Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Aaron David Miller is currently a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he wrote his new book, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace. He served as a Middle East negotiator in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

From Aaron David Miller

The Much Too Promised Land had a strange birth. Originally I had no intention of writing it. I resigned from the Department of State in January 2003 after twenty years of working on Arab-Israeli issues, much of them spent in American efforts to broker a negotiated peace. I left the State Department not because I had lost faith in the power of American diplomacy, but because the end game for Arabs and Israelis seemed years into the future. Having wrestled with the older generation of Arabs and Israelis, I went off to head Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit NGO dedicated to fostering better understanding among the younger generation.

But things changed. In the years after 9/11, I watched America struggle (and fail) in a Middle Eastern world that was becoming more important than ever to our national interests and to our national security. American failures grew largely out of a dysfunctional region where an authority deficit in places like Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon combined with the emergence of a virulent and extremist strain within Islam, the potential proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and rage at America for its presence in Iraq which threatened American interests and credibility.

At the same time, American policy seemed to be making matters worse. It seemed to me we didn’t understand the world in which we were now embroiled. America was in an investment trap in the Middle East: we couldn’t fix the region; and we couldn’t extricate ourselves from it.

Whatever else caused our Middle East predicament, it seemed to me that our challenges were made worse from two self-inflicted wounds: first, we didn’t pay attention to the past, let alone learn from it; second, we persisted in seeing the world not the way it was, but the way we wanted it to be. Our analysis of the region, at least that on which the policy makers based their policy, seemed to flow more from ideology, short-term goals and domestic politics. This was not a Republican or Democratic problem; it was an American problem. In eight years under Bill Clinton, we seemed to stumble at peacemaking; in eight years under George W. Bush, we fumbled badly at making war.

The Much Too Promised Land is an effort to look at American policy toward the Arab-Israeli negotiations and to identify the reasons behind our successes and failures during almost fifty years. It’s not intended as an “I told you so.” I was as much a cheerleader for unworkable policies as anyone during my time in government. Drawing on experiences and anecdotes from my twenty years at the negotiating table under six secretaries of state and on interviews with key principles (including Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter) who presided over the diplomacy during the earlier period, I’ve identified those lessons worth keeping in mind for the future. With all due respect to the British historian A.J.P. Taylor, who opined that the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons, the past can be a cruel and unforgiving teacher if it’s not at least taken seriously.

My hope is that The Much Too Promised Land will create, with clarity and honesty, a new frame of reference to evaluate our policy toward the Arab-Israeli issue over the last forty years, and to identify those key ingredients that increase the chances of successes in the future. By the looks of the situation on the ground, we’ll need that and a lot more.

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