Peace Is Good

It's not the only good, nor always possible; but it is good, and always worth pursuing

There’s an interesting parallel emerging in left-wing and right-wing narratives about the massacres perpetrated by Hamas that perversely blames Western peace-making for those horrors. I think those narratives are badly under-thought or, in some cases, made in bad faith, and I’m going devote this post to pushing back.

On the right, the claim is that the Biden Administration’s eagerness to get Iran back into the nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama emboldened the Iranians to give the green light to Hamas to perpetrate their atrocities. In its most vulgar form, touted by a variety of Republican candidates for President, the administration’s decision to give Iran access to $6 billion of their money that had been frozen as part of previously-imposed sanctions freed up Iranian funds for Hamas, and therefore President Biden has Israeli blood on his hands. This contention is self-evidently preposterous. The Hamas operation required years of planning, and Iran’s spending on Hamas was never significant enough in the context of its overall budget for even such a large sum to have made it possible for them to provide that support—plus they still haven’t even got their hands on the money so how exactly it could have financed this operation is a mystery. But the larger point behind it deserves a more serious answer. Has the United States, by engaging with Iran in any way, encouraged the Islamic Republic to think it can get away with literal murder? Shouldn’t we rather have pursued a policy of maximum hostility, or even war, so they would never have dared do such a thing?

I don’t believe this analysis holds much water, in the first place because I just don’t think diplomacy is perceived by hostile regimes as a sign of weakness as such. That doesn’t mean diplomatic overtures can’t ever lead to war. Diplomacy can easily be viewed as dangerous by groups opposed to peace, and they may therefore take aggressive and hostile actions that seem likely to scuttle diplomacy—but this isn’t what these right-wing critics are arguing. Somewhat more in line with their narrative, friendly overtures can also encourage a regime to believe that the country making the overtures will be more solicitous of that country’s interests, including its use of force to defend its interests. It’s possible that Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, for example, in part because it misunderstood America’s position and thought America was unlikely to respond with significant force, and America’s support for Iraq in its war against Iran in the previous decade, as well as Ambassador April Glaspie’s somewhat ambiguous language regarding America’s views on its border dispute with Kuwait, may have contributed to this confusion. But it frankly beggars belief that the Iranian regime believed that because the current American administration was trying to renew diplomacy toward restraining their nuclear program, that therefore America was no longer going to support the Jewish State, and Iran could attack it with impunity.

That leaves the fundamental conviction that diplomatic overtures communicate weakness, and that conviction is just false. Start with the fact that states communicate with each other all the time in forms other than threats; it’s only America, the global hegemon, that is supposed to always communicate this way, which tells you all you need to know about what is actually being communicated. But even America cannot make good on every possible threat we might wish to make to secure an outcome we prefer. And there really isn’t anything more provocatively weak than a threat that isn’t credible.

Mind you, I do think the perception of weakness had a lot to do with Hamas’s attack, but the perception was of Israel’s weakness. Part of that perception of weakness was due to the protests tearing the country apart, for which I think most of the blame belongs to Prime Minister Netanyahu personally. Even more important, though, was Israel’s actual weakness: the over-reliance on technology to give warning of an attack across the border with Gaza, the transfer of Israeli troops from that area to protect settlements in the West Bank, and the ignoring of intelligence warnings that something serious was brewing. For these failures, all of the blame belongs to the current Israeli government. Washington’s very limited overtures to Tehran, by contrast, cannot plausibly be blamed for much of anything.

They also can’t be credited with much of anything either, of course, which raises the question of whether they were worth pursuing. Even if you believe that some kind of opening to Iran was available in 2015, the Iranians would have to be idiots to seriously reengage when American foreign policy toward them can so readily swing from one pole to the other with each change of administration—and whatever else the Iranians are, they aren’t idiots. Moreover, Iran’s increasingly overt alignment with Russia makes an opening that much less plausible. Nonetheless, if you roll back to 2015, I thought at that time that the Obama Administration’s overture was a sensible and comprehensible move as part of reducing America’s direct exposure to the region, unwinding the very heavy direct involvement of our military assets and moving back to a posture of offshore balancing and encouraging the powers in the region to take primary responsibility for their own security. And in an important sense, they did work: The main diplomatic fruit of Obama’s move was Trump’s Abraham Accords and the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, for each of whom Iran was the primary security challenge.

Those diplomatic successes, though, are the core of the emerging left-wing anti-peace narrative.

There are three parts to this argument. The first part argues that America’s embrace of regional peace between Israel and other Arab states without first tackling the Palestinian issue has left the Palestinians hopeless, and gave Hamas the opportunity to assert its continued relevance in spectacular fashion. The second part argues that the Abraham Accords and the prospect of a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia underwritten by an American security guarantee to the latter was incredibly threatening to Iran, and that the Iranians gave the green light to Hamas to do their worst so as to provoke a massive Israeli retaliation and thereby scuttle the prospects of the peace that threatened them. Finally, the argument is that by relying on autocrats to make peace over the heads of their anti-Israeli populations, we’re both undermining the long term prospects of peace and forcing those leaders to be more repressive in response to popular discontent.

With regard to Iran, I want to bracket the offer of American security guarantees to Saudi Arabia because the question of how much America should put on the line to achieve Saudi-Israeli rapprochement was and remains an important one, and because explicit security guarantees can be plausibly interpreted as threatening and not merely as defensive. Anyone who doesn’t see that after NATO’s wars in Kosovo and Libya must just not want to see. But having bracketed that one point, peace between formerly hostile countries is good, and peace between countries that each have good relationships with America is even better. It’s more than a little perverse to say that America should not be trying to foster peace between countries we can influence because it will threaten a hostile country where we have little influence. And inasmuch the complaint is that we’re helping other countries in the region work together to resist Iran’s efforts to achieve regional domination, well, what exactly are they advocating instead? That we facilitate Iranian domination? Appeasement is a legitimate strategy, even if it has a bad odor since 1938, but it’s not clear to me what the critics’ strategy actually is in this case.

As for the Palestinians, I’ll say two things. First, if America pursuing peace between Israel and the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, etc. is threatening to the Palestinian cause, how much more so our having brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and between Israel and Jordan. Needless to say, there were those who opposed those accords on precisely those grounds, as an abandonment of the Palestinian cause; Iran is the most prominent entity taking that position today. Properly understood, though, this isn’t a call for a more comprehensive peace; it’s a call for America to join those who want to continue to make war against Israel in the name of justice for the Palestinian cause.

Why, though, would America do that? The Palestinians are, of course, under no obligation to have ever accepted peace on terms that they consider humiliating, and while I don’t think the terms offered at Camp David and Taba were humiliating, it’s not ultimately for me to presume to know how they looked to the Palestinian people (assuming they ever learned the actual terms) or to their leadership. The implication of saying that, though, is it was, and always has been, a choice for the Palestinian leadership to make of what to hold out for. Other countries in the region—including those that have made peace with Israel—have consistently followed their lead on this matter, and the objective result has been a consistent deterioration in the Palestinians’ position. You can admire their persistence or lament it, but it’s still not clear to me why the United States should endorse it any more than we should endorse the views of Israelis about what a just settlement should be. As Matt Yglesias did a very good and evenhanded job of delineating, peace between Israel and the Palestinians is objectively difficult. Advocating that America hold all progress toward peace and all hope for a better life for millions hostage to solving a very difficult political problem strikes me as a very strange position for anyone to take, but especially for anyone nominally on the left.

Phrased more narrowly, of course, it’s a valid conservative objection. As I noted near the top of this piece, those threatened by peace do have an incentive to undermine it with violence. Hamas did have an incentive to do something dramatic to torpedo peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as did Iran. Perhaps that made the pursuit of peace too dangerous to risk. But, by the same token, Palestinian rejectionist groups will have an incentive to torpedo any peace between Israel and the Palestinians—as will Jewish rejectionist groups. To reject peace overtures on that basis is to give rejectionists an effective veto. As it happens, that’s a fairly good description of the Netanyahu policy, and now we see the result.

Finally, there’s the question of authoritarianism. There’s an argument to be made that the United States should simply insulate itself more from the region rather than embed ourselves with its unsavory and sometimes brutal leaders. Again, this is a natural conservative argument rather than a left-wing one. But even on its own terms, it’s hard to see this as an argument against peace-making specifically. Peace with Israel should bring material benefits to the countries that pursue it, should give Israel more of a stake in preserving that peace, and should weaken the appeal of eternal rejectionism domestically. Maybe it won’t achieve any of these things—but how could continued hostility achieve them? Again, if peace-making is rejected, what’s the preferred strategy?

I’d rather argue that while peace was worth pursuing, we should have rationally anticipated the reaction of rejectionists, and prepared for it, diplomatically and militarily, rather than proceeding with blithe confidence that peace was breaking out all over and rejectionists could be safely ignored. This is, among other things, a reason for the United States to continue talking to Iran, if only to have a forum in which to talk, and to listen, to communicate our intentions clearly and try to discern theirs. Even without an unlikely breakthrough, it offers some possibility of preventing some bad decisions by Iran—and, if it fails even in that regard, it enables America to credibly portray those decisions as having been a betrayal of ongoing diplomacy rather than a natural response to the lack of diplomacy.

Far more, it’s a powerful reason for Israel to have pursued a different policy with respect to the Palestinians over the past decade and more. Israel can perhaps have peace with Egypt, with Jordan—maybe even with Saudi Arabia—without addressing the plight of the Palestinians. But it can’t have peace, and they should want peace because peace is good. I have consistently argued against Netanyahu’s policy of ignoring Gaza and tacitly (or even directly) supporting Hamas there while undermining the Palestinian Authority and progressively tightening the screws in the West Bank, a policy that did not begin with this execrable government. It has always been premised on the idea that peace is not only unlikely but actively bad, while domination is good. I think the opposite: I think peace hard to achieve but good, and domination is bad and generally counterproductive.

I try to apply that perspective consistently, whether we’re talking about Russia-Ukraine, China-Taiwan, Israel-Palestine or any number of other conflicts that America isn’t as actively engaged in. “Peace At Any Price” is wrong and “No Justice, No Peace” is also wrong—but the pursuit of peace, and of the conditions that can secure peace, is right, because peace is good. So, I think America’s overtures to Iran were worth making, and even now, when there’s really not much prospect of those overtures leading anywhere, we need to be able to communicate with Iran to prevent our relations from degenerating into outright war. I also think America’s efforts to broker peace between Israel and other Arab states were worth undertaking, and I don’t think the threat they posed to the Palestinian cause or to Iran should have stopped us from pursuing those agreements. And I also think Israel should never have abandoned its efforts to reach some kind of peace with the Palestinians, and that the context of the current war in Gaza makes resuscitating those efforts—however difficult—all the more important.

Because I think peace is good. Not everybody thinks so. Some people think war is not only a necessary evil sometimes but a positive good—a way to keep society unified and strong. Some people thrill to the vicarious experience of violence, or to the sense of history happening. Peace, by contrast, seems dull and stultifying, or a mask for various forms of oppression.

But I think peace is good. If that’s enough to make me a starry-eyed idealist, then we’re even worse off than I thought.