalls the saga of another ex-spy from Russia, Alexander Litvinenko, who also cooperated with the Spanish and was poisoned to death with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. The current international scandal, combined with the effect of existing sanctions, has already spooked foreign investors: The Economic Development Ministry recently updated its prognosis on capital flight in 2018 from $18 billion to $41 billion.

Although political experts predict that United Russia’s governor candidates will regain control in the second round of elections, this weekend’s events show that a page has turned, and increasing numbers of Russians are souring on the Kremlin. In the short term, this will not do any good for the Russian people: The reaction from the authorities will only worsen, leading to more political prosecutions. But in a long-term perspective, the Kremlin has started losing—and its famous PR skills can only disguise that truth for so long.

The post Putin’s Fraying Mandate appeared first on The American Interest.

The Right Approach to Rights

Since 2007 I have interviewed scores of Americans and foreign nationals—diplomats, embassy staff, soldiers, journalists, NGO workers, missionaries, business people, and others—who have represented the United States overseas. Some of these interviews were about U.S. government efforts to support independent journalism in places where it would not otherwise exist. Others concerned how the export of American film, TV shows, and popular music, which increased fourfold between 1989 and 2010, often distort foreign perceptions of American society and institutions.

Most of these interlocutors felt a strong need to push back against a narrative of the United States as a cesspool of hedonism, dysfunction, criminality, and corruption, which they saw as being aggressively purveyed not only by the hostile propaganda of our adversaries but also, ironically, by the more lurid productions of our entertainment industry. And there was general agreement that the most effective way to push back is not censorship (there is already too much of that in the world) but honest, vigorous counter-speech affirming what is best about America.

But that raises a question: What is best about America? To our educated elites, the answer is obvious: America’s greatest virtue, the thing that makes this nation a shining city upon a hill, is diversity. By the same logic, our elites tend to assume that the main threats to freedom and democracy emanate not from hostile foreign powers but from domestic prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. The next step is to urge well-meaning Americans to bear the glad tidings of diversity to every backward corner of the globe.

This answer is not wrong. Even in the age of Trump, foreign visitors continue to marvel at the easy mingling of colors, creeds, and backgrounds in public and private settings all across America. But by the same token, what American elites mean by diversity goes beyond mere mingling to the point of requiring people to “celebrate difference.” The trouble here is that, by itself, diversity is not a virtue. It is simply a fact, a ground-level reality that, boosted by record levels of migration, is becoming increasingly obtrusive in many places besides America. To put it another way: When those same foreign visitors return home and find large numbers of strangers in their midst, their admiration for diversity may well diminish.

If America can no longer count on being the shining city of diversity, then what other virtues can we claim? For an answer I turn again to my overseas interlocutors. On several occasions, the more thoughtful ones volunteered their description of the type of American most admired in the parts of the world they knew best. The picture was remarkably consistent: an unpretentious man or woman who takes a hopeful but practical approach to solving problems.

By “hopeful” my interlocutors did not mean utopian dreams of saving the world. Indeed, they made clear their disdain for the American tendency to pursue overly ambitious goals in a starry-eyed way, not to mention in the short term and on the cheap. This tendency dates back to the post-millennial project of 19th-century American Protestantism, which was to perfect America as a Christian nation, then go forth as missionaries to perfect all the other nations, in anticipation of the Day of Judgment. In the 20th century this project took secular form as the “religion of progress” by which America would provide the template for a modernizing, democratizing world. Intoxicated by this spirit, Americans have done amazing things. But we have also done terrible things. And more often, we have failed to do the good things we set out to do.

That is why my interlocutors stressed the word “practical”: They were mindful of the need to temper optimism with a prudent awareness of limits, both material and (more important) human. Rather than dream of a future in which the crooked timber of humanity will be straightened out once and for all, this distinctive and widely admired American ethos seeks to build with the material at hand—namely, the frailty and waywardness of men and women as they actually exist.

This ethos lies at the heart of the current American critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and now approaching its 70th anniversary. This critique is not new, because, to quote the veteran human rights activist Aaron Rhodes, the UDHR “mingled human rights based on natural law with positive rights granted by states—rights that emerged from specific political traditions.” As elaborated in his new book, The Debasement of Human Rights (Encounter, 2018), Rhodes and his fellow critics consider the UDHR a deal with the devil that “aggrandized positive economic and social rights as human rights intrinsic to human beings, while degrading natural rights as nothing more than arbitrary gifts of the state.”

It can be bracing to read a passionate critique: The right sort of polemic can stir our mental sediment and remind us of the deeper reasons why we hold to a particular position. I suspect Rhodes meant to write such a polemic—and as the former executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights during the critical years of conflict in the Balkans, Chechnya, and Central Asia, a co-founder of the Hamburg-based Freedom Rights Project, and the current president of the Vienna-based Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe, he seems the right man for the job.

But unfortunately, The Debasement of Human Rights is more enervating than bracing. In the first instance, it is poorly organized. Rhodes has a wealth of practical experience to draw upon—as he notes in the Introduction, “I have come to my conclusions about the nature of human rights through many years of working in the trenches, in both advocacy and investigation.” But while some of this evidence appears in later chapters, it is preceded by a great deal of repetitive rhetoric about how the natural political and civil rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution are based on the bedrock of objective truth and the will of God; and the positive economic, social, and cultural rights enumerated in the UDHR are based on the shifting sands of politics and the arbitrary will of dictators.

However worthwhile this point, it is tedious to see it belabored on every page. And it is exceedingly counter-productive of Rhodes to ramp up the rhetoric for the sake of relieving that tedium, as he does in a passage intimating that FDR’s 1944 State of the Union address urging the continuation of the New Deal’s social safety net “stood in stark contrast” to the Enlightenment view of “humans as independent individuals with the capacity for moral choice,” and “might even be seen as providing an exculpation” for “the horrific crimes of the Nazis.”

Less egregious but equally regrettable is Rhodes’s effort to establish a rock-solid basis for natural rights as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment. To this end, he summons the spirits of Socrates, Zeno, Cicero, John Locke, the Magna Carta, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, and Immanuel Kant. In the hands of a deeply learned and astute political theorist, these sources could conceivably be woven into a coherent, if not dispositive, account of why natural rights should take priority over positive rights. But Rhodes offers no such account. Instead, he cherry-picks these sources for a sermon addressed exclusively to the choir.

Rhodes can be eloquent in affirming the ways in which political and civil liberties are fundamental to the “cultivation and preservation of the human soul” in a world full of dehumanizing threats, not only from undemocratic “states and ideologies” but also from “the complacency and moral lassitude, and indeed the illiberalism of many members of liberal democracies.” And he is right to emphasize that the UDHR was drafted by a committee that included both champions of liberal democracy and advocates of democratic—and undemocratic—socialism.

But Rhodes is wrong to impugn that committee, and indeed all defenders of social welfare systems past and present, as authoritarian wolves in democratic sheep’s clothing. Rhodes is right to complain that the UDHR has been roundly abused over the last 70 years. But what is the counterfactual? As the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon observes:

It is worth remembering that the men and women who built those principles into the human rights project were not starry-eyed idealists. Nearly all of them had lived through two world wars and severe economic crises. The events of their times had shown them human beings at their best and worst. They took encouragement from the fact that while the human race is capable of gross violations of human rights, it is also capable of imagining that there are rights to violate, of articulating those rights in declarations and constitutions, of orienting their conduct toward the norms they have recognized, and feeling the need to make excuses when their conduct falls short.

In A World Made New, Glendon’s 2001 history of the drafting of the UDHR, she makes a strong case for the “organic unity” of that document, which had a clear structure built on a foundation of human “dignity, liberty, equality, and brotherhood”; and an equally clear design that prioritized individual rights to “life, liberty, and personal security” over “rights in civil society”; “rights in the polity”; and “economic, social, & cultural rights.” Glendon faults the document’s many critics for ignoring this structure, and she reminds us that “The ink was barely dry on the UDHR when the Cold War antagonists disregarded the fact that it was an integrated document composed of mutually conditioning parts. They tore it in half, so to speak, with the US championing the political and civil rights, the Soviet Union emphasizing its social and economic provisions, and both ignoring the rest of the text.”

Words to remember in a world intent upon shredding this and every other document affirming human freedom. One thing is clear: The fact that these documents were all created by particular people in particular places and times is not grounds for disparaging them. The same is true of the American ethos. It, too, was woven from different religious, philosophical, and economic strands: dissenting Protestantism, with its contending visions of whether or not the soul can actively seek salvation; Enlightenment liberalism, with its relatively sunny view of human beings as naturally rational and free; classical republicanism, with its darker warning that self-government is not possible without citizen virtue; and the defense of the free market by Adam Smith, a moral philosopher who also took a fairly dim view of human nature, a fact sometimes lost on his libertarian acolytes. (As the economist Herb Stein wrote back in 1994, “Adam Smith did not wear an Adam Smith necktie.”)

Because the American ethos emerged from these particular roots, it is easy for its enemies to dismiss it as a mere artifact of culture—and to suggest that it pales by comparison with various authoritarian ideologies, for example the Confucian tradition as weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party. But unlike those other ideologies, the American ethos is beneficial to all human beings, not because it is American but because it opens a path between two extremes: the naive optimism that so often begins our striving for a better world, and the cynical pessimism that so often ends it.

Rhodes, p. 32.

Ibid., p. 3.

Ibid., pp. 41-42.

Ibid., p. 3.

Draft of upcoming address before “Man and State in the International Human Rights Project: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” a Notre Dame Conference co-sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, November 1-3, 2018. Used with permission of the author.

Ibid.

The post The Right Approach to Rights appeared first on The American Interest.

The Myth of “Failed” Peace

The Middle East peace process is about to take a few knocks. Late-night comedians, cable news commentators, and numberless think tank pundits are sure to pounce on the 25th anniversary of the signing on the White House lawn of the Oslo Accords, the founding document of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, to pillory the peace process. They will call it a failure, an embarrassment, an irrelevancy, and a waste of presidential time and energy. In so doing they will join other Oslo detractors now accumulated over the years.

Despite this, the eighth President in a row says he is readying a new plan to achieve Arab-Israeli peace—or, as he calls it, the “deal of the century.” If past is prologue, his effort will fall short. Nevertheless, chances are likely his successor—and his successor’s successor—will try again. This recidivist violation of the common-sense definition of insanity is part of what earns the Middle East peace process widespread derision. But the ridicule is misplaced. The truth is that the Middle East peace process, marshaled largely under U.S. aegis, has been a resounding success. Indeed, it is one of the most effective American foreign policies of the past half-century. And its best time may be yet to come.

It is important to recall the original rationale that motivated Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to navigate the final stages of the October 1973 Arab-Israel War in such a way that a U.S.-led diplomatic gambit—which soon earned the label “peace process”—filled the gap left by the failed United Nations-focused effort of previous years. They had three interlocking goals:

to offer Arabs and Israelis a diplomatic alternative to armed conflict;
to solve the strategic quandary of having two sets of pro-Western states—the Jewish state of Israel and the conservative Arab monarchies—on opposite sides of a regional war;
to offer Moscow’s Middle East allies a reason to shift into America’s strategic orbit, thereby shrinking and ultimately sidelining Soviet influence throughout the area.

The strategy they pursued was to devise an incremental approach to peacemaking, eschewing a go-for-broke effort to forge peace by focusing instead on step-by-step measures. At its core was a novel idea: Success would not come from being an impartial, third-party mediator but rather an honest broker whose close political affinity for one of the sides (in this case, Israel) would be an asset to peacemaking, not a liability. As soon as America began playing the role of honest broker—helping the parties by reducing the risk of dangerous concessions and providing vital inducements of economic aid, military support and strategic backing—progress was made. And as soon as one Arab party, in this case Egypt, saw that America could deliver what it needed because of its close relations with Israel—both in terms of Israeli concessions as well as critical direct assistance—other Arab parties soon wanted to get into the game.

Eventually, by every measure, the peace process achieved its original goals and more. First, most of the Arab states and Israel have not only embraced a diplomatic alternative to conflict but effectively renounced war as a way to resolve their differences. The October 1973 War was the last inter-state war between Arabs and Israelis; since then, Israel has faced a range of regional adversaries but they have either been Arab sub-state actors and terrorist groups (Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas, and the Arab-led ISIS) or the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran.

Second, both Arab states and Israel have forged much closer ties with the United States over the forty years since the dawn of the modern peace process, building strategic partnerships with Washington that extend to all levels of diplomatic, military, and intelligence relations. Some of those Arab states have even developed important, if quiet, ties with Israel.

Finally, with the rise of the U.S.-led peace process, two historic allies of Moscow before 1973—Egypt and the Palestine Liberation Organization—gradually moved into the American camp. The result was that the Soviets and then the Russians were relegated to bit players in the Middle East for a generation, only re-gaining a measure of influence as a result of U.S. decisions in Syria during the Obama and Trump Administrations that had nothing to do with Middle East peacemaking.

What about the fourth goal of the Middle East peace process—peace? Here, too, U.S. diplomacy has been surprisingly successful. Later this month, Egypt and Israel will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Camp David Accords, which defined the framework for subsequent peace treaties signed under U.S. auspices. While their relationship has often been chilly, it is warmer today—at least on the official level—than at any time since Anwar Sadat’s assassination in October 1981.

Next month, Jordan and Israel mark a quarter century since a breakthrough White House meeting between then-Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, which set the stage for a peace treaty reached under the American President’s watchful eye in the Arava desert the following year. These neighbors also enjoy very close strategic, military, and intelligence relations, even if hopes for cultural ties and deep people-to-people connections have not yet been realized.

With Syria, the other major belligerent on Israel’s border, a formal peace has remained elusive. Nevertheless, the 1974 disengagement agreement brokered by Kissinger survived war, revolution, and a flood of refugees. For more than forty years, the Golan border has been among the quietest in the Middle East.

The big picture is remarkable. With the exception of the frontier between Israel and Lebanon, where Hezbollah has captured the state and remains on active war-footing, an entire generation of Arabs and Israelis has grown up knowing nothing but peace and quiet along all of Israel’s international borders.

What about peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the so-called core of the conflict? Even in retrospect, it made sense for American presidents and local leaders to focus on resolving the interstate conflict—which could produce not only regional war but superpower confrontation—before turning to the more complex, more emotional inter-communal conflict between two peoples wrestling for control over the same land. But by the time they did fix their sights on the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the world had changed.

On the one hand, the very success of interstate diplomacy reduced the strategic urgency of solving the narrower conflict. This was brought home during the second Palestinian uprising, a violent, bloody period from 2000 to 2004 that took unprecedented numbers of Israeli and Palestinian lives but, importantly, did not attract the intervention of a single Arab state.The lesson was clear: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was now reduced to a local issue, one that had potentially painful outcomes for Israelis and Palestinians but from which all other regional parties had decided to stay away.

On the other hand, a larger, a more menacing threat had come to occupy the attention of both American and regional leaders: the fear of violent Sunni jihadism. While the intifada flared, bin Laden launched his brazen 9/11 attack against the United States, eventually triggering America’s two longest wars and setting in motion a global conflict that is still raging. This threat further diminished the strategic importance of an already marginal local conflict, as policymakers pivoted to Afghanistan and Iraq.

In this environment, what is remarkable is not the setbacks Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking suffered but the considerable successes it achieved. To some, this claim strains credulity; after all, a quarter century after the famous handshake between Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat, leaders of the two sides are not even on speaking terms. But that political breach masks a deeper, more enduring strategic reality: Not only is the quasi-government created by the Oslo Accords—the Palestinian Authority—a reasonably well-functioning entity (certainly by regional standards), it conducts relations with Israel that are more peaceful, cooperative, and mutually beneficial than many other cross-border relationships in the Middle East. Consider the following:

According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the Palestinian territories have a per capita gross national income (measured in purchasing power parity) that exceeds Honduras and Ghana, is about on par with Nigeria, Moldova, Pakistan, Nicaragua, and the Marshall Islands, and even approaches Vietnam. It has infant mortality rates lowers than Morocco; child malnutrition rates lower than Turkey; and a youth literacy rate on par with Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. At 104 on the most recent global listing of the World Happiness Index, the Palestinian territories came in ahead of Tunisia (111) and Egypt (122), let alone such war-torn Arab countries as Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. While much poorer than Israel, a world-class economy, the Palestinian territories are well within the development spectrum for non-oil-exporting Arab states. (To be sure, these achievements are thanks in no small part due to the enormous sums of development assistance, foreign aid, and UN Relief and Works Agency spending directed toward Palestinians over the decades, especially since the 1993 Oslo Accords.)
Despite Israel’s security barrier and numerous military checkpoints, the border between Israel and the PA is not nearly the hermetically sealed cage it is widely thought to be. About 80,000 Palestinians work in Israel every day, half with legal working papers and half with Israeli authorities looking the other way, making this a much more permeable frontier, relative to population, than such closed or severely limited borders as between Morocco and Algeria; Libya and Tunisia; Syria and Jordan; Saudi Arabia and Yemen; and, especially, the locked-and-barricaded borders between Gaza, on one side, and Egypt and Israel on the others. When salaries to Palestinian workers in Israel are included, direct Israeli-Palestinian trade sums to about $6 billion, making this one of the most active borders in terms of regulated trade in the region.
Even in terms of security, the Israel-PA relationship deserves to be recognized for its positive achievement. A review of the U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism reports indicates that the total number of Israelis killed by terrorists originating in PA-administered West Bank territory over the ten-year period from 2007 to 2016 was, at most, 70. (Since official statistics are not presented in this fashion, this cumulative figure was derived from details in the reports; any inaccuracies are not likely to alter the magnitude of the finding.) While that is 70 too many, it amounts to about one fifth of the number of homicides that the city of Baltimore suffered in just one year (343 in 2017). It is widely understood that this level of relative security is a function of four factors: Israel’s security barrier; operations of Israeli military, security and intelligence forces in the area; operations of Palestinian military security and intelligence forces; and cooperation/coordination between the Israeli and Palestinian forces. Take away any of those pillars and the entire structure collapses.

None of this is meant to minimize the virulently anti-peace component of PA public policy, such as its system of financial payments to terrorists and their families, or to sidestep the formidable governance issues facing the PA, from mismanagement to corruption. Similarly, none of this is meant to overlook Israeli actions that have severely complicated further diplomatic progress, including restrictions on legitimate economic activity in Palestinian areas and the expansion of Israel’s civilian presence (that is, settlements) east of the security barrier. All these issues merit intense scrutiny and urgent remedial action. Rather, the key point is to put the PA in the proper regional context.

By that measure, the PA functions about as well as any new Middle Eastern “state” could expect to function, providing levels of satisfaction and security—to its people and to its closest neighbor—on par with other regional states. (Compare, for example, the PA’s experience of relative peace and stability to the seven years since South Sudan became independent.) Setting aside the sad story of Gaza, warped since June 2007 by the destructive control of Hamas, the nearly 15 years since the end of the second Palestinian uprising have witnessed a lengthy period of underappreciated calm, predictability, and relative normalcy in the West Bank. This experience is especially notable given the extent to which the PA’s powers and authorities are circumscribed by the complex web of legal, security and other practical ties with Israel.

All of which brings us to the wisdom and efficacy of American peacemaking efforts and, specifically, to three questions:

Do the repeated unsuccessful efforts of successive Presidents, Republican and Democratic, to achieve a final resolution of this conflict tell us that peace really isn’t possible?
If Israeli-Palestinian peace has dramatically less strategic urgency than it once did, should the United States still commit time and effort to achieving it?
If the United States decides that achieving peace is both possible and advantageous to American interests, what should the current Administration do that previous ones have not done?

Is peace possible? If peace is defined as a new agreement between the PLO and Israel that defines borders between Israel and a future Palestinian entity, the various powers and authorities the latter will enjoy, and the substance of bilateral relations, the answer is undoubtedly yes. (The entity will be universally and appropriately recognized as a “state” even if, through its founding documents, it agrees to give up certain aspects of sovereignty enjoyed by most states.)

The historical record suggests that nothing makes it impossible for the leaders of the PLO and Israel to reach such an agreement: not the purposeful settlement of large numbers of Israeli civilians in communities within the West Bank, often with the stated intent to prevent such an agreement; not the shameful record of Palestinian political, religious, and civic leaders inciting anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred and even violence; not the internal political divisions within the Palestinian world; and not the substantial shifts in American policy toward key aspects of the Palestinian issue in recent years. Indeed, the lesson of history is that when Arab and Israeli leaders are determined to change realities and reach agreements, no obstacles are too high to overcome. The Oslo Accords themselves exemplify this truth: At their origins, the Accords were negotiated by bypassing then-existing U.S. mediation efforts and were approved by surmounting considerable domestic opposition among both Israelis and Palestinians.

Some have argued that the sheer number of Israeli settlers who currently reside outside the West Bank security barrier—approximately 97,000—constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to future peacemaking.Of course, no one can predict precisely how future peace negotiators will address questions of borders, settlements, and legal residency outside one’s country of origin; nor can one presume to know precisely how many settlers will opt to remain in their homes in the event the democratically elected government of Israel calls on them to leave. But the past does provide some guide.

In the history of the peace process, two governments of Israel—both led by domineering Prime Ministers on the political Right—overcame ideological resistance and the organized opposition of settlers to evacuate substantial numbers of civilians from territory slated for transfer to full Arab control. This was the case in 1982, when Israel completed its withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula after removing 14 settlements, including the large town of Yamit, and then again in 2005, when Israel removed more than 8,000 settlers from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank, handing those areas to the Palestinians. Seeing the forced relocation of Jews from settlements built at the instigation of successive Israeli governments was a gut-wrenching experience for many Israelis, even those who supported the decision as essential for Israel’s larger national security. But that did not stop Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon from implementing those decisions. The lesson here is that while the numbers matter, the commitment and determination of Israel’s leadership matter more.

This assertion about the continued possibility of peace, even in the face of major obstacles, has two important implications.

First, it means that the Cassandras are wrong; the moment for peacemaking has not passed. It may not even have arrived.

Second, it means Palestinian and Israeli leaders will reach a new agreement if and when they conclude that the status quo is unacceptable for them both—politically, strategically, morally. At that point, the key missing ingredient will be leadership, the uncanny but essential ability to bring along a majority of one’s constituents while also projecting sympathy for one’s domestic adversaries. This is not a simple matter. It is possible that Israeli and Palestinian leaders will reach that conclusion individually but not together; and it is equally possible that they reach that conclusion but one or both will lack the leadership skills to translate it into practical action. An inescapable fact is that the while the potential for peaceful change is real, the potential for lost opportunities is real, too.

(In the event the two sides are not synchronized as to when they both recognize the urgency for action and choose leaders capable of making that happen, unilateral action by one of the parties to improve its own situation is a distinct possibility. This could include, for example, an Israeli decision to withdraw civilian settlers inside the security barrier, without any compensating agreement with the Palestinians, similar to how Sharon opted to disengage from Gaza. This would not produce peace, as such, but it would change the calculus for the two sides, perhaps making further progress more likely in the future. In this case, the United States may have an important role to play with just one of the parties, helping to reduce risks and limit costs.)

At the current moment, it does not appear that the two sides view their existing relationship as so painful, burdensome, and unbearable that they wish to exchange it for something else. If Palestinian leaders truly considered their situation untenable, they would have taken advantage of any number of opportunities presented by successive U.S. Presidents to propose practical alternatives, or at least to respond constructively to U.S. and Israeli ideas about alternatives.

One can make a parallel case about Israelis, which usually resolves around the “unsustainability” argument—the idea that trying to maintain the current situation indefinitely will force Israel to eventually choose between its Jewish character or its democratic character, a choice so unpalatable that Israel would be better off taking the initiative to resolve the situation now. In fact, the current situation is eminently sustainable, as the history of the past half-century has shown, and there is evidence that it is growing even more sustainable as Arab states signal disinterest in the Palestinian issue and Israel maintains its impressive economic growth. There may be some future moment when the demographic/political/military/strategic situation reverses and the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships come to view the relationship between Israel and the PA as such a drag on their national well-being that they would be better off negotiating a new one. But that does not describe the current moment and while the local situation can change suddenly and rapidly, such a change may be a long time coming.

Meanwhile, therefore, relations between Israelis and Palestinians will be governed by agreements already signed, institutions already built up (separately and together), and the actual record of cooperation, coordination, and conflict they have experienced. What the two sides have today is not peace but it is also not war or even low-level conflict; Israeli-Palestinian relations today are in fact similar to the unhappy but grudgingly tolerable relations that characterize ties among many states in the Middle East.

So: Should America still pursue Middle East peace? The answer is a qualified yes.

There is no doubt that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has less strategic urgency today than it once had. (Whether it was ever as urgent as some pundits claimed is debatable but beside the present point.) Few would argue that the absence of a new Israeli-Palestinian agreement is a casus belli for any Arab state or an opportunity for some external great power to expand its influence into the Levant. If catastrophe strikes and the two sides slide into an intifada-level paroxysm of violence, the regional implications are likely to be even more limited today then they were during the second Palestinian uprising. It is true that the Islamic Republic of Iran opposes any Muslim reconciliation with Israel, but confounding Tehran on this issue is not in and of itself a strong enough reason to invest considerable effort on peacemaking.

But the answer is still “yes”: The peace process advances U.S. interests and those of its regional allies. America and these countries—Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and moderate Arab states in the Gulf and North Africa—are all status quo powers; they share a common view of the peace process as a tool in the broader effort to promote stability. They all see benefit in an active, U.S.-led diplomacy to resolve a lingering, emotive regional dispute. Without such diplomacy, there would be a vacuum that more radical, anti-status quo forces would happily fill. To be sure, the peace process is not the sole or even most important arrow in our collective quiver and its pursuit must be viewed in the context of broader objectives (alliance cohesion, counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, energy security, and so forth) but nonetheless it remains smart policy.

Moreover, Arab states lobby for American engagement in peacemaking for one of the same reasons Nixon and Kissinger originally conceived of the peace process: It gives Arab capitals a political excuse for maintaining strategic relations with the great power ally of their putative Zionist adversary. Even if the urgency of success has receded over the years, the perception of effort remains important. While this especially applies to Jordan, with its large and restive Palestinian population, it remains relevant to varying degrees in all Arab states aligned with America.

For Israel, even more is at stake in having Washington actively and constructively engaged in peacemaking. When America works closely with Israel on peace, it underscores the strength of the U.S.-Israel partnership, a critical element of Israel’s strategic deterrent. It may sound like kabuki theater, but Israel usually wants Washington to play peacemaker even when Israel itself is not ready to make major decisions that would increase the likelihood of diplomatic success. That’s because America’s engagement in the peace process has other, derivative benefits for Israel: It can forestall negative actions by various Palestinian elements; it can shore up Israel’s relations with peace partners Jordan and Egypt; it can provide a diplomatic umbrella for quiet cooperation between Israel and other Arab and Muslim states; and it can even deliver political benefits to the sitting Israeli government, which usually likes to be seen working with Washington on the peace process even if it isn’t willing to deliver key concessions, and indeed sometimes likes to be seen standing up to American pressure to deliver those concessions. The political complexion of the Israeli government is irrelevant; Left or Right, Likud or Labor, they all want Washington as a partner in the pursuit of peace, though they may differ on the content of both the partnership and the peace.

Ultimately, therefore, America should remain engaged in the peace process as part of a broader regional strategy to promote stability and because that engagement is itself important to America’s regional allies. If a vacuum of peacemaking persists, negative actors could fill the gap and disbelief about even the potential for progress could take hold, both of which could contribute to instability and become significant obstacles to peacemaking when circumstances for a breakthrough eventually ripen. If the harvest phase of the peace process is yet ahead, the gardening phase is a necessary precursor to getting there.

The qualification to this concerns what America is willing to invest to achieve a peace breakthrough, especially in terms of presidential capital. If a new Israeli-Palestinian agreement has less strategic value than previous Arab-Israel agreements, American leaders should be willing to expend less to achieve it.  Given how little time Barack Obama and Donald Trump and their secretaries of state have spent on this issue, that already seems the case. (In terms of the past decade, the outlier is John Kerry, whose tenure was characterized by his dogged pursuit of breakthroughs on Israeli-Palestinian peace and the Iran nuclear negotiations; on only one of these did he have the full support of the President and that, in part, explains the results.) Without a profound change in the regional status quo, it is difficult to see a rationale for another Bill Clinton- or John Kerry-like push for an Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough.

So, what is to be done? There is no shortage of suggestions for dramatic measures that would shake up Israeli-Palestinian relations. One proposed by advocates on the political fringes who reject the idea of a further partition of historic Palestine is euphemistically known as the “one-state solution.” Variations of this idea are supported by Israeli maximalists who want to extend full Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the West Bank and by Palestinian maximalists who want Israeli citizenship, rather than a separate, independent state, with the goal of eventually voting the Jewish state out of existence. The one-state solution, so-called, is therefore not a solution at all because it precludes any outlet for the national aspirations of one of the parties. It is instead a recipe for perpetual conflict, a diplomatic cul-de-sac that no American President should ever entertain, let alone embrace.

A less extreme but still radical suggestion is to increase the negative incentives for peacemaking. That can be done by making the alternatives to the current situation more appealing by denying one or both of the parties the benefits of the status quo. The Trump Administration currently appears to be pursuing one variety of this approach by tightening the economic belt on the Palestinian Authority through the cumulative impact of the imposition of the Taylor Force Act, the cut in funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and the decrease in U.S. development support to projects in the West Bank. Israeli leftists and even some Palestinian leaders advocate a different variation of this approach to target what they believe is the source of Israeli satisfaction with the status quo: the entire Palestinian Authority. Collapsing the PA would, in theory, make Israel more willing to consider compromises to the Palestinians by making the Israeli military and security services bear the entire burden of West Bank security, and the Israeli taxpayer bear the costs for basic services for the Palestinians.

There is certainly a role in diplomacy for disincentives, and there is a time and place for them in the peace process, too. The U.S. government has no interest in reinforcing a negative status quo and thereby inadvertently helping leaders avoid difficult choices. Appropriately employed, disincentives can change a calculus for the better. The George W. Bush Administration, for example, made a signal contribution to peacemaking in June 2002 when it conditioned U.S. support for Palestinian statehood on the development of democratic institutions and the election of new leaders, an emphasis that regrettably dissipated within U.S. policy over time. What made that disincentive a practical contribution to peacemaking—hastening the transfer to a post-Arafat leadership—was that it was matched with a positive incentive, America’s backing for Palestinian statehood.

(Unlike the Palestinians, with whom the United States has a narrower set of interests and does not have a strategic relationship, the issue with Israel is more complicated. The United States always needs to keep the peace process—and, specifically, the question of disincentives—within the larger context of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship. In the past, some Administrations have erred in prioritizing the peace process “trees” over the strategic “forest,” the result of which is usually negative for both.)

A strategy based solely or overwhelmingly on disincentives, however, is much less likely to succeed than a policy that intelligently mixes carrots and sticks, with more of the former than the latter. If an aggrieved party fighting for what it believes is its national existence sees nothing but punitive action from the alleged “honest broker,” chances are it will either fight back or try to outlast the “broker”; after all, for the aggrieved party these issues are existential, while for the faraway “broker” they are not. Indeed, there is no historical precedent for solely “hardball diplomacy” making local parties more amenable to the give-and-take necessary for Middle East peacemaking. Such steps may produce a certain psychological satisfaction and some may be justified on the merits. However, there is little reason to think such ideas will turn one side or the other into a more conciliatory partner for peace, for even if pressure can strong-arm a party into an agreement, it is not a sound foundation for solid, long-term neighborly relations.

Whatever virtues such proposals possess for other reasons, the disincentive approach is not a wise or effective strategy for peace. The Trump Administration risks going down this route in its current approach toward the Palestinians. While there is a certain logic to each measure it has recently taken, the cumulative effect cannot but be viewed as punitive, without a compensating set of incentives that Palestinians can reasonably expect to see on the horizon. And even as a punitive strategy, it is difficult to discern who is being punished—Palestinian political leaders or ordinary Palestinians. This approach undervalues the “glass-is-more-than-half-full” assessment of the PA outlined above, especially the PA’s vital contribution on security, and it does not appear to recognize the political oxygen needed to ensure an environment conducive for security cooperation and other critical PA functions. It is easy to misinterpret the absence of vocal expressions of concern from Israel and Arab states as support for this approach, but that would be a mistake given that they have other reasons to mute their reactions.

That leaves two, broad options. Both come under the heading of traditional incentive-focused diplomacy, in which a key aspect of the U.S. role is to provide protection and inducements to leaders willing to take “risks for peace,” while at the same time denying leaders easy “exit ramps” to avoid difficult decisions. These are the options that have divided American presidents and their diplomats since the founding of the modern peace process 45 years ago: the comprehensive approach, which seeks early agreement on the overall parameters of the final settlement, leaving implementation to stages; and the incremental approach, which envisions step-by-step progress on discrete issues, with each mini-agreement building a foundation for the next mini-agreement. Nixon (and Gerald Ford) and Kissinger patented the incremental approach through the latter’s shuttle diplomacy; Jimmy Carter then came to office attracted by the appeal of a comprehensive solution, in partnership with the Soviet Union. This so spooked Egypt’s and Israel’s leaders that they took the dramatic step of reaching out to each other to circumvent Carter’s plan. While Carter eventually played an essential role in achieving the historic success at Camp David and the bilateral peace treaty six month later, this difference in approach—comprehensive versus incremental—has repeatedly reemerged in various forms ever since.

Reading the tea leaves of statements by President Trump and his chief aides responsible for the Middle East peace process, the current Administration appears inclined to the comprehensive approach. This is certainly the implication of Trump’s “deal of the century” rhetoric, as well as the widely accepted meaning of comments made on core issues like borders, refugees, and the status of Jerusalem.

If accurate, Trump’s would be the second full-scale presidential plan for the resolution of this conflict, following on the “parameters” formally proposed by Bill Clinton in his final days in office. In the current environment, there is little reason to think a Trump peace plan would enjoy any greater success than Clinton’s. Not only have both parties publicly embraced highly adversarial negotiating positions—with the Palestinians adopting  a diplomatic strategy that avoids direct negotiations and instead seeks redress against Israel before multilateral fora, perhaps including the International Criminal Court, and the Israelis saying a peace agreement can be reached without a single Israeli being displaced from even the most remote corner of the West Bank—but they have also suspended much of their quiet coordination and cooperation, save for security ties.

While leadership remains the sine qua non criterion of peace process success, even the strongest leaders—statesmen like Sadat, Begin, Hussein, and Rabin—could not operate in a wholly inhospitable political environment, and in any case, one is hard-pressed to identify leaders of that stature on today’s regional stage. At a time when civil society contact between Israelis and Palestinians hovers near zero and when key political leaders and mainstream media on each side constantly question the legitimacy of the other as peace partner, it is difficult to imagine that majorities would be willing even to entertain creative ideas on peace and reconciliation, assuming that is what the Trump plan has to offer. There may come a moment when it is appropriate for a President to lay a set of bridging proposals on the table, but Israelis and Palestinians are now far from that moment. The President’s proposal, therefore, is likely to attract some polite but non-committal praise and perhaps even a willingness to explore certain aspects further; but if it contains a detailed outline of the endgame for this conflict it will likely be “dead on arrival.”

That brings us back to where we started, which is precisely where Nixon and Kissinger started a generation ago: incrementalism. In the current environment, this extends to what are colloquially called “bottom-up” as well as “top-down” initiatives. The former include a broad range of often technical but potentially high-impact ideas that are essential to reinvigorating the institutions of peace and the prospect for future progress: Rebuilding cooperative relations between Palestinian and Israeli governments, bureaucracies, businesses, and civil society; improving Palestinian governance capacity and service delivery; and expanding opportunities for Palestinian economic development, including commercial enterprises within Palestinian territories and enhanced access for labor and goods to the Israeli market. The latter includes more high-level engagement such as personal meetings and summitry; diplomatic initiatives to identify areas of agreement or near-agreement, determine the most effective formats and venues to address disagreements, and offer creative negotiating ideas; launching semi-official “track II” diplomacy among trusted lieutenants; persistent efforts to bolster existing peace relationships with Egypt and Jordan; and the orchestration of supportive regional actors who can create an encouraging and receptive environment for peacemaking.

(Note that the peace process is not sealed off from broader regional strategy; how Washington comports itself regarding the expansion of Iranian influence into the Levant, for example, has a profound impact on the confidence of local parties to work with each other under the American strategic umbrella. Indeed, effectively countering Iran in the Levant will, as much as any other initiative, increase the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.)

In each of the Obama and George W. Bush Administrations, presidents and secretaries of state were presented at critical moments with both top-down and bottom-up options and chose the former: hence, the Annapolis process in 2007 and the Kerry peace initiative in 2014. Both failed, and failure is not harmless, for American diplomatic capital is finite and burst expectations can exact psychological costs, shifting the terms of political competition within both Israeli and Palestinian contexts in ways that are often unpredictable and generally unhelpful. The appeal of top-down is that it is commonly viewed as the sexy short-cut to success; bottom-up is consistently seen as too hard, too gritty, too low-profile, not worthy of the time, effort, and supervision of grand statesmen and political leaders. While there are moments when administrations wade into the bottom-up muck, such as the Bush Administration’s important decision to stand-up the mission of an under-the-radar U.S. security coordinator in the West Bank, they are regrettably few and fleeting.

The record suggests both are necessary prerequisites for diplomatic breakthrough; neither is, on its own, likely to be sufficient. Without tangible movement on the ground that improves the lives of ordinary people, political movement at the leadership level will not be credible; similarly, without an overarching political process that projects hope and possibility, the hard work of building bottom-up progress will be difficult to sustain.

What, then, to do? The U.S. government should channel its inner Nixon and Kissinger, return to first principles, and develop a peace process the way it was meant to be. That begins with identifying regional strategic objectives, factors in the interests of current and potential allies in the region and beyond, and considers how the effort to resolve the local conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can help the U.S. government achieves those objectives. If we are wise, prudent, and persistent, we will devise a process that advances U.S. interests, and we may even help Israelis and Palestinians make peace.

For an American critique, see Michael Mandelbaum; for an Israeli critique, see Efraim Karsh; and for a Palestinian critique, see Husam Zomlot.  For a classic comedy routine on the Middle East peace process, see Jon Stewart.

The brilliance of this approach was cogently explained by Harvey Sicherman in Broker or Advocate?: The U.S. Role in the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1973-1978 (Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1978).

Only faraway Iran tried to intervene in the intifada, through its attempt to ship weapons to the Palestinians via the Karine A. See, for example, my article on the incident, The Strategic Implications of Iran-Palestinian Collusion

For a comprehensive, dispassionate look at Israeli settlements in the West Bank and their potential impact on peacemaking, see the online tool developed by David Makovsky.

The post The Myth of “Failed” Peace appeared first on The American Interest.

Sealing the Deal

I arrived in Washington, DC, on a flight from Israel very early in the morning on September 13, 1993, the day of the historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat that sealed the Oslo Agreement. That was the informal name commonly used for the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements—or the DOP, in short—that had been secretly negotiated in Norway. I was completely exhausted from constantly flying for the previous four months from Jerusalem to Oslo and from there to Washington, where I then lived (I negotiated the agreement for Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as a volunteer, while still continuing at my day job at a Washington law firm).

I had been asked by Rabin and Peres to arrive in Washington before them to ensure that any remaining issues associated with the signing of the Oslo Agreement would be addressed. The main issues had already been resolved over the past four days, since Rabin and Arafat had exchanged their “Mutual Recognition” letters, which were signed by Arafat in Tunis on September 9, 1993, and by Rabin in Jerusalem the next day. In discussions with the Clinton Administration, it was agreed that the signing ceremony would take place in Washington and would be hosted by President Clinton himself to provide American auspices to the agreement. For good measure, the Russian Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was also invited to participate, necessitating the presence of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Though the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Johan Jørgen Holst, also wanted to participate in the signing—after all, the agreement was negotiated in Norway—it was determined that the podium on which the signing ceremony would take place was too narrow to accommodate him. He was instead relegated to the status of a guest and was assigned a seat among distinguished company in the audience section arranged on the White House lawn. His consolation prize was that, even though the agreement would be signed in Washington, it would forever be known as the Oslo Agreement.

Who Will Sign the Oslo Agreement?

With the signing of the Israel-PLO Mutual Recognition letters three days earlier, the key question of who would sign the agreement for the Palestinian side had also been resolved—it would be a PLO representative. (The Oslo Agreement was negotiated secretly between Israel and the PLO, as an informal back-channel track in parallel to the formal, front-channel negotiations that took place in Washington between Israeli and non-PLO Palestinian delegates. The original thought was that, once completed, the DOP would be signed by the formal delegations of the two parties; that meant that, for the Palestinians, it would be a non-PLO Palestinian leader.)

A minor question remained, though: Which two specific individuals would sign the agreement on behalf of Israel and the PLO? Initially, the thought was that neither Israel nor the United States were yet ready to see Arafat himself travel to the United States and sign the agreement in front of the entire world media. Indeed, for decades U.S. officials had been prohibited by law from negotiating with the PLO, and Arafat specifically barred from entering the United States. To allow an official PLO representative other than Arafat to travel to Washington was already a quantum leap, and in Israel, needless to say, there was little appetite for anyone to be seen together with Arafat in a photo.

The initial Israeli decision was that Peres would sign the agreement on behalf of Israel, and Rabin and Peres expected the PLO to designate Mahmoud Abbas (commonly known by his nickname Abu Mazen), the PLO official who oversaw the Oslo negotiations, as its representative. Under this plan, neither Arafat nor Rabin would come to Washington. This would have allowed Rabin to project an image that closely tracked with his true personal feelings regarding Oslo, as someone who only grudgingly embraced the agreement. He wanted to be seen as a statesman who responsibly endorsed the agreement that he believed best served Israel’s interests but, both as a politician and a private person, he could not bring himself to stand close to anyone belonging to a notorious terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of innocent Israelis. So even though President Clinton indicated to Prime Minister Rabin that Arafat wanted to come to Washington and sign the Oslo Agreement in person and further that President Clinton would want to see Prime Minister Rabin do the same, when Rabin responded that he did not intend to come, President Clinton, a bit reluctantly, accepted that neither Rabin nor Arafat would show up.

But then, just two days before the signing ceremony, Rabin had a critical change of heart. Two of Rabin’s aides convinced him that he could not afford to be absent from the historic event formalizing the culmination of the process that he had adopted, shepherded to a successful conclusion, and would continue to lead in the years to come. Once Rabin changed his mind and informed President Clinton that he was coming to Washington, it became impossible to exclude Arafat. The Rubicon had been crossed.

When Peres heard that Rabin had decided to participate in the Oslo signing ceremony, he exploded with anger. For the past few months, Peres had seen himself as the father of the Oslo Agreement, and it came as a real blow to him to be informed, just as he had completed writing the speech he planned to make at the signing ceremony, that Rabin had decided to steal the glory he felt belonged to him. He told Rabin he was not traveling to the United States. This threat was not to be taken lightly. If Peres were to be absent and Rabin sat alone next to Arafat at the signing ceremony, it would be much more difficult for Rabin to continue presenting himself domestically as the leader who had been pulled by Peres into an agreement he really only half-heartedly accepted. To resolve the crisis, Rabin negotiated a compromise with Peres in which the agreement would be signed by Peres, but Rabin would give the main speech. That compromise also dictated that on the Palestinian side, Abu Mazen would sign the DOP but Arafat would deliver the main speech.

No Military Uniform, No Gun, No Kissing and Hugging

Meanwhile, Rabin sought assurances from Clinton that Arafat would not show up at the ceremony with the gun on his waist that had become, together with his checkered headdress and military uniform, part of his traditional costume. Everyone in Israel remembered how, in 1974, Arafat was first invited to speak before the United Nations, a supposed bastion of diplomacy and peacemaking. Yet, in a clear act of defiance, he had walked dramatically into the General Assembly hall wearing his military uniform as well as a leather holster around his waist, apparently concealing a pistol, even though carrying a gun inside the United Nations building was strictly forbidden. As the Prime Minister of Israel, Rabin was responsible not only for making strategic decisions such as the decision to talk with the PLO, but also for selling these decisions to the Israeli public. Rabin had a lot of selling to do in connection with the Oslo Agreement because he had broken so many taboos, all at the same time, which Israelis found difficult to swallow and digest so quickly. The most critical task for Rabin was to explain why he decided to violate his pledge never to talk with the PLO that he himself had repeatedly reconfirmed. The only possible explanation was to point out the commitments that Arafat had made just four days earlier in the Mutual Recognition letter he had sent to Rabin, where he undertook, among other things, to renounce “the use of terrorism and other acts of violence,” and to seek a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on these newly undertaken commitments, Rabin could have argued to the Israeli public that Arafat had changed. For Arafat to show up at the Oslo Agreement signing ceremony dressed up in his normal military uniform and carrying a gun, however, would be to send a visual message that, notwithstanding his commitments, with the ink with which they were typed barely dry, he was still committed to continue fighting. In other words, this would be the equivalent of giving Rabin the middle finger, except that the finger in this case would be Arafat’s whole body.

Of course, no visitor can get into the White House with a gun, not even Arafat. So Arafat could not have really brought a gun with him to the White House. But the concern was that he would nonetheless have a gun holster around his waist. No one would know that it was actually empty, so his message would still get across: “Peace or no peace, I am still fighting.”

Rabin’s concern about Arafat’s military uniform and gun was dwarfed in comparison, however, by his other concern, which was that Arafat might hug and kiss him during the signing ceremony. Unlike the West, where people preserve their personal space and avoid standing too close to one another, let alone touching, Middle Easterners, particularly males, like to hug and kiss. And there has never been a more enthusiastic hugger and kisser than Arafat. Every time the news showed Arafat disembarking a plane on one of his many visits to Arab countries, he would walk the red carpet toward the Arab leader waiting to receive him and then hug that leader forcefully and for a very long time, followed by kisses—always three—on the cheeks. In Rabin’s mind, nothing more terrible could have happened to him than to have Arafat jump on him during the signing ceremony and hug and kiss him. If that happened, all that the Israeli anti-Oslo opposition would need to do would be to widely publicize a photo of Arafat kissing Rabin with a short caption: “Rabin kisses the murderer. Case closed.” Indeed, shortly before Rabin was assassinated, a photomontage showing Rabin wearing an Arafat-like headdress was circulated widely in Israel and appeared during violent anti-Oslo demonstrations.

To assuage these fears, Rabin asked Clinton to ensure that there would be no hugging or kissing by Arafat during the ceremony. And, as best as Clinton could do, no handshakes. Clinton promised to do his best.

Oh, Dear!

I became aware of Rabin’s hypersensitivity to selling the Oslo Agreement a few days earlier. It took me a while to convince Rabin to accept my idea of exchanging Mutual Recognition letters between him and Arafat before the signing of the DOP. But once he accepted this idea, he approved the draft letters I presented to him before the start of the negotiations with the PLO without any changes, with only one exception. I included the standard opening salutation: “Dear Mr. Arafat” at the top of Rabin’s letter to Arafat and a similar opening salutation (“Dear Mr. Rabin”) at the top of Arafat’s letter to Rabin. Rabin ordered me to cross out the word “dear” in both places. Apparently, this word seemed to Rabin to project an undesired term of endearment.

The negotiations with the PLO over these letters were completed in a Paris hotel just a few days before the DOP signing took place in Washington. After tentative agreement was reached late at night, Uri Savir (the Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who was with me throughout the Oslo negotiations) and I sent the draft to Israel for final approval and went to sleep. After we arrived back in Israel, I heard that Rabin was furious at me. When I inquired as to why, the response was that Rabin was angry because the final text of the letters included the word “Sincerely” before his and Arafat’s signatures. I explained that this word was there all along, including in the draft I presented to Rabin, which Rabin approved. The answer was that, upon review of the agreed draft, Rabin spotted the word, which he had presumably missed when he had approved my original draft, and then sent instructions to our hotel through the Foreign Ministry to remove it from the draft. But I had not received any such instructions. Only then did Savir recall that after the conclusion of the negotiations, while we were fast asleep in our rooms, he had received a phone call from Israel that woke him early in the morning and conveyed Rabin’s order. However, he immediately fell back to sleep and forgot to tell me about it.

Cleaning the Text of the Oslo Agreement

Now that all the major issues had been resolved, Rabin and Peres asked me to fly to Washington to attend to any minor issues remaining to be addressed. I was picked up at the airport by an Israel Embassy diplomat who took me directly to the State Department for a meeting with Jonathan Schwartz, the Deputy Legal Adviser. I knew Schwartz well from my time as the Head of the International Law Department in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and had worked with him on other Israeli-Arab negotiations. Schwartz allowed me to shave quickly in the private bathroom of the Legal Adviser. He then took me to the State Department’s Protocol Office, where I was shown how they had re-formatted the text of the Oslo Agreement, which I had sent them before taking off from Israel. They had also corrected a few typos and grammatical errors, changes I gladly approved. I had spotted these issues when Rabin sent me to Oslo to attempt to fix the draft of the agreement, but I didn’t want to waste political capital on seeking Palestinian agreement to make grammar-based changes, preferring to focus only on the important revisions. After the modified text of the DOP was agreed upon, I provided the chief PLO negotiator, Ahmed Qurei (commonly known as Abu Ala) with a list of grammar changes and typos and suggested we make them. He responded that while he agreed with me, it was too late to make these changes, as the draft already had been approved by the PLO leadership and he was no longer authorized to change even a comma. I was, therefore, happy that these changes were made by the United States.

Surprise!

We then discussed the order of the signing, where I should stand (close to the elevated podium that had been erected on the White House lawn on which the leaders would stand), and when and how I should step up to the podium to help Peres sign the agreement. As the meeting drew close to its end, I quickly considered my list of areas of concern:

The agreement has been reformatted and is ready to be signed—check.
The agreement has been cleaned of grammatical errors and typos—check.
The order of signing and related steps has been established—check.

Great. Everything has been addressed. The agreement is ready to be signed. Nothing can now go wrong, right? Wrong!

Just as I was about to step out of the meeting room, the Protocol person added, like Detective Columbo, as portrayed by Peter Falk, used to say in the 1970s television series bearing his name: “There’s just one more thing. The Palestinians have said that they would not show up at the signing ceremony if Israel does not agree to make four changes in the agreement.”

Had it been up to me, I would have said calmly: “Fine. Let them not show up. Let’s see who blinks first.” I had already witnessed a similar situation three weeks earlier in Oslo where, after the agreement had been fully agreed and just a few hours before it was to be initialed, Abu Ala told us that he would not add his initials to the agreement unless several additional changes were made. As we were discussing what to do, Terje Rød-Larsen, the Norwegian who, together with his wife Mona Juul, was instrumental in facilitating the Oslo negotiations, whispered in my ear that we shouldn’t worry about Abu Ala’s threat. He explained that Abu Ala had just asked him to assist in finding a typist to help him type the speech he planned to make during the initialing ceremony, so he clearly did not intend to carry out his threat. I responded that, in any event, I didn’t intend to budge, but it was good to know that even Abu Ala didn’t seriously intend to avoid adding his initials to the agreed text. But that was three weeks ago, when no one knew about the Oslo negotiations, so no one would have known if the agreement was not initialed. Here, the entire world would be watching and hundreds of people were already sitting on the White House lawn waiting for the signing ceremony to begin, so I could not begin playing a game of chicken on my own authority.

“I need to talk with Rabin,” I said. “Do it quickly,” the Protocol guy replied, pearls of sweat becoming visible on his forehead, “and look for me at the White House lawn when you get back. I will be standing next to the signing podium. Meanwhile, I am holding open the final version of the agreement to be signed.” We did not discuss the possibility that, to save time, the Protocol Office would prepare several versions of the agreement to fit each of the various possible outcomes of the conclusion of this last-minute re-negotiation regarding the four Palestinian requested changes and would present for signing that version which the parties ultimately agreed on. I actually thought about that possibility but did not raise it with my State Department colleagues. A quick calculation told me that they would have had to prepare no fewer than 18 different versions of the DOP and, even if they had the time to do so, which they didn’t, there was no guarantee that they would be able to insert the correct version of the DOP in the four folders prepared for the signing ceremony. Nor was there a guarantee that they would even manage to select four identical copies of the agreed DOP version for inclusion in these folders. (The DOP was to be signed four times in four original sets: one for Israel, one for the Palestinians, one for the United States, and one for the Russian Federation.) “I’ll arrive at the White House as soon as I’ve discussed this matter with Rabin and will look for you there,” I said.

A Shirt, a Shirt, My Kingdom for a Shirt!

The Embassy car that was waiting for me outside the State Department building rushed me to the Mayflower Hotel, where the Israeli delegation was staying. As is usual in such situations, the Embassy had booked dozens of rooms in this hotel for the delegation. The Israeli Ambassador, Itamar Rabinovich, as well as other key Israeli diplomats, had relocated to the hotel and opened a temporary office there for the use of the Israeli delegation. My wife Neomi, who was then the chief administrative assistant to the Ambassador, was running the office. Over the previous few weeks, my work had been so intense that I had no time to stop at home in Washington for even a short break, so I had run out of shirts and didn’t even have the time to send one to the cleaners. I had therefore called my wife ahead of flying to Washington and asked her to bring a clean shirt to the hotel so that I could change before the ceremony. My fear was that, as I would be standing on the podium next to Peres with Clinton behind me, Clinton would suddenly frown and say: “Hold it. Don’t sign. I smell a rat!” I would then have to confess: “No, Mr. President. It’s just me. I haven’t changed my shirt over the last five days. Sorry.”

After changing my shirt, I was taken to Rabin’s room.

Good News and Bad News

At that time, Peres and all the other members of the Israeli delegation had already left for the White House. Because of the tight security measures, all guests had to arrive there at least an hour before the ceremony began. Rabin and I were the only exceptions. Rabin was already all dressed and practicing his speech. “I have good news and bad news,” I said. “The good news is that the agreement is ready to be signed. The bad news is that the Palestinians are not going to sign unless we agree to four changes.” Unexpectedly, Rabin kept his composure and simply asked me to explain what these requested changes were. I did not know it at the time, but from very early in the morning onwards, various Palestinians who had arrived in Washington the day before us were frantically calling various American and Israeli Embassy officials, telling them about their demands and threatening not to be at the White House if these changes were not made. Apparently, Rabin had already heard about these demands and threats, but waited to talk with me before deciding what to do.

In response to Rabin’s question, I explained that there were four requested changes and that they all related to adding references to the PLO throughout the text of the DOP. Two of these changes, I said, would result in a substantive impact on the agreement. The other two related to the identity of the Palestinian party signing the agreement. The draft of the declaration that was finalized and initialed in Oslo referred to this party as “the Palestinian team within the joint Jordanian-Palestinian Delegation.” That was the format agreed to in the 1991 Madrid Conference that had been convened by the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in an attempt to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Representatives of Israel and several Arab countries participated, including a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation that included non-PLO Palestinians. This wording was a compromise formula closely negotiated by Secretary of State Jim Baker between the Arab position that a separate Palestinian delegation should be invited to participate in the Madrid Conference and the Israeli Likud Government position that any Palestinian participation should be limited to non-PLO members and be included in the Jordanian delegation. When these negotiations ultimately relocated from Madrid to Washington, the same format was kept for the Palestinian team. Since the DOP that was drafted in Oslo was originally supposed to be signed by the official front-channel Palestinian team in Washington, the DOP referred to that Palestinian party as “the Palestinian team within the joint Jordanian-Palestinian Delegation.” However, once Israel and the PLO had signed the Mutual Recognition letters, there was no logical reason to continue to avoid referring to that party as the PLO, except that the DOP was already finalized and initialed and ready to be signed in less than an hour.

“What do you suggest we do?” Rabin asked. “If you are ready to compromise,” I responded, “I suggest our position be that we agree to the two requests related to the identity of the Palestinian party signing the DOP and reject the two others and, if they still refuse to sign, so be it.” “OK,” Rabin said. “I have to leave for the White House. When you are done talking with them, come back to report to me.” “I’ll find you,” I said, not focusing in that moment on the question of how I would find him, given that I would be on the White House lawn and he would be inside the White House.

Déjà Vu in the White House

I then rushed to the White House in my separate car and, as I entered the South Lawn, I saw for the first time the set up for the signing ceremony. Hundreds of guests were already seated on folding chairs and behind them there were dozens of cameras with television crews from all over the world facing the podium on which the signing ceremony would soon take place. On top of the podium stood a table which, as the State Department people had told me earlier that day, had been used for the White House signing of the Israeli-Egyptian Treaty of Peace 14 years earlier. This gave me a strong feeling of déjà vu. In 1979, as the Head of the International Law Department in the IDF, I was one of three representatives of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the Israeli delegation to the peace talks with Egypt (the others were Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann and the IDF’s Chief of Planning, Lieutenant General Avraham Tamir). I spent several months in Washington negotiating all the military portions of the Treaty of Peace and, when it was concluded, witnessed its signing on this very same table by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

At that time, I was the youngest member of the Israeli delegation to the peace talks with Egypt. I recall that, during the formal meetings that were held among the Egyptian, American, and Israeli delegations in Blair House, just across the street from the White House, the Israeli delegation occupied three rows at the round negotiating table. In the first row sat Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defense, Weizmann, and the Foreign Ministry’s Legal Adviser. In the second row sat all the other members of the Israeli delegation, while I sat alone in the third row.

In the intervening years, I progressively accumulated more experience in international negotiations as a member of various Israeli delegations that negotiated agreements with Israel’s Arab neighbors. For instance, for four years, I negotiated autonomy arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza with the United States and Egypt under the Begin government. I also negotiated a peace treaty with Lebanon following the 1982 Lebanon War (which unfortunately never took effect). When Arafat and the PLO leadership were forced out of Lebanon at the end of this war, I negotiated the formation of a temporary multinational force to deploy in Beirut to guarantee their safe passage to Tunis, where they established their new headquarters, far away from Israel.

And here I was again at the White House, about to witness yet another historic agreement being signed, except that this time my responsibility was much greater. But there was no time to waste on nostalgia. I had a mission to perform—to re-negotiate a portion of the agreement at the eleventh hour.

Eleventh-Hour Negotiations at the Foot of the Signing Podium

I headed toward the podium, where I spotted the State Department Protocol guy standing at the foot of that platform. I expected to meet one of the Palestinians with whom I had negotiated the DOP in Oslo, Abu Ala or Hassan Asfur. Instead, the State Department official introduced me to two other, non-PLO Palestinians whom I had never met and who stood next to him: Hayek al-Fahoum and Hanan Ashrawi, both members of the Palestinian team that had conducted the formal front-channel discussions in Washington and had been kept in the dark until only a few days ago about the Oslo back channel discussions. Then, standing near the podium on which the DOP was supposed to be signed, at just a few minutes before 11 a.m., the time when the ceremony was supposed to begin, we started discussing the Palestinian demands. I presented the Israeli position as discussed earlier with Rabin and, luckily, they soon accepted it.

We then proceeded to discuss how to implement these agreed changes. Given the time constraint, the State Department Protocol guy wanted to simplify the process. He suggested that when Abu Mazen’s turn came to sign the DOP, he could simply cross out the two references to the “the Palestinian team within the joint Jordanian-Palestinian Delegation” and add the words “the PLO” in handwriting. But both the Palestinian representatives and I objected to this proposal. The Palestinians didn’t like it because the established order for signing the DOP had Peres signing first and Abu Mazen second. They were, therefore, concerned that handwritten changes added after Peres had already signed would not be binding. I rejected this approach because of the concern that Abu Mazen could have added other, non-agreed handwritten changes to the DOP. This left the Protocol guy with no choice but to find a way to somehow re-type the relevant pages quickly enough for the DOP to be ready for signing in just a few minutes. I then turned around and looked for a way to go into the White House where Rabin was waiting for me to report to him whether the problems had been satisfactorily resolved so that the ceremony could begin.

Trying to Get into the White House

It only then hit me that it’s not easy to get into the White House, especially on that particular day. With so many world leaders present inside the White House perimeter, the entire U.S. Marine Corps appeared to be assembled around the White House with strict instructions not to let anyone without a permit enter. In events that involve the participation of foreign leaders, the relevant security services normally provide the participants buttons of various colors to be worn on the suit lapel. The color tells the guards who is allowed to enter which part of the protected complex. The State Department Protocol guy’s button was of the correct color, so he was let in. Because no one had anticipated that I would need to get into the White House, the button I received did not authorize my entry, so I had to rely on my ability to explain why I needed to get in. The guards standing directly in front of the White House’s main entrance, however, appeared to be entirely unmoved by my initial attempt to convince them that I, a complete stranger with no credentials, should be allowed to enter the White House because I needed to talk with the Israeli Prime Minister right away.

It was already 10:57 a.m., and two conflicting fearful thoughts ran through my head. One was that the ceremony would never begin, because Rabin was waiting behind that closed door for a clue from me that the problem was solved and that he would hold everything until he heard from me. Even more frightening was the other thought that, as I was standing there, trying to convince the guards that I should be allowed in, Rabin would lose his patience and suddenly the door would open, the United States Army herald trumpets would begin playing the “Hail to the Chief,” and Clinton, Rabin, Arafat, and all the other dignitaries would begin walking out, and I would have no choice (if not first handcuffed by the guards) but to report the results of the re-negotiations to Rabin while walking alongside them with all the television cameras focused on us. As I contemplated these two horrible scenarios, I felt the clean shirt my wife had brought me just hours ago becoming soaked as my sweat dripped down my back.

Suddenly, one of the guards began talking into his wrist and then, miraculously, he took me by the arm, opened the White House door, and walked me through a long corridor that led to the Blue Room, where I saw Clinton, Vice President Gore, Rabin, Peres, and other dignitaries standing in a large circle in one corner of the room. At the opposite corner of the room, I saw a much smaller circle consisting of only three people: Russian Foreign Minister Kozyrev, Abu Mazen, and, yes, there he was, the arch-terrorist, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat.

First Encounter with the Chairman

I quickly glanced at Arafat. That was the first time I ever saw him in person. Over the next three years, I would spend more time with him than any other Israeli and probably more time than most Palestinians. He looked exactly as in the pictures except that, when you stood close to him, he seemed shorter than I had imagined.

I immediately noticed that he did not have his gun belt around his waist. Good. However, he did wear his uniform. I subsequently never saw him wearing any clothes other than uniform. I wonder whether he even had normal clothes. My eyes continued to scan him. The two-day-old beard. The big smile that always looked a bit sinister. The bulging eyes. And the checkered headdress (or keffiyeh). In all the years that I spent later with Arafat, I never saw him clean-shaven, nor did I ever see him take off his headdress, except once. And when it happened, I was shocked: He was almost entirely bald. Without the headdress, he suddenly looked like a completely different person. It then hit me that when you look at Arafat, you don’t really see the person. You just see the costume, consisting of the uniform, the gun belt, the unshaven face and the headdress. Without them, there was no “Arafat.” He was a walking symbol.

A similar realization had occurred to me 15 years earlier, when I participated in the negotiations with Egypt in Washington, DC, on the Israel-Egypt Treaty of Peace. The two delegations were staying at the Madison Hotel, each occupying a separate floor. One night, Moshe Dayan, who was then the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs and the head of the Israeli delegation, called me to his hotel room. He wanted to discuss a certain point in the military portion of the draft treaty that was subject to a disagreement between Egypt and Israel and prepare together for the next day’s discussions with the Egyptians. It was already very late at night and Dayan apparently was beginning to get ready to go to sleep, so he had taken off his famous eye-patch. I was sitting in front of Dayan discussing matters of high importance, but as much as I tried to concentrate on the discussion, my eyes kept wandering to the place in his face where there usually was an eye-patch and now, there was nothing. Just a hole. He no longer looked like the famous Dayan; rather, he looked like an old man with one eye. Of course, Dayan did not choose the eye-patch to adopt an image of a modern-day pirate. He was wounded in World War II fighting alongside the British Army in Syria. While he was monitoring the enemy using binoculars, a sharpshooter hit him with a bullet. The binoculars stopped the bullet, so his life was saved, but the binocular glass shattered in his eye and he lost it with some pieces staying in his eye socket. He couldn’t adjust to an artificial eye due to the pain, so he started using an eye-patch instead. But once this medically required device was selected, the eye-patch became Dayan’s defining feature, giving him the aura of a fearless bandit. All that it took to depict Dayan in caricatures was to draw a circle and add the eye-patch. There was no need to draw the ears, nose, or mouth.

With Arafat, though, it was different. Arafat had deliberately selected his costume (in the old days, he also always wore dark eye glasses—even at night—but when I met him, he had already discarded that part of the costume). The image he adopted was that of a constant, unyielding rebel (in Israel, that image was perceived as the epitome of the arch-terrorist). He never shaved because revolutionaries aren’t supposed to have time to shave. He always wore uniform and carried a gun because he wanted to exemplify the fighter who must always be on guard, ready to go into battle. And as for the headdress, while, as Arafat had said, he arranged it to look like—and symbolize—the map of Greater Palestine (including Israel), I suspected it was actually intended to cover his bald head. I looked around the room. Everyone was wearing his best suit and nicest tie. Some even stuck a colorful handkerchief in the front pocket of their coat. Everyone was clean-shaven and I could sense that, in preparation for this celebratory event, a few had applied a more generous amount of aftershave to their faces. What a strong message Arafat could have sent to Israel and the entire world if, suddenly, he too had shown up, for the first time in his life, clean-shaven, wearing a nice suit and a tie. But no, not Arafat. Apparently, the clothes do make the man. Arafat’s message—addressed to his people—continued to be defiant. He agreed to forgo the gun but stuck to the uniform. So, out of Rabin’s demands, he accepted one and rejected the other. Just as I did a few minutes ago with regard to the four last-minute Palestinian demands for DOP changes. All that remained to watch for was whether or not there would be hugging and kissing.

Green Light to Proceed

I made a beeline for Rabin to close the loop on the DOP changes. After I reported to Rabin and Peres, who stood by Rabin’s side, on the agreement I had reached with the Palestinians regarding their four last-minute demands, Rabin expressed his satisfaction. The State Department Protocol guy, who was also standing nearby and heard Rabin approving the deal, darted to the other side of the room where Arafat was standing to inform him of the resolution of the four issues. I saw Arafat nodding his head in agreement. The crisis was over.

I later learned that Clinton had conveyed to Arafat the need to avoid hugging or kissing Rabin and, just to be on the safe side, Clinton also rehearsed maneuvers with his aides to physically block any possible attempts by Arafat to hug or kiss Rabin. At the same time, Clinton also broke the news to Rabin that he had decided that a handshake must take place between Rabin and Arafat. Clinton well recalled the 1979 Israel-Egypt Treaty of Peace signing ceremony that took place at the White House where President Jimmy Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were seen clasping their hands in a triangular handshake signaling that a new era of peace commenced. Clinton immediately knew there must be a handshake here, too. The deal will not be perceived by the world to be a deal without it. Rabin swallowed the news with dignity, even though, looking quite shaken, he repeated his request: “But no kissing.”

I don’t know whether the Bard of Avon was correct in observing that, “All the world’s a stage.” But on September 13, 1993, the White House clearly turned into a big stage. After Begin and Sadat shook hands in the White House in 1979 before the cheering audience and were later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously quipped: “Rather than the Nobel, they deserved an Oscar.” Theatrics is always intertwined with Middle East peacemaking. Indeed, on September 13, 1993, the elevated podium on which the signing ceremony would occur momentarily began looking like a stage. The people invited to attend the event were seated on chairs arranged in rows, just like in a theater. And over the foregoing three days, Clinton, Rabin, and Arafat were dealing with the costumes that Arafat, a main protagonist in this show, would wear. These three characters also discussed their movements during the play’s climax, and Clinton even rehearsed them with his aides. All of these visuals, one must admit, were much more important than the script that I wrote for this play—the text of the DOP.

Now that the crisis was over, Clinton and company began to prepare to walk out of the White House to take their places on the podium. I turned around and hurried back to the White House South Lawn to take my place next to the podium.

The Handshake

At 11:07 a.m., seven minutes after the planned start time, the ceremony began. Clinton and all the other dignitaries began walking out of the White House to the South Lawn, most of them being seated on the front row chairs reserved for them. Clinton, Rabin, Peres, Arafat, Abu Mazen, Christopher, and Kozyrev stepped up to the podium and stood in a line behind the table on which the DOP would soon be signed. I was standing at the right side of the podium, waiting for the time the actual signing would begin to climb onto the podium and assist Peres with the signing. But first, the speeches. Everyone spoke, but at the time, my exhaustion began to show and the celebratory words turned into a long buzz in my head.

Only when Rabin began to talk in his typically frank manner did I tune again. I assume that the military background Rabin and I shared made his words that seemed to come from his heart so appealing to me. They summed up exactly what I thought. Among other things, Rabin said:

We have come from Jerusalem, the ancient and eternal capital of the Jewish people. We have come from an anguished and grieving land. We have come from a people, a home, a family that has not known a single year not a single month in which mothers have not wept for their sons. We have come to try and put an end to the hostilities, so that our children, our children’s children, will no longer experience the painful cost of war, violence and terror. We have come to secure their lives and to ease the sorrow and the painful memories of the past to hope and pray for peace.

Let me say to you, the Palestinians: We are destined to live together on the same soil, in the same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians.

We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbor no hatred towards you. We, like you, are people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance, and saying again to you: Enough. Let us pray that a day will come when we all will say: Farewell to the arms.

And then the speeches were over and the signing time arrived. Peres was to sign first. According to a cue agreed earlier with the Protocol Office, I climbed up the podium and assisted Peres with signing all copies of the DOP in all the right places and then moved back to the side of the podium to allow the others to sign. Within just a couple of minutes, the signing ended and, as planned and rehearsed, Clinton embraced Rabin and Arafat and almost pushed them one against the other so as to make them shake their hands.

The applause and roar that came from the audience was almost deafening. It was only then that I noticed the size of the crowd. I then finally allowed myself to succumb to my exhaustion. My role was over for that day. There was no longer a need for me to remain focused, so my brain finally shut down, and my memories of the rest of that day are completely blurred. A lunch hosted by Secretary of State Warren Christopher. A glimpse of Clinton, Rabin, Arafat, and Peres standing on the White House lawn being photographed holding shirts of “Seeds of Peace,” an organization quickly created to support people-to-people contacts between young Israelis and Palestinians. Different people talking with me, asking questions, shaking my hand. But what I really recall is simply the anti-climactic feeling: It’s finally done.

Did You Feel the Winds of Change Blow?

People often ask me how I felt on September 13, 1993. Was my spirit elevated? Was I aware of how important that event was? That history was being made? And how did I feel about the fact that, at the center of this historic event was the DOP, the agreement that I had written? The entire world, billions of people, so it seemed, was watching the event on television. So how did I feel being there? Normally, those questions are asked with dreamy eyes and an expectation of an affirmative, poetic response.

My usual answer is that I felt nothing like this. Rather, my feeling was a strange combination of total exhaustion and razor-sharp focus. During the four months that I spent negotiating the DOP, and particularly the three weeks prior to the September 13 signing ceremony, I was constantly flying back and forth between Norway, Washington, and Jerusalem, almost never spending more than two to three days in the same country, barely sleeping four hours per night and often forgoing sleep altogether. And all the while, I was negotiating issues that were of the utmost importance to Israel and the entire Middle East, arguing over every word, and sometimes every comma, in an atmosphere sometimes so tense that I would not have been shocked had the space-time continuum itself snapped. The combination of tension and sleeplessness resulted in a level of exhaustion I had never before experienced, and have not since.

And yet as soon as I arrived in the U.S. capital and learned about the last-minute crisis that required re-negotiating the DOP, something clicked in my mind and brought back the necessary focus, notwithstanding my exhaustion. It was as if a secret cache of energy exists somewhere inside your body that is kept there for those rare instances when you need it after all your normal energy has been depleted. A “to do” list formed in my mind that included all the steps that had to be taken in a very short time, with the last step being: See to it that the DOP is executed properly before you collapse. All the while, as I was moving from one step to the next one, I was 100 percent focused on what needed to be done, and the rest of the world simply disappeared. I stood by the President of the United States and barely noticed him. The White House was filled on that day with numerous famous guests, some of them the most important people in the world. Kings and Princes, Presidents and Prime Minsiters stood around me or walked by, but they were all reduced to background noise. I was focused on the DOP alone.

In such a situation, there is no room left in your mind for emotions or contemplative perception of the circumstances in which you operate or the impact of what you do. This privilege is left to the audience alone. All that I remember from that day are boxes I checked on the list of things required for the successful execution of the DOP. And, of course, as I recall in the clearest manner possible, item No. 1 on that “to do” list was to get a clean shirt.

Bad Omen

After the DOP was signed, and before we boarded the plane on the way back to Israel, a thought kept bothering me: Why did the Palestinians create the 11th-hour crisis with their ultimatum of not showing up at the signing ceremony if their demands were not met? I understood why they had a valid point, at least for two of their demands. What troubled me was the manner in which they attempted to extract changes in the DOP, after it had been agreed to and initialed.

Was this just a bump in the road on their way from being a terrorist organization, whose objective was to break the accepted rules, to a more civilized organization, which strives to comply with the international norms? Or was that conduct reflective of Arafat’s unique personality? Or perhaps that was part of a well-thought-out set of tactics of negotiations on the edge? Or was the crisis created because of the friction between the formal, West Bank/Gaza-based, front-channel, non-PLO Palestinian team and the informal, Tunis-based, back-channel, PLO group, as they were taking their first step toward becoming a consolidated delegation, with each still having different habits and objectives, resulting in some chaotic conduct?

And what if Arafat actually wanted the crisis to not be resolved before the ceremony began, but rather to have an opportunity to stage the crisis, then have it developed and resolved, through obtaining additional Israeli concessions, in full view of the world’s media, to show the Palestinian people his resolve?

I would soon learn what the correct answer was: All of the above.

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