If you put yourself in the position of, say, the political counsellor of the British Embassy in Washington and you were required to send in a pre-Obama-in-Cairo speech analysis, you could draw upon a close analysis of Obama’s words and those of his Middle East team over the past ten days to say something like this:

1. The first task that Obama has set for himself is to “regain the trust” of the Muslim world. That requires deeply felt expressions of respect, an attitude of humbleness, with apologies for the wrongdoings and arrogance of the president’s predecessors, and “listening.” This phase has largely been completed. The Arab regimes in particular are satisfied with this new U.S. approach, especially because it has legitimated the propaganda they have produced for their own people about American iniquities over the decades.
2. In addition, President Obama has enshrined the phrase “The Muslim World” in American foreign policy. Contrary to the late Professor Edward Said, who never let an opportunity slip by to denounce any American official who would use such a reductionist phrase to apply to such a multi-various reality as Islam, President Obama has re-defined the term so as to convey an understanding that The Muslim World (the Umma) is an alternative to the international state system. This has put in place the foundation for a new relationship of trust between these two, mutually respectful world systems.
3. Next, of course, is to place the United States in a position of “even-handedness” which so many friends of peace in the region—Europeans, American editorialists, UN officials, professors, etc.—have called for over these many years. In this regard, one anomaly stands out: Jewish settlements. The United States will make an absolute settlements freeze the unconditional requirement for future good relations between Washington and “Tel Aviv.” And this of course will cement the new U.S. achievement of mutual trust between The Muslim World and that other international order led by the United States.
4. On the basis of this, the United States can move next to address, diplomatically and without senseless threats or harsh language, the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The new level of mutuality naturally will dictate that all parties in the Middle East adhere to the same goal, which the United States at a later stage will reveal to be universal agreement to turn the region into a “Nuclear Weapons Free Zone” such as that established decades ago for Latin America by the Treaty of Tlatelolco. The first step in this achievement will be Israel’s declaration of its possession of nuclear weapons and its willingness to have them inspected and destroyed by the IAEA.
5. With such positive momentum well underway, the United States may confidently turn to the final steps to end the Israeli-Palestinian problem. This will take the form of the Arab regimes and Iran prevailing upon Hezbollah and Hamas to turn themselves from non-state, anti-state actors into centrally significant participants in their respective states of Lebanon and Palestine. Negotiations between Palestine and Israel will then be relatively easy to wrap up in a short period of time, probably before the end of President Obama’s first term in office.

In the latest issue of The American Interest, March/April 2008, Itamar Rabinovich, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, former president of Tel Aviv University, former head of the Dayan Center, current visiting professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a member of the The American Interest editorial board, takes on the Mearsheimer/Walt phenomenon. That is to say, he is not reviewing the book so much as the various reviews of the book, the reaction of the authors to the reviews, and so on. So if a book is a one-dimensional intellectual object, and a review is a two-dimensional intellectual object, and authors’ reactions to reviews a three-dimensional intellectual object, then what Rabinovich has done aspires to be truly Einsteinian in nature.

I will not take time here to relate or summarize his narrative. I want only to note that, of all the many reviews and discussions about this book and its precursor essay and “working paper,” Rabinovich’s is the only one to have taken the book’s argument to its logical apex, to wit: If, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, the real variance in U.S. Middle East policy is explained by U.S. domestic politics, then a book like theirs should have a significant impact on that policy. But it isn’t, so it hasn’t. And it won’t. Point, set and match, thank you very much.

There is plenty to admire in Rabinovich’s essay, although, as its editor, I confess to a natural bias in thinking so. But the “test” he has devised for the book’s claims, relying on the book’s very own thesis, is, I think, noteworthy. Ecclesiastes tells us (more than once) that there is nothing new under the sun. At times like this, however, I’m not so sure.

MESH invites its members to comment on Rabinovich’s concluding paragraphs:

[I]t is harder to make a realist case for the U.S.-Israeli relationship today than it was during the Cold War. At that time, Israel’s role as a strategic asset was clear, if not to off-shore balancers like Mearsheimer and Walt, then to every American President since John F. Kennedy. Israel and the United States had the same enemies—the Soviet Union and its radical Arab allies—with the conservative Arab regimes stuck awkwardly in the middle. Today things are altogether more muddled, so a more plausible case can be made that Israel is a drag on U.S. security interests and that radical Muslims only hate and attack America because of its support for Israel….

Clearly, the end of the Cold War and the rise of new challenges require fresh thinking about the strategic dimension of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. By defending every aspect of the special relationship when the rationales for them no longer exist, the Israel lobby risks overloading what political realities can bear. There will always be those like Mearsheimer and Walt, as there have been since 1947–48, when the State of Israel came into being, who will argue that U.S. support for Israel and its policies harms U.S. national interests. Israel’s response must focus not only on refuting this charge but on formulating policies that will render Israel, in deed as well as in rhetoric, a valuable partner of the United States.

An opportunity to do precisely that is in the offing, for the next U.S. administration will no doubt formulate a revised comprehensive policy toward the Middle East. An Israel engaged in a peace process orchestrated by the United States and working together with Washington and its other Middle Eastern allies against radical foes will be an important strategic asset in the post-Cold War Middle East. The specific challenge for Israel and its American friends will be their ability to demonstrate how Israel can serve as a strategic asset in the Iranian and Syrian context as it once did against the Soviet Union and its radical allies in the region. The wider strategic canvas, not the vicissitudes of U.S. domestic politics, will as always make the difference.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

“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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