Diplomatic Delusions

Robert Malley is an American diplomat with decades of experience in the Middle East. He served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, was a member of the U.S. peace team, and participated in the Camp David summit. He served in the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, presided over the International Crisis Group, and served as President Joe Biden’s U.S. envoy for Iran. Now a lecturer at Yale University, he discusses with The Ideas Letter the structural obstacles that reveal much of the Middle East–peace discourse to be delusional. 

Leonard Benardo: I wonder whether we might commence with the conflict du jour, the struggle with Iran. As a person so instrumental in working to achieve the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action  (the Iran nuclear deal) under President Obama, what runs through your mind as we witness the current exchange of missiles and the like, and the possibility of the U.S. entering the conflict? And not to wade too deeply into the perilous game of counter-history, but what might we be seeing today if the JCPOA had never been repealed? 

Robert Malley: The 2015 JCPOA is not a bad place to start, though there are so many layers and so many dates behind that date that it would be good to mine some questions: Why the U.S. fixation with Iran? Why the ingrained hostility? What does this say about our political culture and the habits of our foreign policy, not to mention what it says about the Islamic Republic’s political culture and the habits of its foreign policy? And also this: why do Democrats in general, and progressives in particular, so often find themselves on the back foot when seeking to argue the merits of diplomacy over war and of restraint over interventionism, which has been true time and time again, especially when it comes to Iran? 

To return to the JCPOA, President Obama was convinced that, short of an agreement with the Islamic Republic, the choice at some point would boil down to bombing Iran or accepting an Iran with a bomb, to use an irritating, counter-productive, and hackneyed formulation rich with unspoken assumptions. Obama wanted neither of those two outcomes, which is why he directed his administration to do what it could to reach an understanding that would verifiably block Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon. A few things are, I believe, beyond dispute: the deal held Iran to rigorous transparency mechanisms, beyond any formerly agreed to by anyone in peacetime, so that the International Atomic Energy Agency would know what Iran was doing; the deal banned any high-level enrichment and the accumulation of significant quantities of even low-enriched uranium for 15 years; it constrained the kind of research and development Iran would need to meaningfully expand its program; and, importantly, Iran was fully abiding by the deal, even for some time after America’s withdrawal, something even the first Trump administration was compelled to admit. 

One of the chief criticisms of the deal was that some of its most important provisions would sunset. By 2030, Iran’s nuclear program would have been unconstrained in several significant ways. I recall Obama telling us then: A decade is a long time; many things can happen in the interim; my goal is to give my successor and my successor’s successor the opportunity to explore and negotiate a more lasting outcome without the pressure of a galloping Iranian nuclear effort. And if such an outcome proves to be unachievable, I want to ensure they have the space and time to decide what to do about that. So yes, not perfect, but no deal is, and it certainly beat the status quo ante or, in our view at the time, any of the realistically available alternatives. 

Fast forward to today. On the eve of the Israeli and US strikes, both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump were saying that Iran had never been closer to a bomb. How close is a matter of debate, but “closer” than ever, absolutely. But what they meant as an indictment sounded more like admissions of guilt. The reason Iran was closer than ever is because in 2018, pressed by Netanyahu, Trump unilaterally tore up the JCPOA. Iran’s turbo-charged enrichment program began only after the U.S. violated the deal, which makes it not a little ironic that those same two leaders were leading the charge for a military solution to a problem their earlier actions mightily helped to produce.  

As for the situation in the wake of the military strikes, I’d say a few things. Iran’s nuclear program has been very seriously degraded but the world has far less visibility into that program, and Iran’s leaders have far greater incentive to try to build a bomb. I seriously question whether that is a better place to be than with the U.S. abiding by the deal and seeking to build on it in the future.  

Do I know where precisely we would be today had the U.S. kept its word? No, not with any certainty. I suspect the U.S. and its European partners would have tried to negotiate a follow-on agreement of longer duration in exchange for greater sanctions relief. I do not know whether those talks would have succeeded and, if they had not, what the implications would have been. But now we truly are entering into the overly speculative world of counterfactuals: would the sustainment of the deal and Iran’s (relatively greater) integration in the world economy have had any impact on other regional dynamics? Would that have led to other changes in the U.S.-Iran relationship? Would it have affected how Iran dealt with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and, in turn, how those three groups would have acted? It’s interesting to think about all that, but unfortunately of little moment today. 

One thing is for sure: Iran’s nuclear program would not have reached the advanced stage it did, and, in that parallel universe, Trump and Netanyahu could not credibly claim that Iran was closer than ever to a bomb. It’s a lesson for all those who cheered military action. And it’s why I, like so many others, look at what is unfolding, with all its death, destruction, and undetermined longer-term consequences, with a profound sense of waste. 

LB: The questions you raise at the beginning, Rob, are tantalizing. If I might just focus on one of them: what is your current view on why Democrats seem to be perpetually on the back foot when pressing for diplomacy? I say “current view,” because I wonder whether your conception of Democratic flaccidity has changed over the last decade or more. How do you understand this back-footedness? 

RM: It’s a question with which I have repeatedly struggled because I have seen so many of the issues I’ve worked on fall victim to this self-defeating tendency. It’s a strange phenomenon—call it “throat clearing”—this inclination among so many Democrats to begin any potentially controversial policy statement with a series of ritualistic articles of faith designed to firmly establish one’s credibility and one’s credentials but that end up doing the opposite. It is illustrated in the compulsion to begin any statement critical of Israel with the obligatory homily about our “ironclad” or “unshakeable” alliance. It was in stark evidence during the latest presidential election, when Democrats proudly showcased the Cheneys’ support for Kamala Harris, as if that were the ticket to foreign policy respectability. And it is why Democratic statements in support of the JCPOA during Trump’s first term were preceded by a recognition of its flaws, how imperfect it was, the imperative to renegotiate a “longer, stronger” deal to remedy the flaws and perfect the imperfections. Those pronouncements, designed to demonstrate the tough-mindedness of JCPOA proponents, at once conceded their opponents’ main point, narrowed their margin of maneuver, and raised the fundamental question: if you are now determined to renegotiate what you once proudly presented as Obama’s signature achievement, why did you sign up to it in the first place?  

I understand the impulse and the purpose of such rhetorical and political acrobatics among those who fear being labeled weak, particularly if one bears in mind a Cold War history during which this was the favored, and often successful, Republican playbook against Democrats, from Stevenson to McGovern to Dukakis. Clinton did what he could to break the mold, and Democrats made an implicit vow never again to be vulnerable to the charge of wimpishness. But the truth is that genuflecting to your opponents’ positions or personalities does not project strength; the opposite. It signals that you need your rivals’ imprimatur to bolster the credibility of your own uncertain posture. It means voluntarily surrendering a key point and then hoping to salvage something from the wreck—defining the terms of the debate in disadvantageous ways, acknowledging that the other side is basically right before trying to prove why it’s also wrong. It’s why I described Democrats as so often being on their back foot. 

The reflex also is oddly anachronistic at a time when a growing number of voters, from both parties, appear increasingly apprehensive of U.S. belligerency and militarism. It’s at least worth  noting that in virtually every election since 2008, the less bellicose candidate, the one who more forcefully condemned our forever wars and sought to break from foreign policy orthodoxy (Obama against Hillary Clinton, then against McCain and Romney; Trump against Clinton and then against Harris) ultimately won.  

It’s a reason why, along with several colleagues, I have argued that we need to take a page out of Trump’s playbook. Because he defies the laws of political and diplomatic gravity, because he does not feel in the least indebted to the foreign policy establishment, he can do things to which his predecessors may have aspired but never would have dared. He is not constrained by precedent, convention, or process. He can slay taboos and authorize direct talks with Hamas; shake hands with the Syrian president, a former jihadist-turned-statesman, and lift all sanctions on his country with the stroke of a pen; strike a separate deal with the Houthis; consider lifting parts of the primary embargo on Iran, and get away with it. As I’ve said before, it’s hard not to be simultaneously terrified at the thought of the damage he can cause with such power and awed by his willingness to brazenly shatter so many harmful sacred tenets. Democrats would be well served by a president who, like Trump, is free from the conventions of the foreign policy establishment, but, unlike him, is not captive to their own ego; one who is not in pursuit of the blob’s endorsement but not in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement either. 

LB: Pursuant to Iran, how aware do you think lawmakers (even the most discerning) have been about the sociological and political state of Iran? What understanding was there, especially following the uprisings in 2009–10, or those in 2022 after the killing of Mahsa Amini, of the complexities within Iranian society? 

RM: It’s a fair question, though I’m not sure I can provide a fair answer—and, frankly, I am unconvinced that increased awareness would have produced different policy stances. First, as to the level of awareness, very few Americans have a full grasp of Iranian realities, and I include myself among those whose knowledge is limited. The U.S. has not had a presence in Iran for decades and travel is very rare (for good reason, given the Islamic Republic’s policy of hostage-taking). There are some excellent scholars and academics, but that’s not the same as first-hand knowledge. As for the large Iranian diaspora, its views run the political gamut, which makes it easy to listen to those with whom one is inclined to agree.  

Second, regarding the impact of heightened knowledge on policymaking: members of Congress for the most part are not poring over sociological data when crafting policy, any more than members of the executive branch. It’s not how this works. Take the issue of sanctions, and how they affect Iranian society. I have my own views, shaped both by my more general skepticism toward economic coercion and by a number of academic studies that strongly suggest that U.S. sanctions have impoverished the Iranian people, hollowed the middle class, and strengthened the hold of regime insiders with the tools to adapt to—and benefit from—an economy of scarcity. Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and his colleagues have done remarkable work in this field.  

The Revolutionary Guards in particular have been the best placed to access goods on the international market via informal channels, and then to use their monopoly power to extract hefty profits when they resell the goods domestically. Raise this point with most members of Congress or the executive branch and you’ll get a blank stare. Because, they will say, sanctions inevitably translate into less money for the regime, and less money for the regime automatically means fewer resources available to fund tools of repression, foreign militias, the nuclear program, and so on. Sanctions also translate, under this logic, into a weakened Iranian position at the negotiating table and a greater willingness to concede on other issues in order to obtain the sanctions’ loosening. Weighed against such considerations, the minutiae and the longer-term consequences of sanctions are of little relevance. 

It’s noteworthy that the Biden administration came into office pledging to take a harder look at U.S. sanctions policies and their sometimes catastrophic humanitarian consequences. It did, to be fair, introduce some changes designed to better carve out humanitarian exemptions. But on a high-profile case such as Iran, it was hard to discern much of a difference: sanctions were good; more sanctions were better. When officials were asked by Congress or members of the press what the administration was doing in response to the latest Iranian outrage, an answer stood at the ready: a list of additional sanctions whose economic impact was dubious, but whose political benefits were clear-cut.  

LB: I would like us to take a biographical step back if we could. You have written in the past very eloquently about your father and his political commitments. Can you briefly recap some of those commitments, and which of them you feel have been of particular influence on your own?  

RM: I will answer this one very briefly, and for those who want a little more, I’ll direct them to Hussein Agha’s and my just-published book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine! My father was an inveterate outsider, a position he seemed to relish. His Jewish origins set him apart in overwhelmingly Muslim Egypt; his militant Arab nationalism and staunch Palestinian advocacy alienated him from much of the Jewish community and his own family. When he moved to the United States in 1945, he never tired of condemning American foreign policy, especially toward what was then called the Third World, and in 1980 he was kicked out of France, where he had moved to found a Third Worldist magazine, because he inveighed against African and Arab regimes aligned with Paris and backed revolutionary movements across the globe. I disagreed with a number of his views, which I considered overly dogmatic, and felt that, in his rejection of one set of harmful orthodoxies, he embraced another. But I have no doubt that I owe my desire to put myself in other peoples’ shoes, my sensitivity to American (and European) double standards, and my awareness of the gap between how the United States views itself and how others view it, to both my parents.   

LB: Let’s touch on your book if we could for a moment. Hussein Agha and you authored a series of essays some years ago for the New York Review of Books on the vicissitudes of negotiations around resolving the Israel-Palestine question. Is this book taking stock of all that, and looking back on what’s transpired? You write in your last reply about your insistent focus on double standards on the part of Europeans and Americans. What are the most obvious double standards you would point to as you look back at the longue durée of negotiations with the U.S. and Europe acting as core interlocutors? Were those double standards magnified or diminished in the case of the Biden administration? 

RM: First, a shout-out to the legendary Bob Silvers, without whom I don’t know if or when we would have found a home for our first piece, which challenged the reining orthodoxy about the 2000 Camp David Summit with Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. Several magazines turned us down. Bob did not, and the New York Review of Books became the most welcoming of publications. 

Hussein and I wrote a series of articles for the NYRB, driven by a number of questions that Hussein in particular would raise with genuine frustration, addressed at me as a once and future U.S. official: why did we continue to cling to the two-state solution when all evidence pointed to its demise? What could explain this delusion or deceit? What purposes or interests were served by its perpetuation? And, of course, what might lie on the other side of the lie? So, yes, our book looks back—with the benefit of many more years chasing this mirage—at the disconnect between the official peace-process jargon and the deeper, more authentic feelings of Israelis and Palestinians, at the U.S. role in preserving the falsehood, and where it leaves us. When we say that “tomorrow is yesterday,” we mean that, with the illusions of the Oslo process shattered, the veneer of a diplomatic endeavor erased, Israelis and Palestinians find themselves back where they once were: without any common vision; a Palestinian movement bereft of leadership or collective outlook; Palestinians contemplating isolated acts of violence and revenge until such time as a new national grouping consolidates; Israel at once all-powerful, reaching well beyond its borders, and beleaguered; and options for the future that run the gamut from ethnic cleansing to various forms of coexistence short of peace and short of hard partition into two states, among other trends that echo the past. Even the vocabulary is a throwback: nakba, genocide, pogrom, Zionism-as-racism, Jordan-as-Palestine.  

You ask about Western double standards applied to the conflict—well, that is not merely an echo from the past, it has been a constant: past, present, and almost certainly future. But inconsistency is not surprising; for any policymaker, anywhere, I suspect it is an occupational hazard. What is striking about American pronouncements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not merely the hypocrisies. It is their magnitude as well as the outright falsehoods that, as we write, fool nobody and that U.S. officials must know fool nobody. The list of these inconsistencies is long. To name a few: some occupations are more illegal than others; some people have the right to resist occupation, others not; some countries and leaders deserve to be held internationally accountable, others not so much, etc. The list of past deceptions is also long—about the role of the U.S., its commitment to the two-state solution, to international law, and so forth. Both the inconsistencies and the deceptions have been in particularly stark view since October 7, 2023, because of the very different standard applied to the contemporaneous Russian invasion of Ukraine, and because of how blatant some of the untruths have been under the Biden administration (for example, that the U.S. cared equally about Israeli and Palestinian lives, that it was working tirelessly for a ceasefire, that the failure to achieve a ceasefire was chiefly if not entirely due to Hamas, etc).  

LB: Let’s look back—especially as this coincides with the essence of your new book. Can you point to, say, three historical moments, one during Clinton, one during Obama, and, if we must, one during Biden, where a policy change on the part of the NSC or the State Department could have led to a different outcome? What did policymakers refrain from doing or could have alternatively advanced that might have changed the rules of the game, or at least established a different set of incentives, and might have shifted the state of play? 

RM: I don’t want to dispute the premise of your question—although, why not? As our book tries to show, there are not any specific, individual policy decisions that set the course of events, nor specific policy changes that would have altered it. It is all far more structural than that: a system of ingrained habits, assumed interests, psychological and cultural predispositions, accumulated biases and misunderstandings, as well as political incentives and disincentives. So it wouldn’t make sense to try to extract and highlight particular moments or choices among the myriad made across time and administrations. The reluctance to pressure Israel, the preference for gentle prodding over muscular demands; the endless, illusory quest for “moderate” Palestinians (or Arabs) with the ability to deliver concessions that more representative Palestinians would not; the propensity to subordinate the pursuit of a two-state solution to the attainment of extrinsic objectives such as supporting Israeli interests, stabilizing U.S. relations with the Arab world, creating a front against Iraq or Iran, and weakening militant or Islamist forces; the tendency to view U.S. demonstrations of military authority as indices of power and demonstrations of diplomacy as signs of weakness; the defensiveness with which Democrats defend their positions, to which I referred above; or babbling on about democracy and human rights in theory and ignoring them in practice. These, and many more, are part of a structure of thinking and acting that has been the hallmark of one generation of U.S. policymakers after another.  

This may sound overly harsh, and of course not every administration was alike. My dual experiences under Obama and Biden on the Iran file bear testimony to that. One was committed to reaching a diplomatic understanding and prepared to devote the necessary political capital to that end. The other, not so much. But on the whole, the symptoms I laid out form part of a consistent pattern. The outcome is there for all to see.  

LB: So much of the Israel/Palestine conversation is irrepressibly bad as the situation spirals from catastrophe to catastrophe. Maybe we can finish our own conversation with at least a modestly (I’ll even take a minimally) hopeful eye toward the future. I am not asking you to prognosticate and I am not asking you to design any policy. I would, though, like for you to imagine something better than today and offer any guidance as to how we might get there.  

RM: The first, most urgent priority, of course, is to end the carnage in Gaza—what a growing number of experts and international organizations are calling a genocide. Right now, everything besides that is a detail. And that means making clear to Israel that there are real, meaningful consequences to its imposed famine, indiscriminate killings, and wholesale destruction of the Strip. The fact that European countries continue to cooperate militarily with Israel while choosing this moment to organize a grandiose conference and recognize a fictitious Palestinian state says it all: We won’t do what might make a difference but will settle for what might make us look good. Recognition will not improve the lives of a single Palestinian or Israeli, but it will allow leaders to say they did something, however vacuous and meaningless. 

As for the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as you suggest, it is hard to offer much by way of optimism, as the most likely outcome is a perpetuation—indeed, a serious worsening—of the status quo, with elements of ethnic cleansing and de facto or de jure annexation. But Hussein and I try to offer some ingredients of hope, to counter what would otherwise be a recipe for despair. 

First, the horrendous events of the past two years make it more likely that we can finally recognize the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is not a routine territorial spat that can be settled by drawing lines on a map. It is a profound, existential, visceral struggle between two peoples: one in search of justice and historical redress for decades of dispossession, exile, and destruction, which is hard to distinguish from an erasure of the past, which is hard to reconcile with the existence of a Jewish state; the other in pursuit of absolute security and normalcy, which is hard to distinguish from outright dominion, which is hard to reconcile with the existence of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state. Of course, a conflict of this nature is far more difficult to resolve, which is why so many prefer to take refuge in technical negotiations over boundaries, security arrangements, water rights, and in soothing words about a two-state solution and the like. But what’s the point of opting for the easier solution if it is no solution at all? 

I want to clarify an important point. Some early readers of our book have questioned whether Hussein and I were endorsing an “essentialist” view of Israelis and Palestinians, attributing the violence to ancient, immutable hatreds, and seeing in such feelings reflections of their intrinsic, unchanging and unchangeable nature. Nothing could be further from our point. Our argument is that the conflict itself, and the competing ideas of history and religion and rights to which it gives rise, prompts such emotions, and that the diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict to date have done nothing to change those sentiments, much to the contrary: they have contributed to the current catastrophe, in large part because those efforts have eluded the core of the conflict. Hussein first opened my eyes to this by pointing to two simple realities. On the Israeli side, for so many of its Jewish inhabitants, Tel Aviv matters far less than Hebron; they have a deep, abiding attachment to Eretz Yisrael as a whole and are drawn to its historical, religious significance; for them the borders of 1967 are an artefact. On the Palestinian side, if all that had mattered was the West Bank and Gaza, then what were they fighting about between 1948 and 1967? The national movement began in the diaspora and was led by refugees, who constitute half of the Palestinian population; its goal was not statehood over the West Bank and Gaza but liberation and return. Those issues were swept under the carpet under the guise of seeking a two-state solution. In this sense, the so-called peace process did nothing to fulfill the two peoples’ yearnings or address the genesis of their conflict. The diplomats and the people whose lives they were dealing with were talking, and thinking, past each other. 

This glaring gap between ill and cure reminds me of the many times I heard Israelis declaim that the path to peace lay in modifying Palestinian textbooks—as if what Palestinians read on a piece of paper mattered more than what they experienced every day in terms of oppression and occupation. We need to ask ourselves difficult, painful questions, rather than evade them: why were Palestinians worse off 30 years after Oslo than before? Why is it that decades of peace negotiations have not led to greater mutual understanding and, far from bringing the parties closer to the proclaimed goal of two states, have left them ever more distant from that objective? Why is it that most Palestinians, deep down, sympathized with October 7, and a vast majority of Israelis applauded the carnage that has followed? How is it that, in so many ways, tomorrow is indeed yesterday: in terms of the brutality of the violence; Israel’s attempts to eradicate much of the Palestinian people and their leadership; its willingness to reach across borders—yesterday, Beirut, Tunis, Paris, or Rome; today, Tehran or Doha—to achieve that aim; the absence of a representative national Palestinian movement coupled with growing Palestinian resort to individual, uncoordinated attacks on Israelis; the mainstreaming of an idiom and of ideas (ethnic cleansing, Greater Israel, bi-nationalism) from decades past? Hussein and I absolutely believe that Israelis and Palestinians can coexist peacefully. But doesn’t the fact that—diplomatic efforts notwithstanding—they do not and that from almost every perspective the situation is worse today than 30 years ago, tell us that something went terribly, profoundly wrong and that the entire way of apprehending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was amiss?  

What this means is that there is an opportunity to shake things up, reset the table, and rethink virtually all the pillars of the so-called peace process—what the ultimate objective is or should be, which Israeli and Palestinian actors or constituencies ought to be involved, whether the U.S. should continue to play the role it has played to date, and so forth. The peace-process straightjacket ruled out so much: alternative forms of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence that eschew rigid models of ethnically defined nation-states and may fall short of outright peace; a voice for the Palestinian diaspora or Palestinian citizens of Israel or Palestinian Islamists or Israeli religious groups or settlers; a greater role for Arab states, as well as various forms of activism such as sanctions, truth-and-reconciliation commissions, international accountability and justice. To take a couple of examples: might Israelis and Palestinians begin to meet quietly once again, as they did at various times after 1948 and explore different forms of cohabitation? Now that Palestinians are leaderless and now that the Arab world, has had a taste of how much the region can suffer from the inability to resolve the conflict, might it assume a more active part, and use the framework of the Abraham Accords to seriously advocate on behalf of the Palestinians?  

Finally, to bring this home, I look at what is happening in the United States. When I teach my classes, I always start by asking my undergraduate students what foreign policy event most shaped their outlook. For me, it was two things: The Vietnam war, which I experienced through my parents’ eyes, and America’s invasion of Iraq. Both instances ingrained in me a deep suspicion of the use of U.S. military power and of the invocation of “credibility” to justify pursuing a lost cause—to name but some lessons. And I ask myself: what will the present generation of students, who one day will be in charge of U.S. foreign policy, learn from our times? How will they digest this mix of American impotence, incompetence, feckless moralism, and clear-cut complicity? I don’t have an answer, and I realize the students I teach are not necessarily the most representative. But in our book, Hussein and I speak of a possible moral awakening among the next crop of U.S. policymakers. I don’t by any means wish to suggest we can or should count on it, or count on it overcoming the many obstacles facing a more dramatic rethinking of America’s Mideast policy. Still. If this moment will have produced that change, at least some good will have come out of it. 

Leonard Benardo is senior vice president for the Open Society Foundations.