I suspect that I’m going to be spending most of the next year writing about presidential politics which, if past is prologue, is not likely to include much foreign policy. But there have been intriguing developments overseas these past few months, so here’s a quick tour of the big four diplomatic problems we’ll be dealing with in the immediate future—Middle East, Ukraine-Russia, China and Iran. (Immigration could be included here, but that’s a domestic political issue, perhaps the most important one, in 2024. And I’ll have more to say about it soon.)
Middle East
All too predictable. The Jews are the bad guys. They are committing genocide in Gaza, or so it is said. Except they’re not. In truth, there’s not much we actually know about what’s happening in Gaza. The fog of war is particularly dense because the real fighting is taking place underground, in the Hamas tunnel system. But this much is clear: the Israelis are giving the civilians a lot more consideration—advance warnings, evacuation corridors, humanitarian aid—than we gave the residents of Hiroshima or Hanoi. And certainly more warning than Hamas gave the residents of the Kibbutzim near Gaza, whom they raped, murdered, incinerated and took hostage with no warning at all. A great many Palestinian civilians have been killed, which is awful—but that was Hamas’ strategy all along.
There should be absolute moral clarity here: Israel has abided by the international rules of war, horrific as they may be. It has a right to defend itself against an unrelenting, barbaric enemy intent on its destruction. The reaction of the academic left should not be a surprise: it has been more extreme than that of Israel’s Arab neighbors, who understand Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which preaches a violent Salafist perversion of Islam.
Tom Friedman is, as usual, sanity central on this:
There’s a single formula that can maximize the chances that the forces of decency can prevail…It is the formula that I think President Biden is pushing, even if he can’t spell it all out publicly now — and we should all push it with him: You should want Hamas defeated; as many Gazan civilians as possible spared; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his extremist allies booted; all the hostages returned; Iran deterred; and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reinvigorated in partnership with moderate Arab states.
I am, somewhat to my surprise, a hardliner here: no permanent cease fire until Hamas is destroyed. Once that happens, I become a major softliner—a two-state solution, including the evacuation of most Israeli settlements and settlers on the West Bank. New governments in Israel and Palestine. Land swaps to make up for the Israeli settlements of long-standing, like Ariel and those contiguous to Jerusalem. An international force patrolling Gaza, for a time, and the holy sites permanently—not just in Jerusalem, but also Hebron etc. (The crazy Jewish settlement in the heart of Hebron needs to be shut down.)
These possibilities are impeded the actions of the international salon-left, which romanticizes Hamas and demonizes Israel. As for the embarrassment of leftist ideologues on American college campuses, who misapprehend this situation in terms of colonialism and oppression: they have the right to free speech, no matter how idiotic, so long as it remains non-violent. (I find groups like “Lesbians for Hamas” more hilarious than threatening.) But it is also a moment for secular Jews like me to be ostentatious in our Jewishness, to push back against the hard-core Jew haters…and even against the mildly deluded sheep who hold Israel to a different standard from other countries.
Ukraine-Russia
The zeitgeist is shifting hard, but quietly, here. There isn’t much talk about an Ukrainian victory anymore, except among the deluded. Recent pieces in Foreign Affairs by ur-establishmentarians Richard Haas and Charles Kupchan, and in Bild signal the writing on the wall. There is the expectation of a stalemate on the battlefield; Bild reports that Biden and Germany’s Scholtz will use the threat of reduced weapons support to push for negotiations.
I am a semi-softliner here, too. Russia has a case for keeping the Russian-speaking districts in Eastern Ukraine it now occupies, but that sort of concession should only be made if the West guarantees the sovereignty of the rest of Ukraine. Haas and Kupchan suggest the economic integration of Ukraine into Western Europe and continued military support. I don’t know enough to argue forcefully here, and there are massive complications, no doubt, but I’d lean toward including Ukraine into NATO, or the functional equivalent of such—to send as strong a message as possible to Putin that he stays east of the Dniepr River. Zelensky would be crazy to agree to any deal that doesn’t guarantee, in the strongest possible terms, the continued existence of his country. But he must face reality: he’s not going to “win” this war.
China
Another zone of shifting zeitgeist. The Chinese are in real economic trouble. John Ellis offers an indispensable almost daily account of their travails. They need us; they need our market. They are even sucking up to Joe Biden. They do not need us as a military enemy. They would be crazy to invade Taiwan, which would make Russia’s struggles in Ukraine seem a picnic; they’d be wise to limit their ambitions in the South China Sea, too.
Which raises a question: How wise are the Chinese? They are smart, industrious, brilliant merchants—just ask the Vietnamese or the Indonesians about their Chinese communities—but they are blinded by as severe a case of Xenophobic myopia as exists in the world. They have traditionally been an expansive mercantilist power, but not an imperialist military one. And they have this tendency to go a little…crazy from time to time. Mao was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 60 million of his countrymen, the greatest mass killer of the 20th century. There was the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the One-Child policy. Just crazy. As a result, there is a real fear of luan, or chaos. Part of that is built into Confucianism, which is more an etiquette than a spiritual discipline. Order is prized, to a fault. I once asked a Chinese bureaucrat, who was in charge of creating rules to govern the nation’s burgeoning stock markets, what his biggest problem was. He replied, “The leadership of this country believes that insider trading is a Confucian principle.”
The ultimate Chinese problem is: You can’t sorta join the world. Xi’s attempt to strangle the assimilation process has been a failure. They are still a great power, but badly in need of reform.
Iran
I’ve been to Iran twice and I love the place—its people, who are well-educated, ironic and cultured; its civilization is ancient and fascinating; Iranian women are the most liberated in the region, the most powerful domestic force for reform. And it should be understood: Iran is not really a theocracy. It is a military dictatorship—run by the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—with a patina of spirituality. (Even the so-called “Mullahs” reflect a dissident minority of the clerisy, a plurality of whom believe religious leaders should have no role in public life.) But the IRGC is toxic, the greatest threat to peace in the region. What to do?
On the old U.S. Embassy in Tehran—now the Museum of the Great Satan—there are official graffiti. My favorite: “On the day the Great Satan praises us, we shall mourn.” In the past, my position was: let’s give them what they don’t want. Let’s recognize them, engage them. Let the mourning begin! But this is, clearly, not the time for that—not with Iran’s not-so-surreptitious role in Gaza, Yemen and Lebanon.
In fact, we should call the IRGC’s bluff. They should pay for their provocations. We could amp up our retaliations a couple of notches without fear of retribution: the Iranians are cautious to a fault. When Trump took out the IRGC leader Qasem Suliemani, there was all sorts of hand-wringing about an Iranian response. Remember what happened? Not much. For two reasons: Iran has a lot to lose—it’s a middle class country, far more prosperous than most of its neighbors. And second, it’s already lost a lot in recent memory: an estimated one million casualties in the Iran-Iraq war. When I visited Iran in 2001, you would see them in the streets—victims of chemical warfare, shaking uncontrollably. “We want refolution—reform—not revolution,” a leading dissident told me. “We’ve seen too much bloodshed.”
The smartest thing anyone ever said to me about Iran was—and I can’t tell you this person’s name because he’d wind up in jail: “The Shah’s problem was that he thought Iran was Persian but not Muslim. The Ayatollah’s problem is that he thinks Iran is Muslim but not Persian.”
The rift between Persians and Arabs is ancient. The Iranians I met were downright disdainful of their neighbors to the East. But Iran is not just Persian and Muslim, it is also Shi’a—and the creedal rift between Shi’a and Sunni is as deep as the divide between Persian and Arab, deeper perhaps. “Israel is our natural ally,” an arch-conservative adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad admitted to me, with a sigh. Then why not cut the nonsense, I asked. He smiled, “Historically, we’ve not been very good at alliances.”
I once asked an Indian diplomat what it was like to have an alliance with Iran: “Terrible,” he replied. “They’re the world’s ultimate bazarris. They think they renegotiate every deal, all the time.”
As the chefs on The Bear say: Heard!
Your Daily Orange Jesus Outrage
Via Lucian Truscott, the impact of Trump’s mouth on the poor woman who serves as Clerk of New York’s Court of Appeals, where Orange is being tried for fraud:
A list of the threats and harassing phone calls and texts filed with the court of appeals ran to 250 single-spaced pages. The list included such threats against the life of Judge Engoron’s clerk as “I mean, honestly, you should be assassinated. You should be killed. You should be not assassin executed [sic]. You should be executed.” Another threat read, “Resign now, you dirty, treasonous piece of trash snake. We are going to get you and anyone of you dirty, backstabbing, lying, cheating American. You are nothing but a bunch of communists. We are coming to remove you permanently.” Hollon called the threats “serious and credible” in the filing, asking that the gag order against Trump be upheld.
And remember to give the gift of sanity this holiday season. We have a special gift subscription offer:
Just as I was reading this today while having a coffee I saw a “Free Palestine” activist (white, middle class, student) handing our leaflets get into a screaming match with someone who was sticking up for Israel initially sensibly then in a way that indicated not much concern for Palestinians, when the activist started yelling at him that he was a racist and the back and forth began I felt like (but sadly didn’t) stepping between them and saying “guys, guys, calm down, it’s ok you’re both racists”
I will feel better when Tom Friedman has as much venom in his blood for Hamas as he does for Bibi. I exaggerate slightly, but his two big action take aways are that we need to rid the world of Hamas and Iran, but do it in a way that is , well, “humane.” Then we can get on with implementing a two state solution for the reformed Palestinians.
Wow--That is advice that only a NY Times “expert” can give.