Israel America Academic Exchange (IAAE) is a new organization that sponsors educational missions to Israel for American scholars in the fields of political science, international relations, international law, international economic development, modern history, and Middle East studies. By special arrangement, participants in the inaugural mission (June 22-29) have been invited to guest-post their impressions and assessments. Bruce Jentleson is professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. He is also a member of MESH.

From Bruce Jentleson

Central to our discussions was the debate over force and diplomacy as Israeli strategies, so I’ll focus on that for this post.

Is it the case that the lessons of the last 10-15 years are that force has worked, both as compellence and deterrence, and diplomacy has not? This was the dominant argument we heard from Israeli speakers. While the speaker selection was short of representative, I know from other interactions and reading that this perspective has become more prevalent. It also is a view our American group debated among ourselves.

Four main parts to the argument:

1. The Gaza war was intended to impose substantial costs on Hamas and to deter further attacks on Israel. It achieved both; e.g., attacks from Gaza are down since the war.
2. The same regarding Hezbollah and the 2006 Lebanon war: Look at the northern front and how quiet Hezbollah has been, and how weakened the recent elections showed it to be in Lebanese politics.
3. Oslo didn’t work; Camp David 2000 was another instance of the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity; unilateral withdrawals, both Barak in Lebanon and Sharon in Gaza, gave land but didn’t bring pace; plus the recent stories swirling about Olmert ostensibly offering even concessions on Jerusalem. Arafat was an essentialist; his successors may have more will but lack capacity; Hamas is ideological.
4. The status quo is not great for Israel, but it’s tolerable. Risk aversion, both security and politics, says keep relying on military power. Be sufficiently willing to negotiate to check off that box for the United States and the international community but not much more. Don’t antagonize the political coalition on which your power (read Netanyahu’s) depends.

An alternative analysis:

• Gaza: The evidence is more mixed and uncertain than claimed. On the one hand we were told of how few rockets had been launched, on the other of how there’d been a recent uptick. At minimum, six months is hardly enough of an empirical base on which to attribute durable deterrence success. The criteria for durability is not some out-there notion of the long-term, but it also can’t be so short term as to need to be “serviced” again with anything close to a comparable operation in the next year or two. Moreover, gains made need to be part of a net assessment that also takes into account costs incurred and gains made by the other side. One can see a strategic logic for Hamas by which the price it paid had value as (a) diversionary war, detracting attention from problems of its governance and re-igniting the enemy on which to increase its appeal (so lowering a negative source and increasing a positive one), and (b) playing into Israeli politics in ways that strengthen the Right, which in turn makes for strained relations w/the United States. The net assessment may still come out positive, but less dichotomously.
• 2006 Lebanon War: We do have three years of data, and it is a fact that the northern border has been quieter than in many years. That goes in the plus column, as does the demonstrated capacity to impose costs. But in the negative column: the Israeli military’s failure to prevail in this nonconventional warfare as a deterrence-weakening message; the failure to bring captured soldiers home alive; the political disarray that helped doom the Olmert government; and the further loss of international legitimacy as an instrumental and not just normative matter. Moreover, the causal link to Hezbollah’s June 2009 election performance is questionable. Hezbollah came out of the war strengthened. But it then overplayed its hand by unleashing its militias into Lebanese politics in 2007-08. Then as intervening variables in the run-up to the election, Saudi money for the coalition and, I’d at least postulate, the Obama effect made it more politically legitimate to at least not be anti-American.
• Lessons of Oslo, other diplomacy: George Kennan made the distinction between flaws of execution and flaws in the concept. The former means that the policy could have worked but was done poorly; the latter that it was inherently flawed. Oslo, et al., did have elements of the latter, but also plenty of the former, and on all sides (United States, Israel, Palestinians, others). It didn’t work—but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have worked. What would have happened if Rabin was not assassinated, given his domestic credibility and that he was having at least a degree of success in dealing with Arafat? And if the 1996 election, which Netanyahu won by less than 1 percent amidst the spoilers who got going on both sides, had come out differently? If the Clinton administration had been less accommodating and firmer against both sides playing both sides of the street? In the end, Arafat was the major problem, a Gromyko-like Mr. Nyet. He was never going to be a Mandela, but the essentialist analysis is too straight-line and dismissive of decision points and interactive dynamics along the way. As to Hamas, while it’s shown plenty of essentialism, it’s not clear that even this is fixed; see, e.g., the analysis of Khaled Meshal’s recent speech by Brig. Gen. (ret) Shlomo Brom.
• Deteriorating status quo: The domestic opportunity costs to Israel from the status quo were more graphic to me than ever before. See the economic analysis by Professor Dan Ben-David, Tel Aviv University and head of the Taub Center for Social Policy Research. Walk around and see and feel the rising societal power of the ultra-Orthodox, abetted by continuation of the Palestinian conflict both directly through the political utility of the enemy and indirectly as a distraction from the nation focusing on the threats to its balance of secularism and Jewish identity.
• Shifting regional strategic dynamics? While much is too soon to tell, there are signs that the strategic dynamics in the region may be shifting. Anti-fundamentalism is pushing back on many fronts in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The U.S.-Syria relationship has some traction. Perhaps Iran will come out of the current crisis more flexible. The Saudis and Arab League may be ready to make their peace initiative more than a piece of paper. Don’t know for sure, but the alignment of forces may potentially be more favorable than in a long time.
• Palestinians as a credible peace partner and viable state: This may not be the world’s hardest case for state-building, but it’s up there. Among the many challenges their leadership faces is better synching their maximalist positions on terms of a peace and their more limited capacities as yet to function as a viable state. This is tricky politically as well as in substantive policy terms. It likely will require various roles for various third parties. Plenty of work to be done here: the PA-Hamas talks being run by Egypt, security forces, the economy, lawlessness, spoilers. Not to be underestimated.

I’m still not ready to bet the next mortgage payment (non-subprime) on peace and security in the Middle East. But nothing we saw or heard has been sufficient to counter the Churchillian sense of a peace process still being the worst strategy except for all the others.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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On June 4, U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a much-anticipated address to the world’s Muslims, from a podium at Cairo University. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: Alan Dowty, Michele Dunne, Chuck Freilich, Bernard Heykal, Bruce Jentelson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Mark T. Kimmitt, Martin Kramer, Walter Laqueur, Michael Mandelbaum, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Harvey Sicherman, Philip Carl Salzman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young.

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Michele Dunne :: What President Obama had going for him in this speech was at least the appearance of frankness, laying on the table the areas of difference—terrorism (repackaged as “violent extremism”), Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear proliferation, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, economic development—and giving his view of each one. That approach, along with the requisite expressions of support for Islam as a religion and a civilization, will get him some points.

What the speech did not do was tell us anything much about how his administration will follow up on these issues. The list of deliverables was exceedingly short. The only firm promise was to a pursue a two-state solution to the Palestine issue—which will be extremely difficult to achieve. There were hints of a softer approach to Hamas (now it’s an organization with “support” and “responsibilities” instead of a terrorist group) and perhaps to Hezbollah (”we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments”), but it was unclear how serious that was and whether it would be sustainable in Washington.

If Obama considered “terrorism” a toxic word to be discarded, at least he did not do the same with “democracy.” He stayed on the plane of theory but addressed the issue squarely, not ducking its political aspects, and this was the part of the address that got the most positive reaction from the Egyptian audience. It was the only part of the speech where he actually lectured a bit, issuing a series of “you musts” when it came to what “government of the people and by the people” meant. Frankly it was more than I expected. It was a good start to articulate principles for which the United States stands, but then again, there was no promise of follow-up. What, if anything, will the Obama administration do when the Egyptian government excludes most of the opposition from the next parliamentary elections or when Syria throws a bunch of democracy activists in jail? Obama told us nothing about that. Privately, administration people are saying that Bush promised much on democracy and delivered little, and that Obama plans to do the reverse. Let’s see. We won’t have long to wait.

The women’s rights and economic development sections near the end had a cut-and-paste feel. These are Secretary Clinton’s pet issues, and apparently she is inclined to try to substitute them for democracy and human rights overall in policy and assistance programs. At least that didn’t happen in this speech. But the smallish economic and women’s rights initiatives mentioned created a sort of imbalance. It would have been better either to have Obama say what he was going to do in each of the major areas of the speech or none of them, perhaps saving the microloans for announcement in a fact sheet.

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Bernard Haykel :: I am writing from Riyadh where President Obama was cordially received but has left a bitter aftertaste among many here. His visit is seen as an attempt to get, not to say bully, the Saudi leadership to make concrete and positive gestures toward Israel, over and above the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. Saudis have little desire or willingness to do this because of a widely held view that Israel, especially under its present Likud leadership and after the brutal war in Gaza earlier this year, does not deserve this. A number of Saudis have asked the following question: Why should the Kingdom reward an Israeli leadership that is not even willing to acknowledge the Palestinians’ right to a state? Granting something additional now to Israel for nothing can only help make the Saudi leadership look weak-kneed.

As for Obama’s speech in Cairo, all the Saudis I have spoken to have acknowledged its rhetorical power, but they insist that only facts will make a difference to their assessment of the President’s true intentions.

My own view is that the speech was remarkable for its relative candor on a number of important issues (and for some notable omissions), but I am troubled by its framing which juxtaposes the United States and Islam as two equivalent entities, which they are not. In doing this, Obama has adopted unwittingly the framing of Al Qaeda’s ideology, and this in turn might grant a degree of legitimacy to discussing Islam as a political reality rather than a faith. Surely, it is certain forms of Islamism and not Islam that pose the problem.

The second notable point in the speech is Obama’s analogy between the plight of Palestinians and that of African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow. The context here is Obama’s advice to Palestinians to adopt non-violent means in resisting Israeli occupation. As before, Obama has taken a page from Al Qaeda’s book, in which the alleged humiliation and oppression of Muslims are compared to the tribulations of African-Americans. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two leader, often invokes this same history by drawing on the examples of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers to argue that only violence and rejection can lead to political change, and to convince African-American soldiers to desert the U.S. armed forces.

In short, the framing of the United States’ relationship with the Muslim world as one based on friendship rather than enmity, while superficially and rhetorically laudable, is fraught with difficulties and pitfalls, not least because it can unwittingly give credence to the idea that there might in fact be a clash between the United States and Islam. I can imagine a long-bearded man now smiling in a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

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Josef Joffe :: The problem laid out by President Obama in Cairo is an old one in America’s international relations. It is foreign policy as psychotherapy. The diplomatist/strategist deals with conflicts of interest and the “correlation of forces,” as our Soviet friends used to say. The therapist knows no such clashes, certainly no tragedies—only misunderstandings, fears, and neuroses. Obama-in-Cairo was Esalen-amidst-the-Pyramids. Or as he himself put it: “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.” It is an imaginary conflict, in other words.

There are several issues here. The first is that the therapist does not speak truth but reassurance. Obama recounts how Morocco was the first to recognize the United States in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1796. Unfortunately, the larger, though unmentioned, truth is less reassuring: that the first wars America fought after independence were with the “Barbary Pirates,” the potentates of the Maghreb. To break their nasty habit of selling American hostages for money, the young republic fought intermittently from 1801 to 1815. No misunderstandings here, just the naked clash of our interests against theirs.

A larger untruth is the (implicit) idea that America is at war with Islam, as uttered in the e contrario phrase: “America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.” Of course not. Who ever said so? Only Al Qaeda et al. did—copiously and tirelessly. These folks also keep saying as insistently that they are at war with the “Jews and crusaders,” with the West, and above all, America. Before the President reached Cairo, AQ’s No. 2, Aymal al-Zawahiri, let it be known that Obama’s speech would not at all change the “bloody messages” he was sending to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Therapists make no judgments on truth and falsehood; for them, the process is the purpose. But a process that does not correctly unearth the roots of conflict will invariably run afoul of the realities. Islamist terror will not go away because Obama softly, softly establishes a kind of moral equivalence between the Holocaust and what Palestinians call the Nakba, their loss and flight in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

Nor will the Arab world flock to America’s cause because of all the niceties Obama has bestowed on it. Let it be said, though, that the harsh rhetoric on Israel plus slaps like no-state-dinner for Mr. Netanyahu at the White House have been replaced by the balanced cadences of the Cairo speech: The Israelis have to do this, the Palestinians and Arabs have to do that.

But the chickens have already come home to roost. The hope, a perennial one, obviously is that the Arabs will be so overjoyed by the U.S. manhandling Israel that they will rally to Old Glory en masse, doing America’s bidding throughout the Greater Middle East. This is not how the Mideast works. To make the point, the spokesman of the Egyptian foreign ministry told the New York Times: “We will judge everything by the degree of Israeli commitments, and measures that are taken.”

In so many words: “Mr. President, now that you have pressured the Israelis, we want to see more of it. And more. And then, perhaps, we’ll do you a favor on other matters.” We are back at the oldest game of the Middle East. It is called “Let the U.S. Deliver Israel, Then We Might Start Acting in Our Own Interest.” Obviously, if it were in the Arab interest to push the Palestinians toward peace, and to engage in an alliance of containment and deterrence against Iran, they would have done so. But for lots of reasons, good and bad, the Arabs are not interested. And so the United States will keep weakening its only true ally in the Middle East without reaping any geopolitical fruit from its courtship of Araby.

Alas, a lot of damage will have been done before the United States learns that therapy is not grand strategy and changes course. But one bit of therapeutic advice remains apropos: Never treat your opponents and detractors better than your friends.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama gave a powerful speech in Cairo setting forth his vision of how the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world can be improved. In it, he called for change both in how the United States and its allies view and act toward the Muslim world. But he also called for change in how the Muslim world views and acts toward America and its allies.

Early on in the speech, he pledged “to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” In the very next sentence, though, he insisted that, “the same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America.”

His remarks about how the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq began and about Guantanamo were obviously critical of Bush administration policies. His saying that, “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements… It is time for these settlements to stop,” is an unmistakable call for change in Israeli policy. At the same time, however, Obama made clear that America’s bonds with Israel are “unbreakable.”

And in one of the most important passages of the speech, Obama called for a change in Palestinian behavior toward Israel. “Palestinians must abandon violence,” he stated bluntly. He noted that black people had suffered in America, but that, “it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.” He noted that non-violent resistance had overcome oppression elsewhere too. Non-violent resistance, he implied, would help the Palestinians achieve their goal of an independent state while violent resistance would not.

Later, Obama called for improved Iranian-American relations, but made clear that Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

Regarding the democratization of the Muslim world, Obama stated that this was not something that “can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” On the other hand, he made clear that America wants to see progress toward democracy in the Muslim world, and that this is in the interests of Muslim governments since “governments that protect…rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure.”

Those in the Muslim world who do not want to cooperate with the United States will find—indeed, have already found—reasons to dismiss Obama’s speech. Osama bin Laden dismissed it even before Obama gave it. However, those in the Muslim world who did not like American foreign policy in the past but would like to cooperate with America in the future can find in Obama’s speech an American president who acknowledges their concerns and is willing to work with them.

Obama’s Cairo speech represents a good faith effort to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world. If this does not occur, it will not be for lack of trying on Obama’s part.

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Mark T. Kimmitt :: OK. The long-anticipated “major speech to the Muslim world” is over, and it is being parsed for messages, inferences, policy directions and reactions. The “let me tell you what the President should say next week” crowd is reviewing the text to see if their recommendations were embraced, rejected or reversed. The analysts and pundits on Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and a thousand broadsheets in the region are assessing it to see how it aligns with editorial policy. The President is moving on, rhetorically and physically, to the next key administration challenge, be it North Korea, the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, General Motors, Afghanistan-Pakistan or a host of other high-priority national security issues.

As for the speech, all the right messages were sent out. America is not at war with Islam, we have common interests in fighting violent extremism, Palestine is a problem, a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat, and democracy is a form of human rights. So, let’s push the reset button. Good, practical sound bites that reaffirm U.S. policy and increase our appeal on the street, but there was little in the way of tangible new initiatives or promises of outcomes. Perhaps it was too much to expect, but the speech seemed more of a conversation rather than a commitment.

It’s fine to have a conversation. Perhaps it’s helpful to tell the Muslim world that we will get out of Afghanistan when the job is done, and get out of Iraq by 2012 regardless. Helpful to note that the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. Important to clarify that Iran should have nuclear power, but not nuclear weapons. But what is the administration going to do about this? The only tangible “we shalls” in the speech were easy and low-hanging fruit on education, science and technology, economic development and fighting violent extremists. No specific “we shalls” on Iran, on Palestine, on Gaza, on Syria. Only aspirations and “we seek.” Fine speech, but what’s next?

Was this a speech to guide U.S. policy or enhance U.S. popularity? Will the speech prove to be the catalyst for reform, for moderation, for diplomatic breakthrough or simply words to calm the street? If nothing else, the speech has built up expectations, and expectations are that the United States wants to reset the relationship—and that there will be tangible results from that new relationship. The Muslim world will be looking for outcomes, for a change to the status quo, for breakthroughs in long-standing grievances. The speech raised expectations and the street is looking for results.

Among the billion or so who listened carefully to a well-crafted speech, many are sitting in taxis, sipping coffee in cafes, praying in mosques and arguing in universities. Many if not all of them are applauding the speech and many (if not all) are asking the same question: what’s next?

So, congratulations on a great speech, well-written and well-delivered. It is certain to change more than a few minds about American intentions. But good words and good intentions have a rapidly depreciating value, and will make things worse if these words turn out to be false promises. Time will tell.

It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.

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Martin Kramer :: “Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect more than the Mamluks God, His Prophet, and the Quran.” So spoke Bonaparte when he arrived in Egypt, in a proclamation of July 2, 1798. Substitute “Islam” for Egypt, “we Americans” for I, and “violent extremists” for the Mamluks, and you’ve got the core message of President Obama’s speech.

It’s a very old drill in the annals of “public diplomacy.” Supplementary gestures help. Obama was careful to pronounce the word Quran with the guttural qaf of the Arabic. (Too bad, though, he botched the word hijab.) Unless you’re converting, you can’t say Ich bin ein Muslim, so you come as close as you can. (Barack Hussein Obama—can we finally use his middle name now?—gets closer than most.) Some Muslims are wise to this, and so presumably they will discount it. But the great majority? Who doesn’t love pandering?

I leave it to others to parse the sparse policy pointers in the speech. (Rob Satloff does a nice job of it.) Some of the influences on Obama bubble to the surface. There is the Third Worldism: Muslims are victims of our colonialism (Obama has read Fanon) and the Cold War (has he been reading Khalidi again?) The primacy of the West is over: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” There is the implicit comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans during segregation, a familiar trope (Carter and Condi went for it too). Israel comes across as an anomaly. There is no appreciation of Israel as a strategic asset—its ties to the United States are “cultural and historical,” and thus not entirely rational. (That validates Obama’s other former Chicago colleague, Mearsheimer.) All of this has the ring of conviction—and of a Third Worldist sensibility.

Maybe the most disconcerting line is this one: “We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.” The pretense? This discrediting of liberalism and its universal humanism is the classic stance of the Third Worldist radical. And did you know that the job description of the nation’s leader now includes “my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear”? Perhaps it’s possible to disband CAIR. America now has a president who knows “what Islam is, [and] what it isn’t,” and who even has a mandate to insist on closing “the divisions between Sunni and Shia.” Perhaps an emissary should be sent from Washington to the pertinent muftis and mullahs: the mission would certainly be more congenial than closing divisions of General Motors.

Indeed, not since Bonaparte has a foreigner landed on Egyptian soil and delivered a message of such overbearing hubris. Were I a Muslim, this 6,000-word manifesto would have me worried stiff. This man wants to be my president as much as he is America’s.

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Walter Laqueur :: An excellent speech. Even before it was delivered, Wikipedia included it its list of the greatest speeches ever, a list beginning with the Pericles funeral oration. If a religion has 1.3 billion followers, it was only natural that the emphasis had to be on a new beginning, on mutual interest and mutual trust, on partnership, on peace, on not being prisoners of the past, on breaking the cycle of suspicion, on Muslims having enriched America, on doing away with crude stereotypes, on diplomacy and international consensus, on all of us sharing common aspirations, on listening and learning from each other, on Andalus, algebra and on the 1,200 mosques in America, on all of us being the children of Abraham, on “any world order that elevates one people over another will inevitably fail,” on education and innovation being the currency of the 21st century.

How much of this is genuinely believed? How candid can one (should one) be? I am sure that when the Prince of Wales said a few years ago that the Muslim critique of materialism helped him to rediscover sacred Islamic spirituality, he had never even heard about taqiya and kitman. I do not know the answer to the question; perhaps it was a mixture of the two.

Dissimulation may not be an admirable practice, but it could save lives. I recommend Macaulay’s 1850 essay on Machiavelli, a strong believer in Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare which, freely translated, means that he who does not know to dissimulate has no business to be in politics.

What of the impact of the speech? An unfair question: soft power, however desirable, has its limits. Pericles’ funeral oration did not lead to the resurrection of the dead and there is still much sin in the world despite the Sermon on the Mount.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: President Obama’s Cairo speech continues two venerable traditions of American public life. One arises from the electoral politics of foreign policy. It is customary for the presidential candidate of the out-party to promise more skillful conduct of the country’s relations with the rest of the world, either by adopting different positions—as with candidate Barack Obama’s promise to end American participation in the Iraq war—or by doing better in pursuit of a goal on which all agree.

During the Cold War the standard version of this second tactic was the charge that the incumbent had, through crass insensitivity, botched relations with America’s European allies, which the challenger promised to repair with more adept diplomacy. America’s relations with Muslims served this electoral purpose in the 2008 presidential election, with the challenger promising to improve them by dint not so much of his policies as of his identity. The purpose of the Cairo speech was presumably to deliver on that promise.

Unfortunately, it will not do so. Muslims’ attitudes to the United States will depend on Obama’s policies—that is, on what he does—not on who his father was. Whatever the uses of identity politics within the United States, there is no good reason to suppose that they have any significant effect beyond the country’s borders. As Anne Mandelbaum has observed, Dwight Eisenhower’s German background did not win him approval among Germans during the years, from 1942 to 1945, when he had extensive dealings with them. Nor is it clear why people in Muslim-majority countries should be favorably impressed with the fact that the United States has a president one of whose parents shared their faith. They live, after all, in countries governed, for the most part, by men who by that standard qualify as twice as Islamic as Obama, and whose performances in office have been, to put it generously, unimpressive.

The second political tradition that the speech continues is the perennial overconfidence of all presidents of the United States in the power of their own oratory. Such overconfidence is not surprising. In the United States an individual becomes the most powerful person in the world through his speeches. It is one of the glories of the American political system that a presidential election is, in part, a debating contest. Foreign policy, however, is not. Here again, what is relevant is the fact that what Obama does will shape Muslims’ (and others’) opinion of him and his country, while what he says will not. His impact on Muslims and the countries in which they live will therefore come from the policies affecting them that he devises after words fail him.

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Michael Rubin :: Obama is a gifted orator, one in a generation. By nature of Obama’s background—and the fact that he is not George W. Bush—he has a real chance to change the tone of discussion in the Middle East and among Islamic states. That said, rhetoric isn’t enough. Policy matters. Here, there is cause for concern. The Obama doctrine appears to rest on twin pillars: One is a decision to dispense with demands for accountability, and the second seems to be moral equivalency or cultural relativism.

Both Bush and Obama spoke of Palestine and their desire to see the creation of a state for Palestinian Arabs to live beside Israel. But Bush conditioned U.S. support for Palestine’s independence on a cessation of terrorism. Obama does not. And while he certainly condemned “violence” (perhaps terrorism is too loaded a term for Obama), he implied equivalence between this and the dislocation felt by some Palestinian Arabs.

Obama also cast aside demands for accountability when discussing elections, declaring “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.” This appears to be an allusion to the lack of U.S. support for the Hamas-led government in Gaza. The United States should be under no obligation, however, to befriend or assist governments which run counter to its interests. After all, U.S. foreign aid is not an entitlement. Hamas scrapped—and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt demands the scrapping of—agreements to which their entity and state have already obligated themselves. We should hold them accountable, not say we will embrace everyone.

As for cultural equivalency, I must object to his statement: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” Time and time again, however, it has been the superpower status of the United States which has prevented a far worse world order from taking root, be it in Europe, Asia, or even Latin America. The United States is not equal to Libya, nor should it ever be.

The cultural equivalency also permeated Obama’s discussion of democracy. Backtracking away from democratization as a pillar of policy, Obama said: “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people.” But there are certain norms of good governance. On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, for example, we should not say, “Oh, well: That’s just the way Chinese democracy works.”

Let’s hope for the best but, absent a clear articulation of what the United States stands for and what our vision is, rhetoric will not be enough to make a better, more secure world or build a solid foundation for U.S. relations with Muslim-majority states.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s Cairo speech was Wilsonian. The lofty moral tone, keen detachment (all claims treated equally), and leap-of-faith rhetoric are all there. So is the religious overlay. And as befits the shorter attention span of the 21st century, Obama proposes to remake the world in seven points instead of fourteen, in 55 minutes instead of Wilson’s 99-plus.

As president of a secular democracy, Obama’s choice of location (Mubarak’s Egypt) and audience (a “world” identified only by religion) offered minefields aplenty. He negotiated most of these with admirable dexterity but not always. One paragraph invoked “a partnership between America and Islam,” and then declared that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” This was a bit much. Probably, as Theodore Roosevelt once said about a Wilsonian elocution, “as a matter of fact, the words mean nothing whatsoever.”

Some of the other words do mean something. Obama vigorously asserted the dignity of America’s civil religion, especially freedom of speech, religion, democracy, and women’s rights. He refuted dangerous nonsense about 9/11 and the Holocaust; explained policy in Iraq and Afghanistan; and justified the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coming from Saudi Arabia the day before, he instructed the Arab oil producers not to rely on “what comes out of the ground,” and instead educate their people. Good luck!

Obama’s “no sticks in sight” approach to Iran, including his apology on the Mossadegh affair (Madeleine Albright did this in 1998) was all open hand to which the Iranians thus far have responded with the middle finger. But the President’s framework ought to alarm the Israelis: will a U.S.-Iranian “dialogue” produce a demand that Israel yield its nuclear weapons in exchange for international guarantees that Iran, under international supervision, will not build one?

Obama, as he told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman before the speech, wanted to “speak directly” to the Arab street and persuade them of America’s “straightforward manner. Then at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.” But this is more than a margin call. Obama has straightforwardly distanced himself from Israel, the better to cultivate the Arab coalition, whose leaders are his real target. Can they deliver the Palestinians to a compromise acceptable to Israel? Can they do much to alter the Iranian course? Or is the Arab coalition’s influence, like that of the Arab street, or the world of Islam, only a shadow of its reputation? A historian might say of the Cairo speech that it was a triumph—of hope over experience.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: President Obama uses his bully pulpit in Cairo to urge his vision to the people of the Middle East. That vision is one of commonality based on common traditions and common humanity. The driving force that would motivate this commonality is teleological: a desire for progress. We all want the same things, he argues and urges: peace, prosperity, dignity, education, family, community. If we only look ahead, we shall get along with one another, and go along the path of progress. This is a remarkable post-postmodern rebirth of the 19th-century concept of progress.

But the President does not address the people of the Middle East, but instead addresses Muslims. In doing so, he validates the argument by Islamists that Islam should be the primary identity of the people of the Middle East, and implicitly validates the vision of a new Caliphate. And in focusing on Islam, he must over-communicate virtues and commonalities, and under-communicate problems and differences. Islam, he tells us, is a religion of “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” He goes on to say that “throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

This seems to me rather a whitewash of a dark history. Why, it’s déjà Bush, all over again: Islam is the religion of peace. Indeed, he argues that “one rule… lies at the heart of every religion—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” I suppose we should not be surprised that these formulations are geared to generate positive sentiments, rather than to summarize our knowledge of actual Islamic history, theology, or law.

Several times the President urges listeners to stop looking backward, to leave past grievances aside: “If we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward.” This is a difficult message for Muslims, given their understanding that the golden age of Islam was under Muhammad, who should for all eternity be the model for every believer. Islam under Muhammad is the life to be emulated. A good Muslim always looks back.

The specifics are mixed. The President is strong on “unbreakable” bonds with Israel, and that “Palestinians must abandon violence.” Definite on favoring two states. Strong on condemning Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism, but in the abstract only. Strong on democracy generally speaking. Strong denouncing Iran’s bomb. Weak on Palestinians still in camps in Arab countries. Very mild on women’s rights. Ambiguous on Jerusalem. Wishes a nuclear-free world, but no special emphasis on a nuclear-free Middle East.

Shall the good intentions of the President pave the path to progress?

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Raymond Tanter :: President Obama’s Cairo speech was replete with soaring rhetoric designed to reach out to Muslims around the globe, and particularly those in the Arab world. The President remarked that now is “a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world,” but added:

We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek. A world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s children are respected.

The President can certainly talk the talk regarding outreach to Muslims, but will he walk the walk that the Muslim street wishes to see?

Doing so would require a number of U.S. policy changes to appease the Muslim street, such as pressuring Israel to make unilateral concessions, expanding engagement with Syria without preconditions, accepting an Iranian regime with a uranium enrichment capability, withdrawing forces more quickly from Iraq, halting drone attacks of Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan, and reversing U.S. escalation in Afghanistan.

President Obama was careful to signal that such unrealistic policies would not be forthcoming. He indicated an evenhanded policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute, reaffirmed his commitment to keep Iran from getting the bomb, held to his Iraq timetable, and justified escalation in Afghanistan.

The President’s indications that no major policy reversals would occur clashed with his eloquent rhetoric about a “new beginning” between Muslims and non-Muslims. Without any dramatic policy changes, President Obama’s speech is likely to unfairly raise expectations in the Muslim world, leading to inevitable disappointment.

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Michael Young :: President Obama’s homily in Cairo had much that was interesting in it and much that was vague. That’s the nature of these communications, but several things suggested that Obama wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

In referring to the war in Iraq, the President remarked:

Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.

Indeed. But if Iraqis are better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, what does that tell us about U.S. policy when it comes to supporting democracy and human rights in the Middle East? After all, neither diplomacy nor an international consensus would have ever freed Iraqis from under Saddam’s thumb. So did the United States do the right thing in getting rid of the Baath regime by force? Obama didn’t address this prickly question.

That fuzziness, however, permeated his later discussion of democracy in the region. Obama pointed out: “So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” But then he went on to say that this did not lessen his commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people. Except that “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”

But hadn’t Obama just presumed to know that the Iraq war was ultimately beneficial for the Iraqi people, since he felt that they were better off without Saddam? And weren’t they better off without Saddam because the new system they are living under was imposed on them? And weren’t Obama’s bromides in favor of democracy and democratization not also statements implying that he presumed to know what was best for everyone?

If so, then why did he not just come out and state the obvious: that democracy, openness and pluralism are indeed better for all states, as is respect for human rights. Why did Obama prefer to avoid rocking the boat when it came to autocratic regimes in the region? Not a word was uttered on actual cases of human rights abuses, whether in Egypt, which was hosting him, or in any other part of the Middle East. Clearly, the realist aversion to involving the United States in the domestic policy of the region’s states was on display.

Finally, I was interested in what Obama had to say about the Maronites and the Copts, given my weakness for minorities in the region: “Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld—whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt.”

Yet this advice Obama placed under the rubric of “religious freedom.” Odd, because the problem of minorities in the Middle East is usually more political than religious. What the Copts would like more of is political power, not the freedom to exercise their religion. As for the Maronites, their sense of decline is attached not to the fact that they cannot practice their religion, which they can do without any objection from their Muslim compatriots, but that they feel political power is escaping them.

What do these issues have in common? They lead me to a disconcerting conclusion that Obama has no coherent view of political freedom in the Middle East. He tended to overemphasize religion, while underemphasizing how the United States might address political matters, such as what to do about dictatorial regimes, the major cause of the great trauma he described, namely 9/11; or how to reverse the absence of democracy in the Middle East, in illegitimate states that fail to fulfill the aspirations of their citizens; or what to do about minorities denied political power, Muslim and non-Muslim.

Obama submerged his speech in the holy water of religion, but it is freedom, the failure of the Arab state, and the lack of accountability of regional regimes that are far more central to the dilemmas the Middle East face today. In one word, it is mostly about politics, and on this Obama was too busy being polite to his listeners to raise the difficult questions he promised to raise.

Go to the comments for more from Alan Dowty, Chuck Freilich, Bruce Jentleson, and Michael Reynolds.

“Scholars on the Sidelines” is the headline of an op-ed by Harvard’s Joseph Nye in Monday’s Washington Post. There he notes that the Obama administration has appointed few political scientists to top positions, and predicts a widening of the divide between policymaking and academic theorizing. His Harvard colleague Stephen Walt has echoed the complaint, placing the blame upon scholars who follow what he calls “the cult of irrelevance.” Michael Desch, a Notre Dame political scientist, also has written in the same vein in a new piece entitled “Professor Smith Goes to Washington,” claiming that while Obama may be “depopulating the Ivy League and other leading universities with his appointments,” it’s unlikely the academics can match the influence of the think tanks or overcome the anti-intellectualism that pervades society and government.

The driver of this year’s rehashing of the issue is the promise of the Obama administration; just a few years ago it was the threat of Al Qaeda. Ask Bruce Jentleson now a MESH member, who wrote a similar and much-discussed lament about academic insularity—exactly seven years ago.

Of course, the debate is older than that. I addressed it myself, in an article entitled “Policy and the Academy: An Illicit Relationship?” originally delivered as a lecture in 2002. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the passing of Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), who taught politics at the London School of Economics and whose work has had an abiding influence upon many students of the Middle East, myself included. My subject was a short essay by Kedourie, dating from 1961, entitled “Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit.” I explored (and contested) Kedourie’s principled belief that policy and the academy should not meet, and that the divide benefited them both.

My piece is on the web and many have read it. But now that this debate has resumed, I think it useful to provide access to Kedourie’s own text—a trenchant 1,100 words—which I think speaks rather more forcefully than my synopsis of it. Read his piece first, and only then read my discussion of it. (By the way, the poet he quotes is Eliot; the poem, Gerontion. And yes, Kedourie usually did put “social scientists” in quotation marks.)

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Foreign Policy: A Practical Pursuit
by Elie Kedourie

Foreign policy, it is universally agreed, is a practical pursuit. It is an activity the end of which is the attainment of advantage or the prevention of mischief. Foreign policy, in short, is action, not speculation. Is the academic fitted by his bent, his training, his usual and wonted preoccupations, to take or recommend action of the kind which generals and statesman are daily compelled to recommend or take?

Someone might say, in reply, that academics are the best fitted for this activity. They have, after all, a highly trained intelligence, they are long familiar with the traffic of ideas, and long accustomed scrupulously to weigh evidence, to make subtle distinctions, and to render dispassionate verdicts. Plato, it might be urged, was not far out in his hopes of philosophers becoming kings.

The good academic is indeed as has just been described, but it is not really wise to invoke Plato’s shade, and exalt the scholar to such a high degree. For consider: if the academic is to recommend action here and now—and in foreign policy action must be here and now—should he not have exact and prompt knowledge of situations and their changes? Is it then proposed that foreign ministries should every morning circulate to historians and “social scientists” the reports of their agents and the despatches of their diplomats? Failing this knowledge, the academic advising or exhorting action will most likely appear the learned fool, babbling of he knows what.

It may be objected that this is not what is meant at all: we do not, it may be said, want the academic to concern himself with immediate issues or the minutiae of policies; we want his guidance on long-term trends and prospects; and here, surely, his knowledge of the past, his erudition, his reflectiveness will open to him vistas unknown to the active politician, or unregarded by him. And should not this larger view, this wider horizon be his special contribution to his country’s policies and to its welfare? But this appeal to patriotism, this subtle flattery, needs must be resisted. Here the man of action may be called on in support: it is related of the great Lord Salisbury that presented with a long, judicious, balanced memorandum written by one of his officials, and abounding in wise considerations on the one hand, and in equally sage considerations on the other hand, he impatiently exclaimed: “How well do I know these hands!”

The long view, the balanced view, the judicious view, then, can positively unfit a man for action, and for giving advice on action—which, as has been said, must be taken here and now. The famed academic, Dr. Toynbee, writing his Study of History in 1935 came to the conclusion, on the weightiest and most erudite of grounds, that there was no likelihood of Peking ever again in the future becoming the capital of China! Should he not have remembered the sad and moving confession of Ibn Khaldun—a writer he much admired—that his minute knowledge of prosody unfitted him for the writing of poetry?

What is true of poetry is as true of politics, and an academic’s patriotic duty is not to confuse rulers with long views and distant prospects, for the logic of events seems to take pleasure in mocking the neat and tidy logic of ideas:

Think now [it is a poet who warns us]
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear.

How difficult, therefore, to be wise, except after the event, and how every leap is a leap in the dark! To be wise only after the event is accounted a failing in men of action; but to be wise after the event is a virtue in historians. To leap in the dark requires strong muscles, steady nerves, a taste for adventure, and not too great a fear of the consequences. “I am not responsible for the consequences” Salisbury used to say, and he meant that having acted to the best of his knowledge and judgement, he could not but let the events take their course as the fates in their caprice decreed.

Shall academics then presume to instruct a man how he shall leap? Presumption is the pride of fools, and it ought to be the scholar’s pride not to presume. It is pursuit of knowledge and increase of learning which gives scholars renown and a good name. How then should they, clothed as they are in the mantle of scholarship, imitate this lobby or that pressure group, and recommend this action or that, all the time knowing full well that in politics one is always acting in a fog, that no action is wholly to the good, and that every action in benefiting one particular interest will most likely be to another’s detriment. Scholars, of course, are also citizens, and as such jealous for the welfare and honour of their country. Equally with other citizens they can recommend and exhort, but they should take care that a scholarly reputation does not illicitly given spurious authority to some civic or political stance.

Of what use then are academics? The impatient, mocking question seems to invite the short, derisive answer, which men of action and men of business have not seldom been disposed to give. But the scholar’s existence and activity does not have to be justified by his usefulness. Who, in the first place, shall be the judge of usefulness, who can tell whether the useful will not turn out to be useless and worse, and in the second, a world in which people shall live or die according as they are useful or not is one which men must feel to be totally estranged and hostile. The question therefore cannot be, of what use are academics, but rather what is it that they do. Unlike the earlier question, this one does not plunge the enquirer into the metaphysical depths, and the answer to it is very simple. Academics seek to transmit and to increase learning, one had almost said useless learning—but one does not wish to provoke. Foreign policy they leave to those who make bold to know how to leap in the dark.

First published in The Princetonian, January 4, 1961; republished in Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion (London: Mansell, 1984).

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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On April 6, U.S. President Barack Obama gave an address to the Turkish parliament in Ankara, on the occasion of his first visit to a Middle Eastern country as president. (If you cannot see the embedded video above, click here. The text is here.) In his speech, the President touched on a range of issues related to U.S.-Turkish and U.S.-Muslim relations. The following MESH members responded to an invitation to comment on the speech: J. Scott Carpenter, Michele Dunne, Hillel Fradkin, Adam Garfinkle, Bruce Jentleson, Josef Joffe, Mark N. Katz, Michael Reynolds, Michael Rubin, Philip Carl Salzman, Harvey Sicherman, Raymond Tanter, and Michael Young. Soner Cagaptay’s assessment is added in the comments.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: There were many, including me, who were worried that President Obama’s speech before the Turkish parliament would send the wrong signal to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development (AKP) government, by embracing Erdoğan’s conceit that Turkey is somehow a leader of the “Muslim World” and a major player in the Middle East. Our worry, it turns out, was unjustified—for the most part.

In the speech, the President struck mostly high notes. Symbolically he linked Turkey strongly to Europe by traveling there as part of his European trip. He spoke of Turkey as the secular, democratic nation-state that it is, even as he challenged it to move forward on religious freedom and minority rights. His formulation that Turkey is a country where the Muslim faith is practiced was merely… accurate. When the President mentioned Turkey’s desire to play a role in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, he did so only after referencing the more proximate conflicts of Nagorno-Karabakh and still-divided Cyprus. Importantly, in a thinly-veiled reference to Hamas, the President called on the Turkish government to “reject the use of terror, and recognize that Israel’s security concerns are legitimate.”

There were a couple sour notes, however. When the President delivered the requisite reminder that the United States is not, I repeat, not at war with Islam, he once again invoked the tired bromide of the so-called “Muslim World.” When will senior U.S. policy makers stop reinforcing Al Qaeda’s narrative about a mythical Muslim world? The President also continued to avoid the “D” word (democracy). Prosperity, instead, is the word of the day. Finding ways to improve education expand healthcare, boost trade and investment without improved transparency and accountability will be a neat trick which I look forward to hearing more about. The President promised more detail in “coming months.”

Whatever the Turkish people might have thought about the speech, Erdoğan’s body language suggested he did not like it. At all. The fact that Obama tracked substantively with President Bush on Iran and the Palestinian issue was clearly painful for him to hear. More painful still probably was the President’s wise decision to skip the Khatami-inspired Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Istanbul. The AKP were desperately hoping to rope the President into this muddleheaded effort to divide “civilizations” into religious camps. Actions always speak louder than words.

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Michele Dunne :: In President Obama’s address to the Turkish parliament, he made a few basic statements—inter alia, “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” “The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security,” and “The United States strongly supports Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European union”—that were, if not revolutionary, at least useful in their clarity. I will leave the evaluation of what Obama said on internal Turkish affairs to those who specialize in that, but what he said about specific reforms inside Turkey seemed to reach a satisfying level of detail, and he made several general statements—e.g., “freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state,” and “an enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people”—that encouraged further movement on these issues.

What was peculiar about Obama’s speech, however, was his strong emphasis on democracy (mentioned at least eight times) as the tie that binds the United States and Turkey in friendship, and yet his unwillingness to apply the same principle in the latter part of the speech to U.S. relations with the Muslim world. There, the “D” word was banned. Aside from the usual platitudes about “mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama promised to promote the welfare of people in the Muslim world only in socioeconomic terms: education, health care, trade and investment. No objections to that, Mr. President, but what’s the plan for working with countries where the state stands squarely in the way of citizens getting those things? And that would apply to quite a few states in the Muslim world.

The President and Secretary Clinton can only go around the world apologizing for the Bush administration for so long. The Obama administration needs its own foreign policy—one that is neither Clinton-warmed-over nor anything-but-Bush—and one that takes account of current conditions. Those conditions include much more political ferment and stronger demands for civil and human rights than existed in the Middle East a decade ago. So promoting democracy and human rights will need to be part of that foreign policy, including in the Muslim world. It’s getting to be about time to face that, and Turkey would have been an excellent place to start.

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Hillel Fradkin :: Towards the close of his speech to the Turkish parliament, President Obama declared “as clearly as I can” that the “United States is not at war with Islam.” He sought to reinforce that message by implying that our military actions within the Muslim world, in past and future, have only the object of “rolling back a fringe ideology” and the terrorism represented most prominently by Al Qaeda—an effort he regards as shared by Muslims themselves.

Much attention has and will be paid to this declaration—it is already being referred to as an “olive branch”—even if it stated the obvious. The United States is not in fact at war with Islam and never has been, as President Bush made clear by declaring Islam to be a religion of peace but a few hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001. For after all, why would we Americans be at war with a peaceful religion? Moreover, although our soldiers are presently engaged in fighting some Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, we are fighting side by side with other Muslims. A statement of these facts would have enhanced Obama’s declaration.

But perhaps the obvious must sometimes be stated, and Obama is perhaps in a better position to make it clear by virtue of a fact he mentioned in his speech: he is among those Americans “who have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.” Perhaps this will put this issue to rest so long as such misunderstanding as exists is not willful. At all events, and as Obama implied, the future of peaceful and fruitful relations between the United States and the Muslim world may depend less on the United States than on the approach that the Muslim world takes to terrorism of all varieties—including anti-Israeli terrorism—and the ideologies which inform them.

But Obama’s speech was not primarily addressed to the Muslim world, but to the Turkish people and its government. In the long run, it is the substance of his remarks to them which is likely to be more important than his declaration—and not only for U.S.-Turkish relations but for the wider Muslim world. Here he placed less stress on Turkey’s Muslim heritage than its republican heritage as the first and so far the most successful Muslim-majority republic.

As Obama almost indicated directly, this emphasis comes against the background of recent concerns that Turkey under the present leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) might be weakening in its fidelity to that heritage, turning away from its long-standing alliances with Western countries—including the United States—and even moving closer to radical Islamic actors such as Sudan and Hamas. Obama’s remarks, although gently stated, essentially urged Turkey to renew its historic commitment to republican democracy and reaffirm its role as the place where East and West “come together.”

Obama referred explicitly to the heroic statesmanship of Atatürk, George Washington and perhaps above all of Abraham Lincoln. In light of his appeal to Lincoln, one might say that Obama invited Americans, Turks and Europeans to listen to the “better angels of our nature,” and urged Turks in particular to rededicate themselves to the propositions upon which modern Turkish history and success have been built. This was an important message to deliver, and it can only be hoped that it will be well received. That hope may however embrace not only Turkey but the wider Muslim world, which might profit from the example of Turkish republican success both now and hopefully in the future. In the long run, the reception of that message will be more important to American-Muslim relations than the declaration that the United States is not at war with Islam.

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Adam Garfinkle :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Atatürk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted ever since 1924. This comes at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any president who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims now have heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts” (as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting), it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off the White House website, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bona fide clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have written a better speech for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh-so-many missed opportunities in that speech—so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) which apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people had been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

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Bruce Jentleson :: Good speech. Got both the music and the words right. Doesn’t solve all problems in U.S.-Turkish relations, or all issues on the U.S. agenda of which Turkey is part, but does amount to a good start on both separating from the most counterproductive parts of the Bush policy and defining the key elements of an Obama policy.

Obama struck two key notes in getting the music right. One was his emphasis on mutual respect. This is the same phrasing he used in his inaugural address and in his video message to Iran. True, the respect mantra often gets invoked in the Muslim world as cover for less defensible positions. But its genuine resonance is even truer. Meeting people where they are, rather than where one may think they should be, is more likely to lead to being able “to build on our mutual interests, and rise above our differences,” as Obama put it, than lecturing and hectoring. Those self-styled hard-headed powerites who like to deride this sense of mutuality would do well to remember how the strength of anti-Bush sentiment in the Turkish parliament blocked Turkish military cooperation with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The other was the line about not being at war with Islam. This needed to be said. Sure, Bush made any number of disclaimers of his own. But they didn’t stick. In saying that trust was strained “in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced,” Obama was recognizing reality. That’s strategic, not self-flagellatory as some neo-cons would have it.

On the substance he also got much right. He spoke to Turkey’s multi-faceted role as an ally, not just on terrorism or any one particular issue but more broadly on a range of global, regional and bilateral issues. He gave Turkey credit for its diplomacy in the Israel-Syria talks, while stressing active U.S. re-engagement in the Arab-Israeli peace process. He supported Turkey’s accession to the European Union. He also pushed a bit on internal democratic reform and rule of law. He approached the Armenia issue with more of an eye to what the two countries need to do together than what the lobby back home expects of him.

Much remains to be done. Music and words are fine, but action must follow. But not bad for a start.

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Josef Joffe :: “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” This is one of those sentences which are so right that nobody could disagree—like “I love jamocca ice cream” or “The sun sets in the west.” Of course the United States is not at war with Islam, and never will be. If you want to push it, you might say: a part of Islam is at war with America, and for that there is plenty of evidence—from 9/11 to an endless slew of statements made by Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri or a bunch of lesser imams and mullahs or by various leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, not to speak of those representatives of the “Arab street” we get to see on Al-Jazeera.

Why would the president affirm what was undeniable in the first place? To make a gesture, of course. As he did with this sentence: “I also want to be clear that America’s relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

Again, this is as “surprising” (or if you want to be catty: vacuous) as the “we are not at war” sentence. Whoever based America’s relationship with the umma on “opposition to terrorism?” Not Bush ‘43—not, he, the coddler of Saudi Arabia, the financier of Egypt, the ally of Jordan’s Abdullah, the guarantor of the Gulfies. How patient, to the point of self-effacement, was W. with Turkey, after Ankara betrayed him in the run-up to the Iraq war? And who saved the Muslim Bosnians from the rage of the Serbs? The U.S. Air Force in the days of Clinton.

“We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground.” Does this mean we did not listen carefully to our Arab allies, paying over-sensitive respect to their fence-sitting and their mumbly caveats? Here Obama resorts not to belaboring the obvious, but to the oldest (liberal) tradition of American foreign policy. There are no clashes, no interests, no conflicts—just “misunderstandings.” And if we listen hard and patiently enough, these “conflicts” will just go poof.

Of course, these are not the ways of international politics, where collisions and conflicts are real, where the measure is not goodness or careful listening, but the power and the will that—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—backs up diplomacy.

Especially in the Hobbesian universe that is the Islamic Middle East—say, from the Levant to the Hindu Kush—homily will get you nowhere. Let’s hope the 44th president of the United States is not like Jimmy Carter who took four years to learn about the nasty ways of the world—who preached in the beginning that we should lose our “inordinate fear of communism” only to be rewarded by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and who let Khomeini come to power only to be repaid with the 444-day humiliation of the embassy hostage crisis.

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Mark N. Katz :: President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament was designed to appeal not just to the Turkish public, but also to the broader Muslim world. In it, Obama certainly struck many positive notes. His administration is for improved Turkish-American and Muslim-American relations. His administration also seeks peace or improved relations between Turkey and Armenia, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and Syria, among others. His administration supports Turkey’s admission to the European Union.

Indeed, Obama signaled that America is willing to work with all parties in the Muslim world except the terrorists. He called for the United States to work with Muslims and non-Muslims alike against them. The only two terrorist movements that he mentioned by name, though, were the PKK and Al Qaeda. He made no mention of the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah, among others. By not describing them as terrorist, Obama has certainly opened the door—and perhaps even raised the expectation—that he is willing to work with them.

The audience applauded when Obama said, “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” His next sentence—”In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical not just in rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject, but also to strengthen opportunity for all its people”—appears to be more an expression of hope than a statement of fact. For unfortunately, there is widespread support in the Muslim world for non-democratic movements that engage in terrorism. Many Muslims instead see groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Taliban as legitimate “national liberation” movements.

What Obama may soon find is that it is going to be extremely difficult for the United States to appeal to the broader Muslim world and to fight terrorist groups within it simultaneously. The Bush administration at least recognized that this was a dilemma and attempted to resolve it by recognizing the need for democratization (even if it did not push very hard for this in many Muslim countries). But Obama’s statement that “Turkey’s democracy is your own achievement. It was not forced upon you by any outside power,” appears to be a strong signal that his administration does not share even the Bush administration’s recognition that the United States can and should do something to promote democratization in the Middle East.

Obama’s hopes for improved relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world are laudable. But unless public opinion in the Muslim world stops supporting non-democratic political movements, or these movements undergo a democratic transformation, it is doubtful that the improved relations he hopes for can be achieved.

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Michael Reynolds :: President Obama demonstrated in Turkey the talent that has distinguished him at least since his tenure as head of Harvard’s Law Review: namely, the ability to play the role of reconciler between otherwise seemingly irreconcilable sides. The best example of this was his ability to touch on the question of the Armenian genocide in his speech to the Turkish parliament in such a way as to win applause from the parliamentarians as well as praise from one of the leading advocates of Turkish recognition of genocide.

Obama’s charisma extended beyond the parliament. Even the thousands of leftist protesters who declared Obama to be merely a new face for an old American imperialism felt compelled in interviews to concede that, yes, Obama himself comes across as intelligent, affable, and appealing. Posters showing a cartoon Uncle Sam with Obama’s face superimposed recalled the famous New Yorker magazine’s spoof of Obama dressed in a turban, albeit with precisely the opposite point: far from being a secret Al Qaeda sympathizer, Obama represents merely a new face for an old American imperialism.

Obama’s message of humility, patience, and charity thus left a generally positive impression in Turkey. Needless to say, however, articulating a vision wherein conflicts are resolved through mutual and sincere compromise is easier said than achieving that vision. Obama has not yet indicated publicly to what extent he is willing to use American power, positive as well as negative, to push the resolution of the Middle East’s multiple conflicts.

Another thing that that struck me was this statement made by Obama in support of Turkey’s EU candidacy: “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith—it is not diminished by it.” It is a quintessentially American assertion. The sentiment behind it is, indisputably, appealing on the most obvious level. But one has to wonder what citizens of the European Union, regardless of their stance on Turkey’s EU candidacy, think when the President of the United States of America makes declarations about what constitutes Europe’s fundamental interests.

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Michael Rubin :: There are certain points every U.S. official should make upon visiting Turkey. President Obama did his homework and delivered them. He is correct when he declares, “Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And Turkey and the United States must stand together—and work together.” Obama is right to highlight Turkey’s EU accession ambitions as well as the reforms accomplished over the past several years. And he successfully tiptoed through the political minefield of the Armenian genocide debate.

However, Obama also broke new ground, not all of it positive. For example, Obama stated, “The United States will continue to support your central role as an East-West corridor for oil and natural gas.” But how can Obama expect to pressure Iran to accede to its international obligations when Turkey’s State Minister Kürşad Tüzman seeks to raise bilateral trade with the Islamic Republic to $20 billion? (It was just $1.3 billion when the AKP took power.)

And while diplomatic nicety is the bread-and-butter of speechwriters, in the case of Obama’s reference to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it can have cost. Here his comments were infused with moral equivalency which is especially dangerous given Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s embrace and, indeed, endorsement of Hamas. Obama could have sent a positive message, especially in a country like Turkey which has suffered so much terrorism, had he reinforced that idea explicitly that democracies must stand against terrorism and that no political agendas can legitimize terrorism. Obama drew equivalence between Al Qaeda and the PKK; he should have added Hamas to the mix. Let us hope that, before Obama embraces Erdoğan as a true partner, he becomes aware of the Turkish Prime Minister’s endorsement of Al Qaeda financier Yasin al-Qadi.

Rhetoric is easy, but can be ephemeral. It is easy to say “We will be respectful, even when we do not agree,” but the President of the United States should never sacrifice the values of free speech or expression in order to protect the sensitivity of anyone who might take insult. To compromise fundamental values is a slippery slope; we should not go down the path of Europe. Nor should Obama speak of the Islamic world. He should recognize the true diversity of Muslim peoples, and not seek to impose a unitary identity upon them.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Will President Obama, even with his Muslim middle name, have any greater luck than President George W. Bush reassuring the Muslim world of the good will and good intentions of the United States? He goes farther, saying that “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better.” Along the same line, addressing Turkey’s application to the EU, he argues that “Europe gains by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.” In fact, the benefits of Islam, both in history and prospectively in the EU, are highly contested, but the Turks and Muslims more broadly probably welcomed these sentiments.

The President says that the United States is not and can never be at war against Islam, that “our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.” Here the President asserts a division between the moderate majority of Muslims and the minority “fringe” of jihadis—oops, I mean “terrorists”—not to be specified further. This may be a distinction without as much of a difference as we, and the President, might hope. If the President says it enough, maybe his Muslim audience will come to believe it.

The President’s approbation of Turkey and its recent legal measures was clear, while he urged its leaders to continue along the line of diversity and pluralism, particularly in regard to the Kurds (but not the PKK), and the Orthodox Christians, as well as to resolve differences and improve relations with Armenians. At the same time, he stressed the secular nature of the Turkish constitution, and made no mention of the Islamist—I mean Islamic—party in government.

President Obama took a hard line on Iran, focusing not on cooperation in regard to Iraq and Af/Pak, but on Iran’s movement toward nuclear weapons. He offers a stark choice to Islamic Republic: “Iran’s leaders must choose whether they will try to build a weapon or build a better future for their people.” No hints about what may follow the manufacture of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

They say that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it, first as campaign promises, then as foreign policy. So it is with Palestine. In spite of much good advice from MESH prior to the President’s ascension, he is determined to achieve what so many, with so much effort, have failed to achieve: “In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis, and people of good will around the world.” (Emphasis added.) I do not know which Palestinians the President has been speaking to, but neither Hamas nor Fatah will recognize Israel, and the preferred goal of most Palestinians appears to be a different two-state solution: Palestine and Jordan.

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Harvey Sicherman :: President Obama’s speech at the Turkish parliament gave ample evidence of his gift for allowing his audience to see themselves in him. Thus, he spoke winning words to those advocating the democratic Kemalist Turkey of the West. But those who wanted to “reorient” (literally) Turkey toward the East could also find comfort in references to Ankara’s mediation of regional conflicts and imperial Muslim past. Kemalism, of course, burns the bridge to the East. And the current Turkish government is suspected by its opponents of seeking to burn the bridge to the West. Nevermind; Obama levitated above this contradiction with the crowd-pleasing conclusion that “Turkey’s greatness lies in your ability to be at the center of things.” Gifted rhetoric to be sure.

In the wake of Presidential parades, a clean-up crew (usually the unfortunate Secretary of State) must collect the policy. Three specifics:

1. RESET: To use the blackberry-proficient President’s favorite phrase, he wants a renewal of U.S.-Turkish cooperation. On the most neuralgic item—the Kurds—Obama pledged “our support” against the PKK while restating that the new Iraq should not be a danger to its neighbors (i.e. no independent Kurdistan). He advocated Turkish entry to Europe (a poke at France and Germany) and swallowed whole in public his previous view of the Armenian genocide, which he consigned to the historians.
2. I’m coming your way: Obama notified Israel’s new government not to quarrel over the two-state solution, “the road map and Annapolis… a goal that I will actively pursue as President of the United States.”
3. I feel your pain: Ankara was another installment in a campaign to change the American image, this time for Muslims. Obama declared (as had Mr. Bush) that the United States was not “at war with Islam.” He tried manfully to lift the American-”Muslim World” relationship out of the terrorist focus through two devices: a respectful search for common ground and his personal experience of Muslims in the family. This, too, was cunningly designed to sway his audience: I am not one of you but I am close enough to know you, a near relative as it were. And, of course, “we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith…” Although variations on the theme were also uttered by his predecessor, the President can count on amnesia, and his own striking example, to change the image. But does this really matter? And is Obama not raising expectations of impossible comity with a “Muslim World” at war with itself and gripped by the grievance culture besides?

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Raymond Tanter :: In tennis, when confronting a choice between hitting the ball cross-court or down the line, “Solve the riddle by going up the middle!” Like the tennis analogy, the visit of President Obama to Turkey is a search for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

One school of thought: Turkey’s harsh response to Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should prompt the NATO alliance to reconsider Turkey’s commitment to the global struggle against radical Islam. Because such “Islamism” is priority number-one for NATO, and because Ankara holds an incompatible view of the threat, consider removing Turkey from the alliance.

When Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen rose as consensus candidate for NATO Secretary General, Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan raised objections. Rasmussen had been prime minister when the cartoons were published and refused to censor the newspapers in which they ran. Rasmussen was cleared for the NATO post after negotiating with Turkish President Abdullah Gül and stating: “I consider Turkey a very important ally and strategic partner, and I will cooperate with them in our endeavors to ensure the best cooperation with Muslim world.” Obama’s apt intervention to help devise language acceptable to the parties allowed for the appointment of Rasmussen and typifies the President’s approach of searching for a middle ground between opposing points of view.

A second school: Turkey’s strategic position—the second-largest NATO-member army; borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran; a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan; and Europe’s sixth-largest economy—requires greater outreach and integration of Turkey into Europe.

Accordingly, Washington should take a lead role in promoting Turkish accession to the European Union to overcome French objections. Enhanced bilateral relations would include expanding the economic component of U.S.-Turkey relations and promoting more collaboration between mid-level military officers. To overcome religious tension, the United States would no longer treat Turkey as a “Muslim country” and more as a European country.

The most prudent course for the Obama administration is the middle path between these two extremes, a road the President is beginning to take. Indeed, Turkey is too important an ally to alienate with even the suggestion that the country might be removed from NATO. But enthusiastic engagement should depend on the degree to which Turkey is on the same page as the rest of NATO regarding the threat of radical Islam.

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Michael Young :: As I read President Obama’s comments to the Turkish parliament on Monday, I couldn’t help but think of Egypt.

Under the conditions prevailing during much of the past 25 to 30 years, his speech would have been one that, in its references to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also at the highly symbolic moment of Obama’s first contact with the Middle East, would have been made before the Egyptian parliament. Instead, the U.S. president chose a non-Arab state as the venue for his first major address to the region and the Islamic world.

One wonders how Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak reacted when he heard Obama say: “The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security. And like the United States, you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the Palestinians. So now, working together, we must not give into pessimism and mistrust.”

Surely, he felt that someone had gently bumped him back into the line. Wasn’t Egypt the traditional mediator between Israelis and Palestinians? If your hunch is that this gives us a sense of the thorough marginalization of the Arab countries compared to their non-Arab periphery, particularly states like Turkey and Iran, but also Israel, then your hunch comes very late. Whether it was in his passages on Iran, Iraq, or terrorism, and even in his appeal to the Muslim world, Obama not once mentioned Egypt or Saudi Arabia, though he did mention their rival, Syria, just once.

Remember, in 1990 it was Egypt and Saudi Arabia that were the cornerstones (if you could call them that) of the Arab mobilization against Iraq when Saddam Hussein ordered his soldiers into Kuwait. When the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended in 1995, it was Egypt that led the Arab effort to create a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East (and failed). Throughout the 1990s, Egypt was the go-to place to talk about Palestinian-Israeli issues, and when Egyptians were the victims of Islamist violence during the 1990s, it was the go-to place to hold anti-terrorism summits, for example the one at Sharm al-Sheikh in 1996.

That Obama mentioned these topics, and others, in Ankara did not mean that it is time to write Egypt’s obituary. But with Mubarak now an old man, still sitting atop a political system seemingly incapable of renewing itself in pluralistically invigorating ways, and with no end in sight to the Saudi gerontocracy, it is not surprising that Obama should have struck his highest notes in a country that is of the region but not quite in it—and therefore untainted by its irrepressible decline. The United States will continue to ally itself with Arab states to contain Iran, but as Obama made clear in his speech, and in his diplomatic initiatives in recent weeks, he relies much more on countries like Turkey and Russia to act as hooks on which to hang any international effort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program.

Obama sent a kind word to the world’s Muslims, and surely many in the Arab world applauded his lines. But what he was really telling them, intentionally or not, is that their region is changing, and it’s changing in ways that may soon turn the Arabs into secondary characters in their own narrative, because their regimes simply seem unable to change.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Peter Rodman, a member of MESH, passed away on Saturday. I met Peter in 1980 in Santa Monica. I was very junior, he had already worked at the highest levels in government, and was just back from a long trip. But he immediately joined into a serious conversation and worked to include me in it. This seriousness and decency would be visible to me for the next 25 years. In Washington, no matter how high he rose, or what difficulties he faced, he kept the human qualities that made him admirable. He will be sorely missed.

Remembrances are invited from colleagues.

“The sober assumption that Middle Eastern instability is today endemic has found little favour either in Britain or in America. The prevalent fashion has been to proclaim the latest revolution as the herald of a new day, and the newest turbulence as the necessary and beneficent prelude to an epoch of orderliness and justice.

“The meliorism of western liberals, the activist categories and the hopeful concepts of their political science go far to explain such an attitude, as also their conviction that a stable, universal peace will ensue only when the world is composed of democratic and progressive nation-states. Whatever the truth of this dogma, it is not one which a statesman should entertain, and indeed it is irrelevant to him whether the events with which he has to cope are milestones on a road leading somewhere, or mere variations on an eternal theme eternally repeated.

“The ultimate significance of social and political change, and the remote consequences of action, are dim and uncertain. The power of chance, the accident of personality, the ritual of tradition, and the passions of men are always at work to mock benevolence and denature its contrivances. It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests. They must not cumber themselves with historical dogmas, or chase illusions in that maze of double talk which western political vocabulary has extended over the whole world.”

Elie Kedourie, “The Middle East and the Powers,” Chatham House Version and other Middle-Eastern Studies, 1970.

From Charles Hill

I talked with Elie Kedourie almost twenty years ago, when he was nearing the end of his days and had come to visit the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In my view, no wiser head has ever spoken on the endlessly tangled and violent history of the Middle East.

This quotation from his essay on “The Middle East and the Powers” could stand as a definitive pronouncement on the American diplomatic and foreign policy approach to the region across recent decades during which the United States saw itself as the indispensable manager of the “Peace Process.”

One reason for what Kedourie called the “meliorism of western liberals” simply has been that dimension of American national character which has proved resistless to the lure of “problem solving” in the belief that all peoples everywhere want the same things we want and given a fair chance would eagerly seize the opportunity to turn themselves into good neighbors, resolving their local feuds and cooperating with the larger outside world. No American president has been able to sit still when such a prospect has beckoned.

Of course there has been a second propellant of this approach: the diplomatic community often labeled as “Arabists.” This group comprises a set of sub-groups ranging from entrenched opponents of Israel committed to the position that the Jewish State should never have been permitted to come into existence and recognized as a state in the international system, to those who have remained convinced that a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict has all along been the one and only key to peace, progress, and harmony all across the Middle East, to those who see primarily a human rights “tragedy” involving a muscle-bound Israeli bully pummeling a helpless Palestinian refugee population in ways that damage the former more than the latter. Taken together, all these varieties of “Arabism” have greatly enhanced the project of the Arab regimes to propagandize and subsidize their own populations into an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, anti-American frenzy that draws their ire away from the oppressions and depredations of the Arab regimes themselves.

Third are the American statesmen who, from one angle of vision, might appear to adhere to Elie Kedourie’s view that “It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests.” But even these policy-makers found cause to conduct American diplomacy in ways difficult to distinguish from lesser and obviously tendentious officials. Henry Kissinger stressed the importance of maintaining stability and balance in the region, an approach not to be lured into dreams of major, epochal breakthroughs. But Kissinger too considered that at least periodic efforts to focus on and try to push forward an Arab-Israeli negotiating track were essential to his larger “Realist” strategy. George Shultz was the exemplar of the belief that America’s philosophy is Pragmatism. Within this intellectual context Shultz recognized that “nothing is ever settled” either in Washington or in the Middle East. Yet he too was always ready to take up one or another perceived opening in the “peace process,” on the purely pragmatic reasoning that “it’s necessary to be seen to be actively engaged in peace-making; when nothing appears to be going on, the situation region-wide rapidly deteriorates.”

So all this would seem to validate Elie Kedourie’s “sober assumption” that Middle Eastern instability is endemic, and that “It is enough for practical men to fend off evils” rather than “chase illusions”—even though no practitioners of statecraft ever seem to be capable of following that advice.

So Kedourie-ites have, with much justification, taken the position that, as far as the wider world is concerned, the Middle East has been, is, and will continue to be, “the bad part of town,” and therefore that the best approach toward the region is to seek to “manage” and contain it and, above all, never to press forward in the hope of achieving a rapid breakthrough or even of bringing some form of slowly progressing change. To try to do so, they suggest, runs terrible risks of inciting even greater violence launched by those who will cite their frustration with yet another failure to deliver on heightened expectations.

But a new factor has to be considered. Simply put, it is that the Middle East, the bad part of town, has so deteriorated that its pathologies are being spat out into other regions of the world, through tactics of mass terrorist slaughter and ever-spreading cultural and religious intimidation—accompanied of course by vast petro-wealth and a radical ideology that proposes to overthrow and replace the established international state system.

So it seems that the approaches of Realism or Pragmatism, even were they to prove able to follow Elie Kedourie’s advice to eschew Meliorism, are not sufficient to deal with the new magnitude of this danger. President Bush’s post-9/11 strategy to try to bring about the “transformation of the Greater Middle East” through, inter alia, the use of major military power, pressures for political reform from democratization to just plain “good governance,” working for changed information and communications standards, offering cultural exchanges, imposing targeted sanctions, fostering integration into the global economy, arguing for women’s rights and, to be sure, seeing a necessity to try to include the Israel-Palestinian confrontation in this overall strategy, amounts to an historic shift in American policy necessitated by an historic expansion of the threat to world order posed by the malignancies of the Middle East.

The question then seems to be: If not this, then what?

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