Jimmy Carter’s Biographer on the Late President’s Biggest Regret

Last summer, ex-president Jimmy Carter was having a gentle, halting conversation with one of his great-grandchildren. Approaching his hundredth birthday, he’d been in home hospice care for nearly 15 months. He remarked that he’d had a pretty wonderful life. He’d been successful in everything he’d attempted—a stellar career as a Naval submarine officer, working under the notoriously domineering captain, later admiral, Hyman Rickover; governor of Georgia; president of the United States; winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize; author of 33 books, including a childhood memoir—An Hour Before Daylight—that was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Yes, he told his great-grandchild, he’d been successful in everything, and had no regrets: “But I don’t seem to be any good at this dying business.” So he still possessed that wry, acerbic sense of humor.

Speaking as his biographer, however, I can venture to say with some certainty that he had one deep regret in his long life. It was called Camp David—ironically, the scene of his greatest personal diplomatic triumph. Yes, the 1978 Camp David Accords ushered in nearly a half century of peace between Israel and Egypt. Carter single-handedly took Egypt, Israel’s only serious conventional military threat, off the battlefield. To be sure, it remains a cold peace, and one that survives in part only because Egypt is still governed by a brutal military dictatorship. But still, two nations that had fought four major wars against each other established diplomatic relations and never went to war again.

But Carter had wanted, and expected, much more. Indeed, he thought he had achieved a comprehensive peace of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, including a concrete road map for Palestinian self-determination. Specifically, Carter thought he had won Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s promise to freeze all Israeli settlements in the West Bank for a period of five years—during which time negotiations would take place for an agreement on Palestinian self-rule and autonomy. The explicit but unspoken assumption was that Palestinian autonomy would lead to a demilitarized Palestinian state. The world’s most intractable and incendiary conflict would finally end with a two-state political compromise.

It did not happen. Carter was deeply disappointed—even outraged—by what he deemed Prime Minister Begin’s betrayal. “He’s trying to welsh on the deal,” Carter noted in his diary. Two days later, Carter again noted that Begin was publicly “denying the agreement we had worked out Saturday night, on which I have a complete record and a perfect memory.” Moshe Dayan, a member of the Israeli delegation at Camp David, confirmed Carter’s account on the critical question of the settlement freeze. On September 20, 1978, Dayan conveyed to Carter that he was “extremely upset over Begin’s public disagreement with the President over the duration of a settlements freeze.”

Three months later, Carter was incensed when Begin announced a major expansion of settlements in the West Bank. He bitterly complained to his chief domestic aide, Stuart Eizenstat, that the Israeli had lied to him. When Eizenstat gently pushed back, Carter reached into a drawer of the Resolute desk and pulled out a document: “These are my notes from my meeting with Begin,” he said. “Here you can see ‘five-year settlement freeze.’”

Carter wanted more than just a separate peace between Egypt and Israel. So, too, did Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—who also understood that his own political viability, and even his personal safety, depended on achieving an agreement that could not be perceived by the Arab street as abandoning the Palestinian cause.

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Begin got what he wanted, a separate peace with Egypt, and he reneged on his promises to the president of the United States. Carter felt betrayed, and this is clearly why in the years and decades to come he would relentlessly speak out against the Israeli settlements. This forthrightness cost him dearly. The Jewish American establishment turned against him.

A majority of Jewish American voters began to turn against Carter in the 1980 election. Carter won only a 45 percent plurality of the Jewish vote, the first and only time a Democratic presidential candidate lost the Jewish vote.

Carter lost his bid for reelection for many reasons, but he was particularly embittered that Jewish Americans had abandoned him after he had risked so much of his presidency to take Egypt off the battlefield for Israel.

Sadat lost his life three years after Camp David, assassinated by Islamist army officers enraged by his abandonment of the Palestinians. Sadat’s killing reinforced Carter’s determination to use his presidency to speak out against Israeli encroachments in the West Bank. He did so repeatedly. But no one was listening.

Finally, in 2006 Carter published a book on the conflict. He gave it the provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. His editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, reportedly tried to talk him out of using the incendiary word “apartheid.” So too did Stu Eizenstat and other former aides. One longtime aide at the Carter Center, Ken Stein, resigned in protest.

Carter wanted to provoke. The title was certainly provocative, but the word apartheid was there in the title as a warning—a clear observation that if Israel did not achieve peace with the Palestinians, then the growing facts on the ground, the increasing number of settlements in the West Bank, would rule out forever a two-state solution. Notably, Carter’s text in the book made no argument that Israel was already an apartheid state.

Israel’s friends were outraged, and Carter made himself even more of a pariah in the Jewish American community. Some accused him of antisemitism. Carter tried to explain that he had not meant to offend. But he defended his book, which leapt onto the bestseller lists and managed to sell an extraordinary 275,000 copies in hardcover.

That was 19 years ago. Of course, since then, things in that dangerous neighborhood have become unimaginably worse. Some Palestinians cheered as Hamas committed war crimes, killing some 1200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. And since then, Bibi Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for committing war crimes in Gaza, killing, so far, some 45,000 Palestinians, 90 percent of whom were civilians, thousands of them completely innocent children.

Carter’s book has proved prescient. He was always a prophet, speaking uncomfortable hard truths, but now his voice is not so lonely. Sadly, he was right about the settlements in 1978—and right about them in 2006. There are now more than 700,000 Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank, a territory crisscrossed by “Israeli only” roads and a maze of civil and legal constraints on the Palestinian population that make it impossible to pursue a normal life.

I would argue that if the international community could muster the necessary courage, a two-state solution could still be crafted. But it would have to be imposed through very concerted political and diplomatic pressure, backed by economic and military sanctions. This, sadly, is not likely.

More probably, Israel will proclaim its annexation, first of the major settlements, and gradually, of the entire West Bank. Palestinians will be pushed to leave. It is all a very bleak prospect.

This is why Camp David became Jimmy Carter’s deepest regret. He wanted more for Israel than for it to be continuously at war. He wanted peace, not apartheid.

I first met Victor in the spring of 1978 when he walked into The Nation’s spartan offices on Sixth Avenue. Three months earlier I had been hired for a three-day-a-week gig by Blair Clark, who had been brought into the magazine as interim editor. Victor had intended to hire Arthur Samuelson, 26, as his assistant editor. Interestingly, Samuelson had made a name for himself as the editor of a small newsletter put out by Breir, a dovish forerunner of J Street, the current lobby group of Jewish Americans critical of Israeli policies in the occupied territories. Arthur would have been an excellent choice. But there I was. And I sensed that Victor couldn’t bring himself to dismiss me. Instead, Victor arranged for Arthur to begin a long and successful career in book publishing. This was my first experience with Navasky, the fixer.

The Nation was a very different place then, occupying one small floor of a loft-like warehouse on Sixth Avenue. Water pipes hung from the ceiling. The wooden floors creaked. We wrote our copy on ancient Royal typewriters. There was a copy editor, Marion Hess, and an executive editor: Robert Hatch—a wiry, elderly, curmudgeon who sat at his desk wearing suspenders and a green eyeshade. He looked like he’d been there for a hundred years. Bob wrote all the magazine’s film reviews—and he never saw a film he could recommend to his readers.

In the wake of the McCarthyite scourge, readership had declined to perilous levels. By 1978, circulation hovered at something less than 20,000—and most of these were library subscriptions, along with a bickering collection of aging New Dealers, Adlai Stevenson liberals, elderly lapsed Communists and the occasional survivor of the 1960s culture wars. The demographics—and hefty deficits—didn’t augur well for the magazine’s survival.

Happily, the magazine’s survival was Navasky’s responsibility—and that of Hamilton Fish, our young publisher. My job was to read manuscripts from the slush pile and write up short summaries on index cards. I worked 10 or 12 hours a day—and rarely even took off weekends. I loved it.

Editorial decisions in those years were a mysterious process. Victor mounted a 10-foot-long rectangular corkboard on the wall in his office. This was his schedule for mapping out what was to go in the magazine week by week. My job was to write the author’s name and article subject on an index card—“Fred Cook on the FBI,” for example—and pin the card in a column marking the publication date. Victor sat gnome-like behind his desk presiding over our editorial meetings, attended by the new managing editor, Richard Lingeman, myself, and the literary editor, Betsy Pochoda. It was a largely silent affair. I would stand by the corkboard, waiting, as Victor and Richard stared at the cards and all the possibilities. Sometimes, I dared to break the silence by commenting on the merits of a particular article. Victor would nod. Richard would whisper something completely inaudible. And then more silence. But Victor and Richard were somehow communicating with each other telepathically. It was very scary to witness. Decisions would be made. The cards were rearranged—though I often later had to pop my head back into Victor’s office to confirm what exactly had been decided. It was like magic.

I learned to trust the Navasky magic. Later that year, he sent me on a boondoggle to the Middle East: two weeks—without pay, of course. In 1979, he sent me to Iran to cover the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, also without pay. But somehow, he managed to get The New York Times to pay my air fare—and yet I still published my reporting in The Nation. After a few years, he helped me find a book agent and sell my first proposal to Simon & Schuster’s legendary Alice Mayhew. Years later, he got me to write a cover profile of Jimmy Carter—which led eventually to a presidential biography. He introduced me to Marty Sherwin—and that of course led to all things Oppenheimer. Last autumn, at the age of 90, Victor was gently encouraging me to pitch a new book proposal, this time on Roy Cohn—a scoundrel he once debated on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. I learned to always do what Victor told me. I liked to joke that he was my rabbi.

But as a biographer, what is fascinating to me about Navasky’s life is that he was so intellectually ubiquitous. He arrived at The Nation in 1978, age 46, already a proven provocateur. As the editor of Monocle, he had published satirical, mischievous essays on the Kennedys, the CIA, and the Cold War. In 1971 he published Kennedy Justice, a critical depiction of Robert F. Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general. And in 1980, he published his groundbreaking study of the McCarthy era, Naming Names—which then won the National Book Award for a general nonfiction paperback. Later, there would be a touching memoir, A Matter of Opinion, and much later an important book about censorship, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power.

These books were all enduring works of scholarship. But he devoted his life to something even more important to our intellectual culture: the art of magazine editing. He did so by calmly and thoughtfully courting important controversy—making his readers confront the uncomfortable. Recall, in 1984 he scandalized many of his own Nation staffers by publishing a David Levine caricature of Henry Kissinger shtupping a female personification of the world with her head replaced by a globe.

Navasky knew some would be offended. And that there would be many letters to the editor. That was okay. He was a small-d democrat, but he knew that an editor of a weekly opinion magazine could not take a vote on what to publish and what to censor. That was his responsibility and prerogative.

Neither was he afraid to take risks in the cause of a good fight.

In 1979, he published 300 verbatim words from former president Gerald Ford’s upcoming 500-page memoir, A Time To Heal. It was a classic scoop—a news story that revealed why Ford had decided to pardon Richard Nixon. But Ford’s publisher, Harper & Row, sued The Nation, claiming copyright infringement. Citing the “fair use” clause, Navasky fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court. And lost. It was bad law—and today the copyright law has been revised to give journalists more “fair use” rights. In retrospect, virtually everyone acknowledges that Navasky was right.

Not so on the case of Alger Hiss. Navasky’s first major contribution to The Nation came in the spring of 1978, when he published a long, highly critical review of Allen Weinstein’s book, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. The review poked holes in Weinstein’s thesis, pointing out that six of his major sources denied that Weinstein had quoted them correctly. The controversy raged and still percolates. But unlike Weinstein, Sam Tanenhaus (Chambers’s biographer), and a busload of other Cold War historians, Navasky quite simply thought Chambers made an unreliable witness. Navasky was not a Hiss believer but an agnostic. As late as 2007, he wrote in The Nation, “This is a case that will not die. It will not go away. The Cold War is over but this, among other Cold War ghosts, lingers on.” For Victor, it was important and interesting to ask why.

I should say that I, too, remain an agnostic. Victor once introduced me to Alger. I had lunch with him in a diner across the street from The Nation office, then on Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. Alger was virtually blind—but charming and sweet. And many years later, in 2007, Victor persuaded me to write a 20,000-word essay on the Hiss case, and specifically to investigate the Venona intercept evidence on whether Hiss had been correctly identified as the spy “Ales.” The evidence was complicated, and I am still an agnostic, and still uncertain of the truth. I have a nagging thought that when the Moscow archives finally open, perhaps we will learn that the truth was gray.

I think Victor had similar thoughts. But what is interesting about this controversy is that with all the heated emotions surrounding it, Navasky never personally aroused his critics’ ire. He remained on civil terms with everyone. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, believed firmly in Hiss’s guilt, but he and Navasky were social friends.

Israel/Palestine also aroused controversy, and Navasky never hesitated to walk into this minefield. He published Edward Said, Israel Shahak, and many other critics of Israel. He also introduced me to Hillel Kook, aka Peter Bergson, whose political odyssey informed my own perspective on the conundrum of Israeli national identity. Kook’s views later resulted in The Nation’s 1981 special issue devoted to “Myths About the Middle East”—a critique that remains relevant to the debate.

But despite all the controversy, Navasky kept the doors open to his critics, like Sol Stern and Sidney Zion—old friends who disagreed vociferously with his views but still dined regularly with the Navaskys. Victor was always a genial, impish man who never lost his sense of humor. In the spring of 2009, he wrote me that he had gone to dinner at Frankie and Johnny’s Steakhouse with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Sid Zion, “and we had an hour-long (friendly, sort of) argument about Israel, joined by an obstreperous woman at the next table—so it was three to one against me—who ended by shouting that she hoped I got stuck with the check!”

That was Victor. He loved people and was invariably amused by them even during a good argument. To be sure, he will forever be known as the man who saved The Nation—and elevated it to new heights. He did so by nurturing good talent and provocative writers. He made us think. But he also touched so many of our own personal lives with his wisdom, humor, and special magic.

He was a mensch.

We live in extremely dangerous times. It feels like August 1914, and the world’s leading actors are playing a game in which not everyone understands the rules.

I speak of the Ukrainian war. Kyiv’s recent successes on the battlefield are heartening. The aggressors are being pushed back. That is a good thing. But Ukrainian resistance is also pushing Vladimir Putin into a corner.

“In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people,” Putin warned, “we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.” He clearly meant nuclear weapons. If Russian forces are further routed, Putin could decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon—a so-called battlefield nuke.

In reality, there is no such thing as a battlefield nuclear weapon. The United States has around 200 tactical nukes with an explosive equivalency ranging from 0.3 to 170 kilotons of TNT. The Russians probably have at least 1,000 such “small” nukes. (By comparison, the Hiroshima bomb produced an explosion equivalent to about 15 kilotons of TNT.) Even the smallest tactical bomb could create serious devastation. The blast from even a one kiloton bomb would create a burn radius of 0.4 miles. Ostensibly, Putin’s generals could use such a weapon on an advancing column of Ukrainian tanks. But on the actual Ukrainian battlefield, there are very few targets large enough for even the smallest tactical nuke.

The real purpose of tactical nukes, however, is not to repel an enemy on the battlefield but to sow terror and change the psychological dynamics of the larger conflict. Indeed, nuclear weapons of any size have never been practical military weapons. They have only a political purpose. Back in November 1945—just three months after Hiroshima was destroyed—Robert Oppenheimer gave a speech in Philadelphia in which he calmly explained, “The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima.” The Hiroshima bomb, he pointed out, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy…. it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”

When asked recently on 60 Minutes what the US response would be, President Biden replied: “You think I would tell you if I knew exactly what it would be? Of course, I’m not going to tell you. It’ll be consequential. They’ll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been. And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur.”

Biden’s national security aides are no doubt advising him that Putin should be kept guessing on Washington’s response. But nuclear ambiguity has its dangers; it is time for nuclear clarity. Putin should be told the truth in no uncertain terms.

• Washington will not under any circumstances use nuclear weapons against Russia or against Russian forces in the Ukraine.
• If even one tactical nuclear weapon is used by Russia in the Ukraine, the West will redouble its supply of conventional weapons to the government in Kyiv.
• Russia will indeed become “more of a pariah.” Economic sanctions will be bolstered by a complete embargo.
• Putin will be indicted at the International Criminal Court for war crimes and a warrant for his arrest will be issued.

It is highly unlikely that Washington would contemplate using nuclear weapons against another nuclear power. That would be suicidal. On February 6, 2018, then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated, “I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game changer.”

Despite Biden’s pretense of strategic ambiguity, he clearly is not going to fight a nuclear war over Ukraine. And while it may be an official secret, our own generals know that nukes of any size are not viable military weapons. Since Americans are clearly not going to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, why not say so?

Instead, we should be making it very clear to Putin that not even the use of tactical nukes will deter the Ukrainians from resisting the Russian invasion. Such clarity now might persuade Putin that he cannot expect to reap any political gains from the use of tactical nukes. It may seem counterintuitive, but we can deter Putin from using tactical nuclear weapons by proclaiming now that we will never use them ourselves on the Ukrainian battlefield.

By their willingness to fight, by their unlikely defiance of Putin, the Ukrainians have seized the moral high ground and deserve our support in terms of economic and military aid—but not American troops. To be sure, NATO expansion in the post–Cold War was a mistake, even a provocation. But NATO expansion neither justifies nor explains Putin’s war of aggression. This unilateral act of aggression by an unstable authoritarian actor has changed everything. Putin’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea was also wrong, a violation of international law. Meaning that the Ukrainians are justified in their military efforts to take back the Crimea.

Nevertheless, we should take every opportunity to bring an end to this war through negotiations. So far, Putin has given no sign that he is willing to sit down and talk with the Ukrainians. But if talks did happen, if a Geneva peace conference were to be convened, America should also be willing to support a political compromise that ends the conflict.

Sadly, this war is likely to go on for some time. But whatever happens, we Americans should not countenance the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, however small, on the Ukrainian battlefield.

Get Carter

I should be grateful that Rick Perlstein devoted 5,000 words to reviewing my biography of Jimmy Carter [“True Colors,” October 18/25]. That’s a lot of words. Unfortunately, the essay is less a review of the biography than a litany of the author’s complaints about Carter as a politician. For Perlstein, Carter is just not left enough, not liberal enough—and not a populist. I am reminded of a letter that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sent to Victor Navasky in 1998 when I published a biography of McGeorge and William Bundy: “I would like to have said to Kai Bird that fair-minded scholarship triumphed over evident political disapproval in his very good book on the Bundys.” Perlstein’s review of The Outlier does just the opposite, allowing his ideology to blind him to the nuance of the biographical narrative. This is an old problem between historians and biographers. We need both—but in my view biography is the higher art.
Kai Bird
new york city

Despite his espousal of universal human rights—the best feature of his presidency—Jimmy Carter was markedly to the political right of any Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. His considerably more liberal and more pro-union vice president, Walter Mondale, was picked to placate the more liberal wing of the party and to mask Carter’s underlying conservatism.

Carter’s administration marked the emergence of the neoliberal age. He began the process of reconstructing a top-down, fully corporatized America. The abnegation of effective government regulation started during his administration with the deregulation of the telecommunications and airline industries.

True, the succeeding, far more right administration of Ronald Reagan vastly accelerated all of these trends, but their genesis resided in Carter’s presidency. His haughty, humorless preachiness and excoriation of the moral failings of average Americans were part of that process. There was, in fact, a rather seamless transition between the two administrations.

Caleb Melamed

Like many serious people, Jimmy Carter bought the argument that a large budget deficit would destroy the economy. But more important for the United States and the entire world, he realized that we couldn’t continue on the path of unrestrained consumption that was destroying the atmosphere and the planet itself. I’m with Kai Bird. Carter was ahead of his time.
Bruce Pearson

A Stream Called Drowning Creek

Thank you for publishing Ada Limón’s beautiful and powerful prose poem “Drowning Creek” [September 6/13]. Sustained metaphor, lines that breathe and carry the weight of thoughts and feelings… what a treat. I had almost despaired of reading poems in magazines; I’m glad I took the time to read this one.

Ron Luce
athens, ohio

I first met Martin J. Sherwin—who died last month at the age of 84—back in the early 1980s, when I was an associate editor of The Nation. Victor Navasky got him to write a long essay that appeared as a cover story: “Hiroshima and Modern Memory” (October 10, 1981). It was quite simply brilliant—and read today, it remains brilliant.

Marty had begun his career as the preeminent historian of the nuclear age with his classic 1975 work, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies. Sometime in 1980 his Knopf editor, Angus Cameron, signed him up to do a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Marty and I became good friends in the mid-’90s during the controversy over the censorship of the Smithsonian Institution’s planned exhibit on the Enola Gay and the end of World War II. He was appalled when the American Legion, the Air Force Association, and most of the politicians on Capitol Hill compelled the Smithsonian to cancel a highly nuanced and complicated 10,000-square-foot historical display. He wrote an article for The Nation on the episode: “The Assault on History” (May 15, 1995).

History mattered to Marty—but he never lost his sense of humor. Five years later, I found myself sitting across from him in a Boston restaurant. He was still working on the Oppenheimer biography, and it was on this occasion that he invited me to join him on the project. To seal the deal, we raised our martini glasses and Marty gave Oppie’s favored toast: “To the confusion of our enemies!”

It took us another five years to complete the book. Marty was a consummate biographer, amassing more than 50,000 pages of archival material, including 8,000 pages of FBI records. There were more than 100 neatly transcribed interviews. He loved to rewrite and edit, and unlike many academics, he had an ear for the rhythm of good narrative storytelling. Ours was a rare collaboration—we were still friends when we finished the book.

Marty was genuinely astonished when it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006. He had a sardonic, skeptical view of the world. On a personal level, he was always fun to be around, with an infectious laugh and ready wit. But he was also profoundly pessimistic about the human race’s ability to survive the nuclear era. He went on to spend a dozen years writing a book with the dark title Gambling With Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (2020). We had survived the Cuban missile crisis, he argued, through just dumb luck.

Marty’s three books are but a small part of his legacy. He died knowing that our Oppenheimer biography was being turned into a story on the big screen. He was surprised by that, too. For him, what mattered was the storytelling from the archives. The day he died, he was working on what he hoped would become a book or film about a B-29 crew shot down over the Sea of Japan—10 American aviators who survived at sea for a week, only to be rescued and then forced by a Japanese Army officer to give witness to the carnage of Hiroshima. It is a story heavy with irony—and Marty Sherwin loved the irony in history.

Dear President Biden,1

ou know and I know that you could learn a lot from Jimmy Carter’s presidency. You are 18 years younger than our longest-living ex-president, but he was your friend and political ally in the 1970s, when you were a senator in your 30s. You were the first senator to endorse Carter’s miraculous run for the White House from complete obscurity. And when he won in 1976, you found yourself on the same political wavelength with the former Georgia governor. You both started out in politics as pragmatic populists: Democrats, but fiscal conservatives. You both opposed school busing and supported a woman’s right to choose—but opposed using federal funds for abortions.2

In January 1978, just one year into Carter’s presidency, you dropped by the White House to warn him that Ted Kennedy was already lining up support from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing to challenge him for the 1980 nomination. You warned Carter that both labor unions and the Jewish community harbored a “deep distrust” of his presidency. Carter was grateful for the warning, but he wasn’t surprised. He told his allies that he was going to “whip” Kennedy’s “ass,” and he did, defeating the Massachusetts senator in a string of hard-fought primaries. But the Kennedy challenge left a weakened Carter to face off against Ronald Reagan in the November election. And, of course, he lost.3

There are some lessons here:4

§ Never promise to never tell a lie. Carter’s consigliere, Charlie Kirbo, warned him, “We’re going to lose the liar vote.” And after Trump, we know the liar vote is pretty sizable.5

§ It’s OK that you don’t drink. But unlike Carter, please do serve hard liquor in the White House. Most politicians and all journalists need to imbibe, and really, it won’t bust the budget.6

§ While we’re on the subject, don’t try to balance the federal budget. Facing a $66 billion deficit—how quaint that sounds—Carter tried to bring down domestic spending and only alienated liberal Democrats.7

§ Realize that trying to make the US broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians will cost you politically. Carter’s personal diplomacy took Egypt off the battlefield for Israel. But this only earned him the distrust—no, the enmity—of the Jewish American establishment, and consequently he became the first modern Democratic president to lose a majority of the Jewish vote. As for the Israelis, remember what Carter learned: They talk about peace, but all they really want are those West Bank settlements. Also, don’t forget how deft Bibi Netanyahu was at humiliating Barack Obama; he’ll do the same to you, even as he once again “mows the lawn” in Gaza and fans sectarian hatred inside Israel. I know, I know, you want to be “evenhanded” about this dangerous neighborhood. But it turns out Carter was right to warn us that Israel was choosing to become an apartheid state.8

§ Beware of dictators. Carter had good intelligence that Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet had ordered the assassination of Orlando Letelier with a car bomb that exploded not far from the White House—and he always regretted not indicting the Chilean dictator. Unfortunately, you’ve already got the same problem with the murderous crown prince of Saudi Arabia.9

§ On national health care: Carter’s major mistake here was not to keep Ted Kennedy inside the tent by endorsing his bill for national health insurance. Kennedy’s expensive bill didn’t have the votes anyway—so when it went down in defeat, Carter could have garnered liberal backing for his own, more measured bill, providing all Americans with universal catastrophic health insurance. The lesson here is that you need to give the Squad and the progressive wing of the party no excuse to desert the Biden tent.10

§ It’s OK to put solar panels on the White House. But if, like Carter, you try to impose a windfall profits tax on the oil companies, know they will hire thousands of lobbyists to destroy your congressional agenda. Ditto Big Tech. So prepare for a big fight.11

§ Carter preserved millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness as a national monument—and Alaskans are still hanging him in effigy. So if you do the right thing for the environment, know that the locals will blame you.12

§ When it comes to reshuffling your administration, don’t take any advice from Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s communications director, who told him to fire his cabinet secretaries en masse. Just fire them one by one on late Friday nights, when the pundits won’t notice.13

§ If you take a 10-day retreat at Camp David, don’t come back and warn the American people that “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” Voters will think you are un-American.14

§ Carter signed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, and the law triggered a special prosecutor’s investigation of his top aide, Hamilton Jordan, who was accused of buying cocaine at Studio 54—a wholly false accusation fabricated by Roy Cohn. (Yes, that Roy Cohn.) Fortunately, Roy Cohn is long dead, so you won’t have to worry about him. But the lesson here is to keep your administration squeaky clean.15

§ Yes, transparency. But maybe you are right not to host too many press conferences. Carter held one every two weeks for the first two years, until he realized it was just annoying everyone. Cultivate influential reporters and be grateful that Sally Quinn writes about religion now.16

§ Don’t read 300 pages of memos a day; it’s too much detail. Don’t work long hours in the Oval Office, and never turn down dinner invitations from the publisher of The Washington Post. Jeff Bezos may not be as gracious company as Katharine Graham, but he is even more powerful.17

§ Don’t let your staff use the White House tennis court. They will only complain that you are paying too much attention to minutiae when you make them sign in to reserve it.18

§ Know that senators from West Virginia stand in a special category. Carter had to listen to Robert Byrd’s bluegrass fiddling—and let him pave any dirt road in the state. Senator Joe Manchin should be given the same perks.19

§ Don’t hire a prickly Polish aristocrat who obsesses about the Russians to be your national security adviser. Zbigniew Brzezinski poisoned Carter’s relations with his secretary of state, Cy Vance. Let your secretary of state run your foreign policy.20

§ Don’t spend more time on foreign policy than on domestic affairs. Carter was seduced by the illusion that he could get more things done abroad. As James Carville said of the 1992 election, “It’s the economy, stupid.”21

§ Embrace the pork barrel. Carter pissed off too many congressmen by vetoing water projects, particularly US Army Corps of Engineers dams that everyone knew were damaging the environment. Let them have their water projects. Get their votes for things that matter.22

§ Know the importance of racial justice. As a Southern white man, Carter understood this. During his presidency, he appointed scores of Black and Latinx people to the federal judiciary. Just realize that if you do the right thing on race, sometimes it means you will not get reelected.23

§ Also, if you do the right thing, don’t tell people that’s why you’re doing it. Otherwise, the voters will think you are sanctimonious.24

§ Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if you happen to be attacked by a killer rabbit while quietly fishing in a Georgia pond, never, ever defend yourself with an oar, because most Americans love rabbits—even those that can swim—and they will accuse you of animal abuse. And then you might become a one-term president.25

Sincerely,
Kai Bird26

Back in 1976, Jimmy Carter’s consigliere, Charlie Kirbo, was delegated to vet the president-elect’s choices for the vice presidency. The short list included Senators John Glenn, Walter Mondale, and Joe Biden. But after interviewing Mondale, Kirbo told Carter, “Governor, I thought I could get rid of that fellah, but I didn’t, and I don’t think I will.” Kirbo’s South Georgia political instincts made him a little leery of the Minnesotan’s stark liberal credentials. But he couldn’t resist Mondale’s plain, transparent decency. Neither could Carter.

Carter’s partnership with Mondale became a perfect match of Northern and Southern populism. Both politicians were intelligent, affable, and unpretentious. They liked each other. One November day soon after the 1976 election, Carter and Mondale were about to walk over to the White House to pay a courtesy call on President Gerald Ford when Carter quietly asked Fritz, “What’s it like?”

“What are you talking about?” Mondale asked.

“The White House,” Carter replied.

“You’ve never been in the White House? It’s a pretty nice place. I think you’ll like it.”

A few weeks later, Mondale sat down with Carter to talk about what the president-elect would want from his number two. Mondale’s aide Richard Moe had prepared a memo with an expansive list of vice-presidential duties. Mondale had expected Carter to negotiate point by point. Instead, Carter silently read the nine-page memo, and then, tossing it on his desk, said, “This is fine. But I also want you to be in the White House.”

Carter thought the vice presidency up until then had been a “wasted national asset.” He was determined to change the nature of the office. For the first time, he promised, this vice president would have full access to all classified documents, and Mondale would be allowed to participate in any meeting he wished, whether it was in the Oval Office or elsewhere.

The new arrangement worked. Mondale encouraged Carter’s liberal instincts. When the budget-conscience Carter angered congressional liberals by cutting $5 billion in “pork barrel” water projects to be built by the Army Corps of Engineers, Mondale gently tried to warn him that congressional “pork” was a relative thing: “In a democracy, someone’s waste is another’s personal treasure.” He also countered the advice Carter received from his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He and Zbig repeatedly clashed over Carter’s insistence that human rights should be a key pillar of foreign policy. On one occasion, Mondale objected that Brzezinski’s formulations “suggest that a major motivation for our espousal of human rights is based on a tactical advantage against the Soviet Union.” For Mondale, human rights wasn’t just a rhetorical tactical weapon against Moscow. Carter agreed.

They had their differences as well. In the late spring of 1979, millions of Americans were having to wait in line to fuel their cars. An energy crisis exacerbated by the Iranian revolution also stoked simultaneous inflation and unemployment. The country seemed demoralized. White House pollster Patrick Caddell urged Carter to address the nation about the need to recognize material limits. America, he argued, needed to be less narcissistic. Mondale reacted angrily to Caddell’s “sophomoric” advice and angrily called it a “bunch of crap” and “crazy.”

Mondale retreated to Minnesota’s northern wilderness lake country, where he seriously contemplated resignation. After a week in the woods alone, he calmed down and decided he could not abandon Carter. But he bluntly told the president, “We got elected on the ground that we wanted a government as good as the American people; now as I hear it, we want to tell them we need a people as good as the government; I don’t think that is going to sell.”

Carter nevertheless hosted an extraordinary domestic policy summit at Camp David for 10 days and then emerged to give a speech in which he talked bluntly about “what’s wrong with America.” The pundits quickly dubbed it the “malaise” speech: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption…. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” He seemed to take issue with the whole notion of American exceptionalism, observing, “We were taught that our armies were always invincible, and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam.” He railed against well-paid lobbyists and “powerful special interests.” Congress, he warned, was paralyzed by false claims, evasiveness, and “every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another.”

It’s easy to forget now that, initially, Carter’s sermon was well received. His poll numbers shot up—until days later, when he suddenly fired five cabinet secretaries. The Carter presidency never really recovered from this political fiasco. Mondale’s political instincts had been on the mark.

Their disagreement, however, did not sully Mondale’s relationship with Carter. The two men remained close. When they lost the November 1980 election—in large part because of the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis—Mondale told Carter, “We obeyed the law, we told the truth, and we kept the peace.” Carter added, “We championed human rights.”

They remained trusting friends until Mondale’s passing last week at the age of 93. And the office of the vice presidency has never been same. Carter and Mondale made it a real job. Every vice president since Mondale has had a desk down the hall from the Oval Office. Democrats probably regretted the elevation of the vice presidency only once, when George W. Bush made Dick Cheney an über vice president. But that just underscores the importance of personal character. Mondale, like his Georgian boss, personified the value of plain decency. And that will be his historical legacy.

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Thirty-three years ago, Victor Navasky and I crafted an unsigned editorial for a special issue of The Nation devoted to “Myths About the Middle East” [December 5, 1981]. Sadly, it remains prescient: “Israel’s democratic character—and its legitimacy and distinctiveness as a Middle Eastern state—is placed in increasing jeopardy with the passage of each day of military subjugation for 1.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The more ‘successful’ Israel is in introducing a large settler population into the occupied territories, the closer it is to becoming a total garrison state.” We also argued that “messianic Zionism—with its assertion that all Jews are one nation, that the ingathering of the diaspora is the raison d’être of Israel—was an outmoded or unrealizable idea.”

Our editorial merely prefaced a collection of astute observations by Boas Evron, Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Mortimer, Sadik Al-Azm and Michael Reisman. It was our intent to have each of these public intellectuals demystify what we believed to be the fundamental problem in the Middle East: the question of national identity. Collectively, they explored post-Zionism, the evolving nature of Israeli identity versus Jewish diaspora identity, Palestinian identity, anti-Zionism versus anti-Semitism, and the status of the occupied territories under international law. Nothing essential to the Arab-Israeli conflict was left unexamined—and, unfortunately, everything written all those years ago remains acutely relevant to our current predicaments.

Identity continues to be the problem in both Israel and the Arab world. The myth persists in Israel today that the early Zionists were trying to create a “Jewish state.” They were not. They tried and in fact succeeded in creating a new national identity for those Jews who wished to leave the diaspora. They became Israelis, living in a Hebrew-speaking republic. And yet, today, Israel is both more secular—think of the beaches of Tel Aviv—and more theocratic and Orthodox in its Jerusalem enclaves. The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as “the Jewish state.” Such a precondition is merely another obstacle erected by a prime minister who opposes a two-state solution.

As Boas Evron warned thirty-three years ago, “the promise of Israel as a ‘haven for the Jewish people’ has been proved false.” Whereas the Jewish diaspora has flourished in America and elsewhere, the Jewish population of the Hebrew-speaking republic known as Israel lives in a besieged state of mind. Its current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, warns repeatedly of the risk of “another Holocaust.” And since we live in an era when even plutonium suitcase bombs are technically feasible, and since Israel has never defined its borders or negotiated a genuine peace with its neighbors, the fear of a nuclear event in this dangerous neighborhood is not just another paranoid symptom of an admittedly often demagogic Israeli politician.

Israel has itself become a nuclear-armed state with a powerful military, and over the decades it has waged periodic wars with disproportionate violence against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. But as we predicted in 1981, the real danger to Israeli democracy is from within. Around 25 percent of all first graders inside Israel—excluding the occupied territories—come from Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox families; another 25 percent come from the families of Christian or Muslim Palestinian-Israelis.

This demographic picture suggests that the unresolved question of Israeli national identity will become even more acute in the future—and that only a secular construct can accommodate such differences. In addition, there are as many as 700,000 Israelis living in the occupied territories, where Israel effectively controls the lives of the 4.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. All told, there are more than 6 million Jewish Israelis and 6 million Palestinians living between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. Clearly, these two communities are on a demographic collision course.

Israel cannot claim to be both Jewish and democratic if it retains control over the daily life of so many people who define their identity as other than Jewish Israeli. And so, of course, a two-state solution involving the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, is the only obvious and wholly rational solution. And just as clearly, this solution is not happening—at least in the near future, and perhaps ever.

* * *

On the Arab side of the equation, things are just as convoluted. But it is still all about identity. Polls often show that a majority of Palestinians will settle for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But in the last Palestinian election in 2006, Hamas—a fundamentalist Islamic party that formally rejects a two-state solution—achieved a plurality, soundly defeating Fatah, the secular party. The outcome precipitated what amounted to a Palestinian civil war. Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, while Fatah retained control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Hamas still employs terror to “resist” an ongoing virtual Israeli occupation and to achieve its political goals. The most recent Gaza war—in which more than 2,100 Palestinians and seventy-three Israelis died—nevertheless persuaded many Palestinians that in the absence of real progress toward sovereignty, Hamas remains a viable alternative. Sadly, there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the right-wing Israeli opponents of any Palestinian state and Hamas: these two enemies need each other to deter any kind of nonviolent political compromise.

In the meantime, the Arab Awakening of recent years has created its own counterrevolution. The initial uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria were fueled by the pent-up demands for a secular civil society. The protesters fervently sought modernity and common democratic rights. This was undoubtedly a good development, long overdue and still unfinished. But when Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood won the country’s first post-Mubarak election and then overreached by taking steps to undermine secular democratic rights, the military autocracy seized on the moment to re-establish its control. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime proved willing to mow down more than 1,000 unarmed protesters to impose a dictatorship more draconian than Mubarak’s. Likewise, in Syria, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has instigated a civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people.

And then there’s the ongoing civil war in Iraq—inspired by our own 2003 invasion of that country—which has greatly inflamed brutal sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. This, in turn, has created a political vacuum, most recently filled by an extremist Sunni criminal mafia—known as Daesh in Arabic, or the Islamic State (ISIS) in English—operating in both Syria and Iraq. Our most recent military intervention—an aerial bombing campaign against this so-called caliphate—may serve only to incite further Salafist terrorism against American targets. It also threatens to drag the Obama administration—and the United States—into yet another interminable Middle Eastern war.

The Middle East today is thus a far more dangerous neighborhood than it was three decades ago. Unimaginative leaders in Israel and throughout the Arab world have made bad choices, but America’s ill-considered military interventions have consistently made things worse.

So what is America to do? I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv. But all my instincts are to protect my Middle East from my America. These are two different worlds—and we Americans, firmly ensconced in one of these worlds, have no understanding of the other.

Furthermore, after all our bloody, misbegotten interventions, we have no standing, no legitimacy as mediators, let alone as peacekeepers. I assure you, we do nothing to improve the situation with our boots on the ground and our deadly drones circling overhead. In the Arab world, we have historically aligned ourselves with generals and kings and narrow-minded sectarian tribal leaders. In Israel, we have become the ultimate enablers of Likudites devoted to colonization.

It is time to walk away and leave these people to their own bad behavior. Let the Israelis occupy—and then let them grapple with the consequences. I oppose any academic boycott of Israeli institutions, but I support an economic boycott of products and services in the settlements. I believe we need to engage at every possible point with the Israeli people—but also to impose a policy of coldly correct diplomatic relations with the Israeli government. I would not give the Israelis a dime in military assistance. And I believe we should support the right of Palestinians (and others) to petition the International Criminal Court for redress when their human rights are violated.

The pundits will say that disengagement with Israel is not politically realistic. They are right. But they are wrong to dismiss it as unthinkable. Less than a year after our 1981 editorial, Geoffrey Kemp, President Reagan’s chief aide for Middle East affairs in the National Security Council, advised: “The President should tell [Menachem] Begin that there can be no resolution of the Palestinian problem unless he abandons expectations of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza.” (The memo in which Kemp made this recommendation was declassified only in 2010.) Kemp also spelled out the steps that could be taken if the Israeli prime minister defied the president, including the possibility of withholding economic aid to Israel. In the event, the Reagan administration did not muster the political courage to force Israel to halt its settlements policy—and we are now all paying the price.

* * *

Over the years in these pages, I have made a wholly pragmatic argument for holding a referendum that would impose a two-state solution, with borders based on the Green Line and with East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. I believe that a majority of both Palestinians and Israelis would approve this broad solution, and a referendum would commit the politicians to a deal. But clearly, this is not going to happen—and without such a referendum, American policy is merely shoring up a dangerous and unjust status quo. The professionals of the “peace process” (I have in mind such diplomats as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk) have come up with nothing over three decades. They have failed time and time again, and their failure has cost many Palestinian and Israeli lives.

Disengagement should now be our policy with both Israel and the Arab world. We Americans should urge our government to end all arms sales to any Arab nation ruled by a general, dictator or king. We need to isolate and diplomatically contain any Arab regime that has demonstrably killed unarmed protesters, as in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. We should also close our military installations in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.

Such a dramatic, categorical and evenhanded withdrawal of American arms and treasure would deal a bracing shock to the region’s ruling elites. But it would be a good and decent thing for all concerned. The so-called experts, our TV talking heads, will be quick to object that such a withdrawal would only open the gates to the barbaric head-choppers. These experts are wrong: the Salafist nihilists operating under the black flag of a farcical caliphate have bitter enemies all around them. They have no real future in the twenty-first century. And in any case, these sectarian wars are not ours—and our government has no business sacrificing young American men and women in such an ephemeral mission.

The experts will call disengagement quixotic. They will speak in Kissingeresque bass tones about America’s “strategic” interests in Arabian oil. But I don’t care about oil, a fungible commodity that will be sold in any event on the global market by any regime that controls such carbon resources—especially since, given our climate peril, we should be focusing on renewable and sustainable energy. And I don’t care about the “strategic” consequences: they cannot be worse than the Middle East we have mismanaged.

We Americans must have a lower profile in the Middle East. Of course we can provide humanitarian assistance. But the Arabs are weary of our shallow promises of security and democracy, and all our flaccid diplomatic efforts to sustain the “peace process” in reality seem only to sustain a dead-end status quo. Enough.

A year before Navasky and I plotted our special issue, we devoted an issue of the magazine to an essay by the late, great historian William Appleman Williams. “What happens,” he wrote, “if we simply say no to empire as a way of life?” That is the essential question America faces in the Middle East.

 
Dilli Ram Dhimal, 73, sits cross-legged on his bed in a bamboo shack in Goldhap, a camp that once housed some 5,000 Bhutanese refugees in southeastern Nepal. In a month he will arrive in America, a citizen of the New World. He stares at me through eyeglasses thick as a magnifying glass. He must be half-blind. He is dressed in a Nepali-style kurta shirt and baggy pants. His full beard is white and his brown skin is gnarled and wrinkled from decades of laboring in his rice paddy. He once owned six acres of paddy and a wooden house in Lali, a small village in the southeastern lowlands of the Kingdom of Bhutan. Dhimal’s father and grandfather were both born in Bhutan. As a young man he had worked on building the road to Thimphu, the kingdom’s capital in the mountains to the north. “I can remember when the king rode a donkey,” Dhimal says in Nepali, the only language he knows. “Now he rides in a car over the roads we built.”

Dhimal describes the day in June 1992 when Tshring Togbe, the district magistrate, arrived in Lali accompanied by Bhutanese soldiers. Togbe called the villagers to assemble and then announced over a loudspeaker that they had seven days to pack up their belongings and leave the country. He spoke to them in Nepali. When a few of the peasants protested, an army officer shouted, “This is a hunting ground, and we can take you like monkeys.”

Dhimal, his wife and five young children decided to leave. They had heard of people being killed in neighboring villages. He thought he would return in a few weeks, when things settled down. Before trekking toward the Indian border, he released his cattle.

By 1992 an estimated 80,000 Bhutanese of Nepali ancestry had been pushed across the Bhutanese border into Indian territory. There, Indian army trucks immediately transported them to the Mechi River and pushed them across the border into Nepal. These refugees constituted at least 15 percent of Bhutan’s estimated population of 550,000.

Stranded in the open on the Mechi River bank just inside Nepal, the refugees were not exactly welcomed by their ancestral compatriots. The government in Kathmandu deemed the refugees citizens of Bhutan and requested assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Eventually, seven refugee camps were built in the southeastern districts of Jhapa and Morang, where the UN’s World Food Program fed them a daily ration. But the government of Nepal declined to issue work permits to the refugees. And so there the Bhutanese refugees languished for nearly two decades.

By 2007, because of natural population growth, approximately 108,000 refugees lived in the seven camps. In that year, the US ambassador to Nepal, James Moriarty, brokered an agreement to resettle them in several Western countries. Astonishingly, more than 60,000 Bhutanese—many of them peasants like Dilli Ram Dhimal and his family—have already been resettled abroad. The vast majority, more than 50,000, have gone to the United States, with the rest resettling in Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Britain.

* * *

By any definition, what happened in Bhutan in the years 1989–93 was ethnic cleansing. The Bhutanese government denies this and has refused to repatriate any of those forcibly expelled.

By all accounts, the problem began when the royal family was startled to learn from a government census in 1988 that the Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas (literally, “southern people”) of southern Bhutan were threatening to become a majority. In response, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck promulgated a series of edicts that he said would preserve Bhutan’s cultural heritage. He defined this national culture, however, as Drukpa—the culture of the descendants of migrants from Tibet who practice Mahayana Buddhism and speak the Dzongkha language. The Drukpas have certainly been the dominant, ruling ethnic group in Bhutan for hundreds of years, but up until the 1980s Bhutan was a multiethnic society that included the Sharchops (also originally from Tibet), the Lhotshampas and more than a dozen other linguistic, ethnic and religious groups.

On January 6, 1989, the 33-year-old king proclaimed a policy of “One Nation, One People.” Henceforth, it seemed that by virtue of a royal edict all Bhutanese would have to dress and speak like Drukpas. The teaching of Nepali to Lhotshampa schoolchildren was banned. They would have to learn Dzongkha. All citizens would also have to wear Drukpa attire, the gho coat for men and the kira for women. A recent citizenship law had required the Lhotshampas to produce pre-1958 tax receipts to prove that they were not illegal immigrants.

Naturally, these royal edicts aroused opposition. A few of the king’s advisers appealed to him to modify his policies toward his Nepali-speaking subjects. One of the king’s physicians, Dr. Bhampa Rai, approached the king’s second maternal uncle and warned him that the situation was going “to earn a bad name for the king.” Rai was told by the uncle, “The king is not listening to his advisers.” Rai is a Lhotshampa himself. “Everyone in Bhutan is an immigrant,” he told me. “The king who first united Bhutan came from Tibet. And when the first Wangchuck king was crowned in 1907, my great-grandfather was already there.”

Initial peaceful protests in southern Bhutan eventually escalated into incidents of vandalism and attacks on policemen. Young Lhotshampas made a public show of burning their Drukpa clothing. The king’s security apparatus responded to these protests with arrests. And then anyone associated with the protests was branded a traitor and expelled. It was a gradual process, but by the summer of 1992 tens of thousands of Lhotshampas were being forcibly expelled. According to a 1995 report commissioned by the UNHCR and published by the human rights group WriteNet:

For approximately eighteen months after the demonstrations ethnic Nepalis were at the greatest risk of gross physical abuse. Experience of such treatment, or the threat or fear of being subjected to it, was commonly cited by refugees who left the country during this period as the primary motivation for doing so. Since then, the level of serious physical abuse has declined significantly, although cases of torture and ill-treatment in police stations and prisons in the south continue to be reported. The arrest of ethnic Nepalis also continues, albeit on a much smaller scale, but refugees state that many of those who are detained are released only after specifically agreeing to leave the country.

At the time, the plight of the Bhutanese refugees garnered little attention. Far more serious ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda was grabbing the headlines. There were no massacres in Bhutan, only arbitrary arrests, violent interrogations and some disappearances. Officially, the Bhutanese simply claim that these refugees were recent—by their definition, post-1958—illegal immigrants, squatters if you will, who never had any claim to Bhutanese citizenship. (Last year I interviewed dozens of people in the camps and nearly everyone pulled out a dog-eared copy of their Bhutanese citizenship card, sometimes carefully laminated in plastic.) There’s no doubt that most of these people were forcibly expelled on the express orders of Bhutan’s then-reigning absolute monarch, King Wangchuck. Nor is there any doubt that the Indian government facilitated these expulsions. (Why? is another question, but New Delhi has long valued its close alliance with the Wangchuck dynasty.)

* * *

With the international community preoccupied with other crises, King Wangchuck escaped any real censure from the international community. How did he get so lucky?

Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, one of his four queens—all sisters—described her husband in her 2006 book, Treasures of the Thunder Dragon: A Portrait of Bhutan. He was, she wrote, a “wise king whose unique philosophy of governance measures the country’s progress and development not by its gross domestic product…but its gross national happiness (GNH)—this is the stuff of which legends, and romantic flights of fancy, are born.” Quite so. And the king’s remarkable public relations machine has indeed used the GNH moniker to garner worldwide praise for Bhutan’s rapid economic development. (No one, of course, knows how to measure happiness, but Bhutan’s GDP is about $4.3 billion and it has a per capita income of around $1,900, making it relatively prosperous compared with its neighbors. And largely because of its efficient exploitation of hydropower resources, Bhutan’s economy has been growing in the double digits for many years.)

On a recent trip to Bhutan I had the good fortune to sit next to Queen Wangchuck at India House, the elegant official residence of Indian Ambassador Pavan Varma. She was so lovely, so charming and so articulate that it would have been rude to inquire about the events of twenty years ago. Neither did I have the courage to query the new king, His Majesty Dasho Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, when we were briefly introduced a few minutes later at the same party. Moreover, I thought to myself, it would have seemed as though I was interrogating him for the sins of his father.

At 31, the young king is even more charismatic than the Queen Mother. Educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Wheaton College and Oxford, Khesar Wangchuck became king in 2006 when his father abruptly decided to abdicate at the age of only 50. Both father and son—colloquially referred to as K4 and K5 because they are respectively the fourth and fifth in the Wangchuck dynasty dating back to 1907—have guided the country toward a quasi-constitutional monarchy. Fair National Assembly elections were held in 2008—the royalist party captured forty-four out of the forty-seven seats, even though the very loyal opposition polled about 33 percent of the popular vote in a first-past-the-post electoral system. The monarchy still wields enormous influence.

On the same day I met Khesar, I watched him give a speech that morning in the National Assembly in which he announced his engagement to Jetsun Pema, 21, a stunningly beautiful daughter of a Druk Air pilot. K5 is down-to-earth and extremely personable. In our brief conversation he told me he loves to work in his vegetable garden, and like his father, he is an avid mountain-bike enthusiast. People talk about the day he walked up and down Thimphu’s main business boulevard, stopping to chat inside each shop with the customers. Recently he spent six days visiting one of Thimphu’s universities, where he sat in on various classes and mingled with students. A professor observed afterward that K5 was “extremely impressive—articulate, warm, smart, responsive and funny.” The king is obviously working hard to become a “people’s king.”

The Wangchuck dynasty thus seems a model of good governance. Over the past half-century the monarchy has implemented methodical and transparently rational steps to develop the kingdom’s economy. It has pragmatically allowed corporations from India, its giant neighbor to the south, to exploit its tremendous hydropower resources. The literacy rate is above 60 percent—nearly everyone in Thimphu seems to speak flawless English. The streets of Thimphu and other towns are clean, and the tap water is potable—a rarity in South Asia. Relatively few tourists visit, but that’s because the Wangchucks decided long ago that they want only the high-spending, boutique tourist trade. To get a tourist visa one must plunk down in advance more than $200 per day. As developing countries go, Bhutan seems to be doing everything smartly.

And yet, there is this little matter of forcibly expelling nearly one-sixth of your population. How could such nice people do this? I spoke with Tenzing Yonten, the director of the Royal Thimphu College, who was once married to one of the daughters of K4. I asked him what he thought most people think today about what happened in the early 1990s. When Yonten hesitated, his American colleague interrupted to say, “Well, that’s a difficult topic.” Yonten then replied, “I think most people have forgotten about it. The issue has faded away.”

I responded, “But do you understand that all these refugees are going to America, where their sons and daughters are going to get educated? And then some of them are going to start speaking out about what happened to their families. Some of them are going to want to come back here on their American passports. And then many of the elderly refugees I interviewed in the camps say they won’t go to America. They are waiting, hoping that someday the Bhutanese government will relent and allow a few of them to come home.” Yonten sat in silence, and then he said, “Yes, but they will find that there is nothing to come back to. Their homes and lands are gone.”

* * *

Bhutanese officials are quick to point out that there are still Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas in their midst. The government won’t specify, but they probably still constitute 20–25 percent of the population. In public, these Lhotshampas conform to the Drukpa attire, and if they are at all educated they speak both Dzongkha and English. A handful of Lhotshampas were elected to the National Assembly in 2008. But the Nepali speakers I talked with indicate that there is a glass ceiling. They feel culturally and politically discriminated against by the ruling Drukpas. “They don’t like us,” one young man told me.

With at least 50,000 Lhotshampas becoming American citizens, it may someday be harder for the Wangchuck dynasty to ignore this difficult history. They have proudly sold themselves in the West as guardians of an idyllic Buddhist culture. The unspoken implication is that it was necessary to purge these people in order to save the last Buddhist kingdom. The Chinese destroyed Tibet, and the Indians absorbed Sikkim. Bhutanese (Drukpa) culture is unique and tough measures were needed to preserve it. Evidently, this was the former king’s cold calculus.

And then again, let’s put this in perspective. A hundred thousand refugees is a paltry number compared with the number of Palestinian, Congolese, Darfuri and Bihari refugees. After all, the modern history of forced expulsions by one ethnic group against another involves millions of victims. And why are these particular refugees coming to America? If the UNHCR had never built the refugee camps, would the government of Nepal have felt compelled to give these ancestral Nepalese work permits or even citizenship? Not very likely. Isn’t this like the Israelis arguing that Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt should have absorbed the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and ‘56 and ‘67? So maybe America should have offered refuge to the Palestinians sixty years ago? But these are just teasing counter-factuals. Millions of refugees around the world remain refugees for decades or more.

The story of the Bhutanese refugees is thus unusual in that it has an ending. Most of them are going to find a new home in America or elsewhere. This brings some measure of closure for the refugees—but ironically, also for the Wangchucks. They hope the unhappy story of what they did twenty years ago will disappear with the closing down of the refugee camps in southern Nepal. It is as if it didn’t happen. Now they can get on with Gross National Happiness.

But there is another specter haunting the Wangchuck dynasty’s Shangri-La: globalization. Internet, television, Bollywood and rock and roll have invaded the kingdom. Thimphu has a free press. But it is a press that observes two cultural taboos: criticism of the royal family, and discussion of what happened to the Lhotshampas. How long can that last?

Bhutan is a beautiful place. High-end tourists love it. Here is my revealed prejudice: I have lived in Nepal for the past four years. In contrast with Bhutan, nothing works in Kathmandu. The electricity is off as much as eighteen hours a day in the winter months. The streets are jammed with unimaginable traffic. The Bagmati River is clogged with plastic bags and other refuse. The drinking water is sickly. But in 2006 there was a people’s uprising that threw out a truly decadent and inefficient royal family. The royal palace is now a national museum. The newspapers are filled with scurrilous attacks on anything and everybody. Anyone can say anything he or she wants. The politicians dawdle irresponsibly, and the Brahmin elite shamelessly does everything it can to perpetuate a Hindu caste culture that holds the country back. Every month or so one of the twenty-four political parties declares a bandh—a strike—and the city comes to a screeching halt. Chaos reigns in Kathmandu. But I like it. It smells of freedom. And I dare say, someday the Bhutanese will get a whiff of it.

This essay is adapted from Kai Bird’s recent memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.
 
How did a bland, uncharismatic army general like Hosni Mubarak manage to stay in power for three decades? I think that what we are witnessing in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria is the final unraveling of the military autocracy created by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. Unlike Mubarak, Nasser was a genuinely populist army colonel who fired the imaginations of a generation of postwar Arabs with his vision of a modernizing, progressive nationalism. Nasser persuaded Egyptians that they were part of one Arabic-speaking nation. This Pan-Arab nationalist vision had wide appeal in the early postcolonial era. But it was Nasser’s avowedly secular stance that seemed to hold the promise of Arab modernity.

Suave and articulate, Nasser had read a great many books in English, including works by Dickens, Carlyle and Gandhi, and biographies of famous world leaders. He was a secular, modern Arab who had an abiding admiration for American films and magazines. He came to power in an army coup in 1952 but was elected to the presidency in 1956 with a popular mandate. He gradually became a dictator. He had a deep distrust of both the Communists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Over the years, his closest political enemies became the Brothers. He threw tens of thousands of them in jail because he could not tolerate their religious xenophobia. He believed that those Arabs who mixed Islam with politics stood in the way of progress.

But then the cause of a secular Arab modernity was shockingly defeated during the June 1967 war, a war Nasser had stumbled into and was not prepared for. It was a debacle for the Arab world. But at the time few understood that it would also be a calamity for the West and Israel—precisely because it discredited secularism and opened the door to Islamists. Young Arab men like Egypt’s Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri later wrote that the naksa—the June “setback”—“influenced the awakening of the jihadist movement.”

Nasser remained in power, but he was disheartened and embittered. He blamed America for his defeat and suspected that the CIA had been plotting to unseat him. This was true. Washington’s foreign policy establishment had always viewed Nasser’s nationalism as inimical to US interests, and the CIA had funneled millions of dollars to his Muslim Brotherhood enemies.

When he died of a massive heart attack on September 28, 1970, millions of Egyptians poured into the streets of Cairo weeping and crying out his name, “Gamal! Gamal!” Sherrif Hatatta, an Egyptian doctor and novelist once imprisoned by Nasser, later remarked, “Nasser’s greatest achievement was his funeral. The world will never again see 5 million people crying together.” Nasser was the last Arab leader who could plausibly claim to reflect the broad popular will. He was not a democrat but neither was he a tyrant. Personally, he was incorruptible. He died with a modest bank account. With him died the dream of secular Arab nationalism. His ideas were defeated by a confluence of forces—best described by Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm as those “values of ignorance, myth-making, backwardness, dependency and fatalism.” But Americans would be remiss to deny our contributions to his defeat. Our government worked hard to ensure that Nasser would fail. The irony is that decades after his death the vacuum is being filled in part by the Muslim Brotherhood—whose theocratic, antimodernist ideas Nasser had tried to repress.

Nasser’s successor, Anwar el-Sadat, initially had little in the way of a popular mandate. Early in his tenure he pandered to the religious right wing. After the October 1973 war, Sadat briefly acquired a measure of popularity—but he ruled as a dictator. He demonstrated great political courage in November 1977 when he flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Israeli Knesset. And the Camp David Accords he signed in 1978 with Prime Minister Menachem Begin might have opened the door to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. But Israel continued to build settlements in the occupied territories and came to no peace agreement with its Palestinian, Lebanese or Syrian neighbors.

Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981—at which point his vice president, Gen. Hosni Mubarak, succeeded him. Mubarak was then a nonentity. It soon became apparent that he was simply an apparatchik of the Egyptian military establishment. He never attempted to create for himself the kind of popular legitimacy that came naturally to Nasser. His one talent was that of a Machiavellian survivor. He marshaled all the usual tools of repression—and more than $60 billion of American aid stemming from the Camp David Accords—to sustain his power. He was America’s “shah”—and that has also been his undoing. Washington blindly regarded him as a voice for “moderation” when his own long-suffering people saw him as a plain old-fashioned dictator. But for thirty years he sustained the Camp David regime—which gave Israel only a cold peace on its Egyptian border.

Now his seemingly impregnable reign is crumbling. His pathetic offer not to run for re-election was greeted with jeers. The Egyptian people seem virtually united in their demand for his immediate departure, even as Mubarak’s paid thugs desperately try to turn Tahrir Square into another Tiananmen.

The strategic consequences for America and Israel are momentous. Any post-Mubarak regime, for instance, will not have itself seen as complicit in the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This does not mean that a post-Mubarak popular government will seek a war with Israel. There is no constituency for war. But any new Egyptian government will insist that the promises President Carter extracted from Israel at Camp David in 1978 be realized. That means Israel will face additional pressures to end the occupation and negotiate the formation of a Palestinian state based largely on its 1967 borders.

Nasser’s dismal dictatorial political descendants are finally exiting. We can hope that what percolates up from the Arab street in Cairo (and maybe Tunis, Amman and Damascus) will reflect a younger generation’s aspirations for a semblance of democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood is certainly the single largest organized opposition force today—but it may turn out that it will be forced to share power with Egyptians nostalgic for Nasser’s secular legacy.

President Obama must go to Jerusalem next week. Seriously. He needs to go to Jerusalem in the same fashion as Egypt’s Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem in 1977. He needs to use his presidential prestige and unique oratorical gifts to impose a dramatic new paradigm on a Middle East mired in a dangerous stalemate. I write this knowing full well that America has no viable partners in a "peace process" that is going nowhere. All the players on the ground are politically weak and perceive the status quo as less risky than the prospect of making the necessary compromises everyone knows are necessary. But that is precisely why the only realistic policy at hand is one that requires a game-changing, high-profile initiative from the Obama administration.

The president’s Middle East advisers—the usual suspects include men like Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk—are no doubt urging caution, arguing that any forceful American diplomacy is bound to end in failure. They are the failed realists. Aaron David Miller, another perennial Middle East adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations since 1978, recently confessed that he was "no longer a believer." In a Foreign Policy essay titled "The False Religion of Mideast Peace," Miller explains that believing in "Arab-Israeli peacemaking" is pretty much like tilting at windmills. He virtually confesses that his career as a diplomat over the past three decades was a futile exercise drenched in delusions. Miller now thinks America can essentially do nothing to end the region’s endless series of tribal wars. At the end of his essay he writes, "Right now, America has neither the opportunity nor frankly the balls to do truly big things on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Fortuna might still rescue the president. The mullahcracy in Tehran might implode. The Syrians and Israelis might reach out to one another secretly, or perhaps a violent confrontation will flare up to break the impasse. But without a tectonic plate shifting somewhere, it’s going to be tough to re-create the good old days when bold and heroic Arab and Israeli leaders strode the stage of history, together with Americans, willing and able to do serious peacemaking."

But a "tectonic plate shifting somewhere" is precisely what Obama could bring about by going to Jerusalem. Standing at the very same Knesset podium where Anwar Sadat once stood, Obama could with drama and empathic oratory unveil a new American policy for the Middle East. It would lay out the following five policy initiatives:

1. America’s full endorsement, with the immediate backing of the United Nations Security Council, of the 2002 Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan for the creation of two states—with June 1967 borders (with small, one-to-one adjustments) and Jerusalem being the shared capital of both states.

2. A proposal—again backed by a new UN Security Council mandate—that the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan be put to a referendum in both Israel and the occupied territories within three months. (This particular peace plan is similar to the December 2000 Clinton Parameters, the 2003 Geneva Accord and the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative—but the simple, six-point Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan has the added attraction of having been endorsed by some quarter-million Israelis and about 160,000 Palestinians.)

3. If said referendum is not held, then America would press the UN to impose economic sanctions against the offending party or parties. Economic and military aid to Israel or the Palestinians would be suspended until that time when a two-state solution is fully implemented.

4. An American pledge to bring Israel within NATO’s security umbrella—if and only if Israel agrees to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and dismantle its nuclear arsenal.

5. When the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan is fully implemented, America and the international community would pledge to create a Middle Eastern Economic Investment Authority on the scale of the 1948 Marshall Plan for European recovery.

These five steps would remake the Middle East. Initially, such a seismic change in US policy would cause political upheavals across the Arab world. The current coalition government in Israel would not survive. But a majority of both Israelis and Palestinians—even in Hamas-controlled Gaza—would most probably vote for the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan. And if they did not, well, America would be fully justified in disengaging from the Middle East. We could then with a clear conscience do what "realists" like Aaron David Miller suggest—nothing.

But I doubt this would be necessary. Most people would recognize that Obama’s new paradigm was rational, democratic and the obvious road to peace and security. Israel would become a smaller state, but it would at last be secure and at peace with all its neighbors.

Some may complain that I am leaving Iran’s theocracy out of the scenario. But the upheavals that would accompany Obama’s trip to Jerusalem would inevitably affect the viability of that regime as well. Perhaps after Jerusalem Obama could plan a trip to Tehran. The road to Tehran clearly lies through Jerusalem.

Make your reservations on Air Force One, Mr. President! You need to start earning that Nobel Peace Prize.

This essay is adapted from Kai Bird’s memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978, published in April by Scribner.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In the spring of 1956, when I was 4, Father was appointed vice consul at the American consulate in the Jordanian-controlled part of Jerusalem. Mother arrived a few weeks later, bringing my little sister and me. We soon settled into a rented house, newly built of the city’s famous gleaming white limestone, on a hill overlooking the stretch of "no man’s land" that bordered Israeli-controlled Mount Scopus.

Jerusalem was very much a divided city. A jarring series of ad hoc fences, walls and bales of barbed wire, running like an angry, jagged scar from north to south, separated East Jerusalem from West. Our house was a stone’s throw from the 1949 armistice line, and Mount Scopus was but an island of Jewish property in a sea of Arab territory. On some nights I could hear the random, not-so-distant tapping of machine-gun fire. "War and rumors of war seem to be the habit around here," my father wrote, "and waking up in the night to hear rifle fire is almost an every night occurrence."

To get to West Jerusalem one had to cross no man’s land, passing through the heavily guarded passageway known as Mandelbaum Gate. The gate took its name from a house that once stood on the spot, built by a family of Jewish immigrants from Byelorussia. I crossed through the gate nearly every day, past the barbed wire and the cone-shaped anti-tank barriers. Men with guns stood guard. The skeletal remains of armored personnel carriers and rusting tanks lay about as constant reminders of lost lives and past conflicts.

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba–the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians. Gradually, over many years of marriage, I came to understand what this meant. One can’t live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors. So the Holocaust–or, to use the more accurately descriptive Hebrew term, the Shoah–well, it too has become a part of my identity. The Nakba and the Shoah: the bookends of my life.

Although I went to college in the United States–Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota–I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut. I went back again in my 20s as a freelance reporter, and I had many adventures before securing, in 1978, a tenuous part-time position as the assistant editor of The Nation. Three months later Victor Navasky suddenly became my new boss. Victor quickly became my journalistic mentor, teaching me the craft of writing editorials and how to inspire young freelancers to rewrite their wooden prose for the third or fourth time–all for a payment in "the high two figures." I called Victor my "rabbi"–a term Wall Street lawyers still use to describe the wizened partners who take young associates under their wing.

In December 1981 Victor and I edited a special issue of The Nation titled "Myths About the Middle East." Nearly three decades later, I would be guilty of false modesty if I didn’t claim a certain prescience in what we wrote. The editorial introducing this special issue could be published today without the change of a single word. We argued that the "greater threat" to Israel’s security was not Palestinian terrorists but the danger from within: "Israel’s democratic character–and its legitimacy and distinctiveness as a Middle Eastern state–is placed in increasing jeopardy with the passage of each day of military subjugation for 1.2 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. The more ‘successful’ Israel is in introducing a large settler population into the occupied territories, the closer it is to becoming a total garrison state."

We then observed, "Among the misconceptions obscuring the road out of the present impasse are those having to do with the nature of contemporary Zionism…. Did Zionism mean a homeland for all Jews? Was this homeland for Jews and no other people?" We answered by arguing that "after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it gradually became clear that messianic Zionism–with its assertion that all Jews are one nation, that the ingathering of the Diaspora is the raison d’être of Israel–was an outmoded or unrealizable idea." Obviously, most Jews around the world, including most American Jews, were not coming. Our editorial argued that Israel should define its citizens as Israelis–not Jews–and that therefore it made no sense to offer automatic citizenship to any Jew anywhere. (We suggested, however, that perhaps the Law of Return should remain applicable until the Holocaust generation had died out.)

In conclusion, we pointed out, "political Zionism succeeded in creating a state called Israel, a Hebrew nation in a part of historical Palestine." We cited Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and peace activist who had proclaimed some years earlier that Zionism was dead. We also drew on the ideas of Hillel Kook (1915-2001), a former envoy of the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization, who did more than anyone to rescue European Jews from the Shoah. I met Kook in Israel in 1978 and became captivated by his arguments for a secular understanding of Israeli identity–a national identity based on Hebrew language and culture, and not merely religion. In this "post-Zionist era" the conflict was not one between Arab and Jew but between Arab Palestinians and Hebrew Palestinians. Kook’s important distinction, we argued, paved the way for a two-state solution, based on territorial compromise between the Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking Palestinians.

The problem–then and now–with this formulation is that messianic Zionism did not die with the establishment of the State of Israel. Unfortunately, messianic Zionism continues to thrive in the hearts of a sizable minority of Israelis–just as political Islam, under the banner of Hamas, has gained increasing support among Palestinians. And even the majority of Israelis still find it unthinkable to repudiate the notion that Israel is a "Jewish" state rather than a Hebrew-speaking secular state in which Jewish culture and religion are merely components of Israel’s national identity.

"Messianic Zionism’s claim of a Jewish right to Eretz Israel, the biblical Holy Land," we wrote in The Nation in 1981, "impels modern Israelis to conclude, as did an early Zionist, Dr. Arthur Ruppin, in 1936, ‘It is our destiny to be in a state of continual warfare with the Arabs.’" Messianic Zionism cannot afford to compromise, precisely because it claims to speak for all Jews, everywhere, and not just the Hebrews of Israel. The editorial quoted Golda Meir telling a group of battle-hardened soldiers on the Golan Heights in the midst of the 1973 October War, "If all the blood that was shed in keeping Israel alive was only for the 3 million [Israelis] of today, it is not worthwhile."

Such a sentiment is an obfuscation of reality. Meir’s messianic Zionism would have Hebrew-speaking Israelis fight and die on behalf of a non-Hebrew-speaking Jewish Diaspora that has no intention of ever making aliyah–immigrating (literally, "ascending") to Israel. This makes no sense, and furthermore, it belittles the interests of those Hebrew-speaking Israelis who are trying to make a life for themselves and their families in a country constantly at war. (In 1947 Rabbi Judah Magnes, then president of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said, "If I do not want a Jewish state, it is because I do not want perpetual war with the Arabs.")

If Israel had been at peace these past six decades, perhaps messianic Zionism would have naturally withered away. But there is no peace, and the ongoing conflict continually reinforces tribalism, religiosity and messianic sentiments. Paradoxically, Israel is being torn in two radically different directions. As the Israeli-American historian Bernard Avishai observes, "We are now in a society that is more democratic, more liberal, more secular, more Israeli–but yet, ironically, more Israeli Jewish." What he means by "Israeli Jewish" is "a Jewish culture that is more overtly halakhic"–that is, a society governed by rabbinical courts and religious ritual.

About 76 percent of Israel’s population–or 5.4 million people–define themselves as Jewish. But while most Israelis are still culturally secular, some 1.5 million others are divided into two main streams: the nationalist religious and the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim. And because of their high birthrates, the Orthodox community as a whole is growing rapidly. By definition, the Orthodox are antisecular, and over the years they have succeeded in imposing many of their archaic rules on the secular majority. They determine who is a Jew and who is not, and sometimes what is culturally forbidden. They have the political muscle to persuade the state to fund their religious schools. The ultra-Orthodox, primarily concerned with pursuing religious studies, get their young men and women exempted from military service. The national religious, for their part, form the backbone of the settlers’ movement to colonize the occupied territories, and they have moved in great numbers into the army, transforming that formerly overwhelmingly secular institution. Both the nationalist religious and the ultra-Orthodox ardently believe in their right to live in an exclusively Jewish state–which helps to explain why in some polls a near-majority of Israelis say they would like to see their government "support the emigration of Arab citizens." A small majority openly opposes equal rights for Israeli Palestinians.

This is, to say the least, a highly undemocratic sentiment. But it has become quite clear that the Orthodox cherish "state Judaism" over democracy. Even the Hebrew spoken by the Orthodox, saturated as it is with archaic religious concepts and overtones, seems to reinforce tribalism. For the Orthodox, all politics comes down to one question: is it good for the Jews? As Avishai observes in his deeply incisive book The Hebrew Republic: "You cannot live in Hebrew and expect no repercussions from its archaic power. You cannot live in a state with an official Judaism, in addition to this Hebrew, and expect no erosion of citizenship. You can, as most Israelis do, speak the language, ignore the archaism, and tolerate the Judaism. But then you should not expect your children to understand what democracy is."

I am under no illusion that Avishai’s–and the late Hillel Kook’s–argument for a "Hebrew Republic" will soon persuade the American public, let alone most Israelis. But the vision for a peaceful resolution to the conflict has been put forth by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders. My childhood neighbor Sari Nusseibeh, now the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, and Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s internal intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, co-signed in 2002 a simple one-page outline for a two-state solution that they have couched as a citizens’ initiative. It has now collected a quarter-million Israeli and just slightly fewer Palestinian signatories. As Ayalon put it, "The only way to force the leaders to finally sign a deal is by first winning over both peoples." Their plan calls for borders to be drawn on the basis of the 1967 lines, with possible exchanges of land on a one-to-one basis; the establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of both states, with Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sovereignty; and the return of Arab refugees only to the new Palestinian state, albeit with the establishment of an international compensation and rehabilitation fund, with Israeli participation, "in cognizance of the suffering" the refugees have endured. (A similar proposal, known as the Geneva Accord, announced shortly after the Nusseibeh-Ayalon plan by former Israeli cabinet member Yossi Beilin and Palestinian Authority negotiator Yasir Abed-Rabbo, also attracted wide domestic and international support.)

The Israelis and Palestinians need to see each other and acknowledge each other’s historical narrative. The Palestinians need to acknowledge the Shoah and come to understand that their adversary is heavily burdened by a history of victimhood. Likewise, Jewish Israelis need to accept the Nakba as a core part of the Israeli-Palestinian experience. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close. But at least for the Palestinians, the Nusseibeh-Ayalon plan implicitly contains an Israeli apology insofar as it requires the explicit participation of Israel in the compensation and rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees. Perhaps this is not enough for some Palestinians. Perhaps some symbolic quotient of "return" is also required. But a settlement along these lines would eventually transform the "Jewish state" into a democratic Hebrew Republic.

No one is ready to accept this scenario. But this is what should happen–and in time, I dare say, it will happen. I would like to think that before this century is over, Israel will become a republic with a constitution that guarantees fully equal rights for both its Hebrew-speaking and its Arabic-speaking citizens. Perhaps someday Israel’s language rather than its religion will define its national identity. Israel can gradually shed its theocratic aspects and erect a twenty-first-century "iron wall" between synagogue and state. A constitution will strip the rabbinical courts of any political powers or privileges. The physical wall that today divides Israelis from Palestinians living in the West Bank will be torn down. There will be no Mandelbaum Gates–but instead, open borders, free trade and a healthy, multicultural and economic interchange between all the peoples of ancient Palestine. There will probably be an Arabic-speaking Palestinian republic, quite possibly composed of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the West Bank and Gaza. All of this will be possible, even necessary, because a hundred years in the future "sovereignty" won’t mean what it does today. No doubt, many thousands of "Hebrews" of Jewish ancestry will be living in the Palestinian state–just as there will be a sizable number of Arabic-speaking Palestinians, Muslim and Christian, living in the Israeli republic.

Perhaps the two republics will be federated. But in some way, somehow, these two peoples will be living together and sharing a land once periodically drenched in blood. That’s my vision. I think its realization is inevitable, however unlikely it may seem today. But I am also certain that a hundred years from now, people will look back to the early twenty-first century and wonder at the fools who delayed peace with their messianic notions.

In his interviews and writings over the past decade, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly talked about America’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He believes (incorrectly) that it was the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender–and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on America that will shock us into retreating from the Middle East.

For an Administration that believes that the only thing it has to fear is the absence of fear, Osama’s threat is a helpful reminder that we live in a dangerous world. “It may only be a matter of time,” President Bush’s recently installed CIA director, Porter Goss, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, “before Al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.”

While such threats cannot be ignored, it is important to historicize and contextualize them if we are to understand how we have contributed to undermining our own security. There were alternative policies at the beginning of the nuclear age that our government could have followed–and could still promote–that would have mitigated the dangers we face today. There were people then, as now, who recognized that the knowledge of how to construct and deploy atomic bombs could not be kept secret for long. And there were people then, as now, who recognized that such bombs could be smuggled into major urban areas–meaning there is no defense against nuclear terrorism. Chief among those who clearly saw the nuclear future–as we have lived and are living it–was the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, who developed a plan for a nuclear-free world and did his best to promote this alternative path.

The history of Oppenheimer’s failure to contain the nuclear genie makes clear that unilateralism and hubris are hardly unique to the Bush Administration; they have been a recurrent characteristic of US decision-making ever since the latter years of World War II. America’s nuclear monopoly was “the great equalizer,” Secretary of War Henry Stimson triumphantly declared in July 1945 at the Potsdam conference upon learning of the success of the atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bomb was our “trump card,” our “ace in the hole,” President Truman and his closest advisers believed. But others, more informed and more thoughtful, like Oppenheimer, realized that the bomb was a Trojan horse that would soon threaten our own security as much as it threatened the security of others. Oppenheimer’s efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the beginning of the atomic age are as applicable today as they were then.

On October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office to meet Truman to discuss his plans to eliminate nuclear weapons. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by stating, “The first thing is to define the national problem, then the international.” Oppenheimer disagreed. “Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem,” he cautiously replied. He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of atomic weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When he replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.” For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman’s limitations. The “incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him,” recalled the Los Alamos scientist Willy Higinbotham.

A week later, on November 2, Oppenheimer returned to the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. Some 500 people packed into the facility’s theater to hear “Oppie” talk about what he called “the fix we are in.” He spoke for an hour–much of it extemporaneously–and his audience was mesmerized; years later, people would say, “I remember Oppie’s speech.” “It is clear to me,” he said, “that wars have changed. It is clear to me that if these first bombs–the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki–that if these can destroy ten square miles, then that is really quite something. It is clear to me that they are going to be very cheap if anyone wants to make them.”

A few days earlier, Truman had given a bellicose “Navy Day” speech in New York in which he had reveled in the atomic addition to America’s military power. The bomb, Truman said, would be held by the United States as a “sacred trust” for the rest of the world, and “we shall not give our approval to any compromises with evil.” Oppenheimer disliked Truman’s triumphalist tone: “If you approach the problem and say, ‘We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,’ then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.”

In late January 1946 Oppenheimer was nevertheless heartened to learn that negotiations begun several months earlier had resulted in an agreement between the Soviet Union, the United States and other countries to establish a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Pressured by veterans of the Manhattan Project and their media supporters, Truman appointed a special committee to draw up a concrete proposal for international control of nuclear weapons.

As the only physicist on the board–indeed, as the only member of the board who knew anything about atomic energy– Oppenheimer naturally dominated their discussions, and he quickly persuaded his fellow panel members to endorse a dramatic and comprehensive plan. Turning to the internationalism of modern science as a model, Oppenheimer proposed an international agency that would monopolize all aspects of atomic energy and apportion its benefits as an incentive to individual countries. Oppenheimer believed that in the long run, “without world government there could be no permanent peace, [and] that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” Since world government was not a prospect, Oppenheimer argued that in the field of atomic energy all countries should agree to a “partial renunciation” of sovereignty.

Under his plan, the proposed Atomic Development Authority would have sovereign ownership of all uranium mines, atomic power plants and laboratories. No nation would be permitted to build bombs–but scientists everywhere would still be allowed to exploit the atom for peaceful purposes. Complete and total transparency would make it impossible for any nation to marshal the enormous industrial, technical and material resources necessary to build an atomic weapon in secrecy. Oppenheimer understood that one couldn’t un-invent the weapon; the secret was out. But one could construct a system so transparent that it would at least provide ample warning if a rogue regime set about to make an atomic weapon.

Soon afterward, Oppenheimer’s draft plan, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, was optimistically submitted to the White House. But optimism was misplaced. While Secretary of State James Byrnes made a pretense of saying that he was “favorably impressed,” he was in fact shocked by the sweeping scope of the report’s recommendations. A day later he persuaded Truman to appoint his business partner, Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, “to translate” the Administration’s proposals to the United Nations. When Oppenheimer read the news, he told his Los Alamos friend Willy Higinbotham, by then president of the newly created Federation of Atomic Scientists, “We’re lost.”

In private, Baruch was already expressing “great reservations” about the Acheson-Lilienthal Report’s recommendations. Like his advisers, Baruch was alarmed by the idea that privately owned mines might be taken over by an international Atomic Development Authority. (Both Baruch and Byrnes happened to be board members of and investors in Newmont Mining Corporation, a major company with a large stake in uranium mines.) And, as far as atomic weapons were concerned, Baruch thought of the US bomb as a “winning weapon.” In short order negotiations broke down completely over the question of “penalties.” Why, Baruch asked, was there no provision for the punishment of violators of the agreement? He thought a stockpile of nuclear weapons should be set aside and automatically used against any country found in violation.

Disregarding the opinion of most scientists, Baruch decided that the Soviet Union would not be able to build its own atomic weapons for at least two decades, and thus that there was no need to relinquish the American monopoly anytime soon. Consequently, the plan he intended to submit to the UN would substantially amend–indeed, fundamentally alter–the Acheson-Lilienthal proposals: The Soviets would have to give up their right to a veto in the Security Council over any actions by the new atomic authority; any nation violating the agreement would immediately be subjected to an attack with atomic weapons; and, before being given access to any of the secrets surrounding the peaceful uses of atomic energy, the Soviets would have to submit to a survey of their uranium resources. What Baruch was proposing was not cooperative control over nuclear energy but an atomic pact designed to prolong the US monopoly.

On June 14, 1946, Baruch presented his plan to the UN, dramatically stating that he offered the world “a choice between the quick and the dead.” As Oppenheimer and his colleagues had predicted, it was promptly rejected by the Soviet Union, which proposed as an alternative a simple treaty to ban the production or use of atomic weapons. The Truman Administration rejected the Soviet response out of hand. Negotiations continued in a desultory fashion for many months, but to no end.

An early opportunity had been lost to make a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear-arms race between the two major powers. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before a US administration in the 1970s would propose a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then it was too late to prevent an arms race and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer’s anguish was real and deep. Every day the newspaper headlines gave him evidence that the world might once again be on the road to war. “Every American knows that if there is another major war,” he wrote in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on June 1, 1946, “atomic weapons will be used.” This meant, he argued, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. “We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world–Great Britain and the United States–used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

He had made this observation earlier in a speech at Los Alamos, but to publish it in 1946 was an extraordinary admission. Less than a year after the events of August 1945, the man who had instructed the bombardiers exactly how to drop their atomic bombs on the center of two Japanese cities had come to the conclusion that he had supported the use of atomic weapons against “an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

A major war was not Oppenheimer’s only worry. Sometime that year he was asked in a closed Senate hearing room “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city.” Oppenheimer responded, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” When a startled senator then followed by asking, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer quipped, “A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].” There was no defense against nuclear terrorism–and he felt there never would be. International control of the bomb, he later told an audience of Foreign Service and military officers, was “the only way in which this country can have security comparable to that which it had in the years before the war. It is the only way in which we will be able to live with bad governments, with new discoveries, with irresponsible governments such as are likely to arise in the next hundred years, without living in fairly constant fear of the surprise use of these weapons.” Today he would add Osama bin Laden’s terrorists to his list.

A quarter-century after the end of the Vietnam War, and eleven years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, it has become commonplace to say that we Americans have no consensus on foreign policy. Across the political spectrum, left or right, most Americans still cling to whatever assumptions they held during our long journey through the cold war. Having inhaled the sweet narcotic of a false triumphalism, Washington’s foreign-policy elite talk as if America’s “soft power” can prevail in nearly every instance. And where it cannot–as in Colombia’s narco-civil war or against the specter of “international terrorism” in Afghanistan or Sudan–Republicans and Democrats alike sanction cruise-missile diplomacy or outright military interventionism reminiscent of Vietnam. Naturally, such behavior reinforces the anti-interventionist instincts of citizens on the liberal-left. But here–as in many aspects of foreign policy–I believe the American left has failed, perhaps understandably, to face up to a new set of post-cold war imponderables. It has also failed to take advantage of this post-cold war period to put forth truly fresh ideas on matters ranging from nuclear weapons to the environment.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism–but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism. To put it bluntly, the lessons we learned from Washington’s bloody-minded intervention in Vietnam have little relevance in dealing with ethnic cleansing or oppression in Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, East Timor and Kosovo. And though the victims of these internal wars cry out for our help–and the aggressors are invariably thuggish regimes–the American left remains divided on how to respond.

This is understandable precisely because the duration and intensity of the cold war make it difficult to remember what might have been. Sadly, in our determination to oppose nuclear brinkmanship and other idiocies that marked Washington’s foreign policy for forty-four years (1945-89), we have forgotten our basic radical principles and the common-sensical path not taken at the end of World War II. Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers had for postwar American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations–these were all ideas of the progressive left. Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were initially conceived as vehicles for internationalizing the New Deal.

And then in the spring of 1945, Harry Truman became the accidental President. A narrow-minded man–a product of the Pendergast machine in Kansas City–Truman purged Washington of New Deal visionaries. An insecure liberal, Truman felt compelled to protect his right flank by authorizing internal security review boards. The subsequent witch hunt that we call McCarthyism was very much a bipartisan affair, designed to suppress dissent against the growing consensus of cold war liberalism. We can blame Truman and his supporters in the foreign-policy establishment for a host of missed opportunities during the cold war. They slammed the door on nuclear disarmament by deciding to make nuclear weapons the centerpiece of the nation’s defense. They militarized the cold war by deciding to divide Germany and rearm West Germany within a NATO alliance, a policy that prolonged the cold war at great cost to life and treasure. By closing the door to trade and engagement, by hardening the lines of cold war confrontation, they postponed for years the very real potential for liberalization within the Soviet Union after Stalin.

Elsewhere, Truman reversed Roosevelt’s support for decolonization of French, British and other European outposts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Instead, Washington spent billions of dollars propping up any regime of corrupt mandarins willing to mouth the slogans of anti-Communism. In short, the cold war legacy begun by Truman was a democratic disaster. Nor were these policies inevitable. There was a choice. In 1945, at the beginning of the cold war, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the cold war as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945–before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

This collection of essays underscores that we on the left, for all our differences, share common instincts. All of us are profoundly suspicious, as Bruce Cumings puts it in his sweeping essay on the America Ascendancy, of what he calls “the celebration of a ‘globalization’ that is uncomfortably close to Americanization.” As Robert Borosage argues, our foreign-policy budget priorities are irrational. We should be spending far, far less on defense against nonexistent enemies and investing far, far more on economic development abroad–as well as at home.

We desperately need to engage with the world–and not just dominate it with our marketplace. The problem, as Sherle Schwenninger, writes, is that the United States is both a revolutionary force in global culture and a status quo power: “A revolution as sweeping as globalization simultaneously creates the need for a new order.” Some kind of global governance is necessary–but to be effective and to command any legitimacy it will require “international bodies that pool state sovereignty.” As Jonathan Schell has earlier argued in these pages, the United States needs to revisit its first comprehensive approach to nuclear weapons–their abolition, as proposed in 1946 by the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan. That plan–drafted by J. Robert Oppenheimer–was derailed by Soviet-American tensions that would shortly fracture the World War II alliance and bring on the cold war. “The end of the cold war,” Schell says, “has presented the most promising opportunity of the entire nuclear age to deliver the world from nuclear danger. The alternative, heralded by the new nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan (the first nuclear arms race having no relationship to the cold war) and the stalemate of traditional arms control, is unlimited, uncontrolled proliferation leading toward what some have called ‘nuclear anarchy’–a state of affairs incompatible with any tolerable vision of the world’s future.”

Similarly, the World Bank and the IMF should not be abetting those governments that spend scarce resources on buying weapons instead of educating their children. We need an authentic UN, a viable International Criminal Court and a standing UN army to enforce recognized international law. And all this means lending pieces of our sovereignty to the global community. We need to work cooperatively with all countries, rather than see them as, at best, temporary allies.

As William Greider writes in his essay, “The choice is not between global engagement defined by the multinationals and right-wing, pull-up-the-drawbridges nationalism. The historic opening–ironically, advanced by the globalizing marketplace itself–is to envision a world without empires of any kind.” Mark Hertsgaard argues that we should use our vast power in the international marketplace to penalize those who pollute the environment. And Kumi Naidoo suggests that much of this agenda can be pushed by using our resources under international law to encourage civil society.

In all these issues of global governance, America needs to share its power. On this much we agree. Many of us will remain in disagreement, however, on the divisive question of humanitarian interventionism. This hot-button issue is discussed in a round-table debate by Holly Burkhalter, Mahmood Mamdani, Ronald Steel, Mary Kaldor and David Rieff. Even here, there is more common ground than one might think.

Most of us will agree with Burkhalter’s instinct that the prevention and suppression of genocide is a vital interest. In principle, this means we need to aid fellow democrats, particularly those democrats defending a secular, multicultural society from the attacks of ethnic cleansers. In some instances–as in Rwanda’s horrifying genocide or Serbia’s meticulously planned campaign of ethnic cleansing–this may mean, as Rieff maintains, going to war. But in most cases, I think Kaldor is right to suggest that “humanitarian intervention is much more like policing than warfighting.” And in any case, many of us will agree with Steel’s and Mamdani’s reservations. Foreign intervention may be necessary when a whole nation or tribe is targeted for genocidal extermination. But as Steel puts it, “A humanitarian impulse could, through abuse, become a geopolitical nightmare.”

The world is a complicated place, and, as Rieff argues, we can’t take the politics out of foreign-policy-making. There are difficult political choices to be made in pursuing a foreign policy based on human rights. Nevertheless, the painful human costs associated with the rush to globalization–as well as the costs associated with ethnic conflict and environmental pollution–can be salved by the messy, even cumbersome, judicial tools of a democratic civil society. Whatever the cultural context, civil society is defined by certain universal principles common to every human community. So maybe, after all, we do have some consensus. Certain truths are indeed self-evident: Ultimately, our foreign policy should be wedded to a radical defense of all human rights. Such a policy was broadly defined by Franklin Roosevelt when he talked about an attainable world in which there would be not only freedom of speech and worship but also freedom from want and fear. We are at a crossroads–much like the crossroads Roosevelt faced in 1945. Our nation’s wealth and power are such that Americans can’t escape responsibility for good or ill in this new century. We should be making bold, openhearted choices now, in the light of day–lest we be forced to choose a path in the dark crisis of some new and different cold war.