Production and distribution of City Club forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, which is devoted to conversations of consequence, which enable democracy to thrive.

It's Friday, January 26.

I'm Heather Hodges, president and ambassador of the Cleveland Council on World Affairs.

I'm honored to introduce today our forum and our speaker.

And yes, it's true.

This is the fourth time I've introduced Aaron.

It shows that I'm a member of his fan club.

And also it shows that he's good enough to speak here in Cleveland from time to time.

Though headlines are dominated by Ukraine, Israel and Gaza.

Those are just a few of the issues on a lengthy United States foreign policy agenda.

As President Biden ramps up his reelection campaign.

He is faced with an unending list of foreign policy challenges.

China.

China's interest in Taiwan threatens democracy and U.S. investments there develop democracies in Africa need support, and economic and political crises in Central and South America are creating migration challenges that are that are for our country's southern border and border.

Our speaker today, Aaron David Miller, joins us to take a closer look at these issues and more.

Well, considering U.S. foreign policy, diplomacy and efforts to bring about peace around the world, Aaron Miller is a senior fellow and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy between 1978 and 2003.

Miller served as the State Department at the State Department as a historian, analyst, negotiator and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of State.

As a matter of fact, six of them where he helped formulate U.S. policy in the Middle East and Arab, Israeli and the Arab peace process.

Most recently, he was senior adviser for the Arab-Israeli negotiations.

He is the author of five books and is a global affairs analyst for CNN.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And city city club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Aaron Miller.

Heather, thanks so much.

You represent the best of the Foreign Service.

And Dan, thanks again for inviting me.

I really am truly humbled when you look at the photos on the wall of notable speakers are truly quite extraordinary, several of whom I worked for.

It's also great to be back in Cleveland.

Lindsey Grant and his father Alan is turning 103.

And may we come back?

We come back every 6 to 8 weeks to visit him.

So this was a great coincidence.

You know, about three years ago before COVID, when we were coming to Cleveland, I had a conversation with a TSA guy who took took the ticket and checked my driver's license.

They asked me where I was going and I just instinctively said, I'm going home.

I thought to myself, what an intriguing comment.

Lindsey and I have been in Washington for 48 years, 48 years.

And yet that was my sense.

And I thought to myself, it's obviously why I mean, I was born here.

My roots are here.

My family is here, my friends are here.

And the values that shape my life and my outlook on life.

My mother and my father and the extent extended Rattner family Miller Schaeffer and Rattner family.

All of that is is increasingly become even more meaningful over the years.

And my own sense is, yeah, you can take the boy out of Cleveland, but the truth is, you can't take Cleveland out of the boy.

I wish I had the honor.

I had the honor and privilege of working for half a dozen secretaries of state, George Shultz to Colin Powell.

When I left the State Department in January of 2003, shortly before the second Bush administration invaded Iraq.

Powell Colin Powell.

And sadly, I went to funerals.

I went to at the National Cathedral during COVID.

One was Powell.

The other was one of my bosses, Madeleine Albright.

Powell gave me two pieces of advice.

The first piece of advice is, don't ever try to come back.

And the second piece of advice was, don't ever try to look back.

I wholly accepted the first piece.

The 25 years I spent in government from the Middle seventies, late seventies to oh three were extraordinary years.

Whether it will come again, I don't know.

I worked for men and women that were remarkable.

Each in their own way on issues that frankly were tractable and generated a certain measure of hope.

A lot has changed since then, and frankly, for any number of reasons.

I spent the last 20 years in the public conversation.

I rejected Powell second piece of advice was, which was, Don't look back.

I felt obligated to look back both because the taxpayers had paid my salary all those years and because and an obligation to try to sort through what we got right and what we got wrong.

I provided a lot of good advice over the years, but also a lot of bad advice and very hard, extremely difficult to look in the mirror and admit that you didn't get things right, or even worse.

So what I'd like to do is share with you six observations in 30 minutes, which basically that I've gleaned from traveling the negotiators highway all those years.

I'm not here to sell you anything.

My selling days are over.

I'm analyzing with with a degree to try to create a measure of clarity, honesty and integrity, which I think is critically important if you don't get the analysis right.

You see the world only the way you want it to be, not the way it is.

You're going to fail every single time.

If you see the world only the way you want it to be and you don't look at it the way it is, you'll fail.

It's the balance between the way the world is and the way you want it to be or we want it to be.

That usually provides the space in the margin for effective policy.

So again, I'll share these six observations with you.

They mean a lot to me.

They've guided me and I think they're worth a listen.

Number one, Freud may have said that anatomy is destiny, but in foreign policy, geography is destiny.

If you want to understand why America behaves the way it does, what are the attitudes and actions that have shaped our policy?

The constraints, the limitations in the advantages?

Then you have to look first where we are.

I'm from a real estate family.

Where location tripled is the key to success.

Understanding American foreign policy is based on my judgment, on where we are and where are we.

We are the only great power in the history of the world.

There are no exceptions or sandwiched between two non predatory powers to our north and south and fish to east and west.

What one historian would want a historian and we should have been me described is our liquid assets.

These liquid assets, these two oceans afford the United States a margin a unique set of experiences that none of the other countries, small or large, with which we deal have.

I think it explains our arrogance because we have a margin for error that smaller and even larger countries who are shaped by the forces of history and geography, we have this margin for error.

We can make significant mistakes without it having to threaten the political or physical integrity, and it explains their naivete.

We may have understood what it was like for the small power at one point in our history, maybe the late 18th century, when we were precariously perched on the edge of the Eastern Seaboard, 4 million of us, including four, 400,000 slaves with the Brits, the French and the Spanish literally in our backyard.

And yes, the British power in Washington, that was it.

We have an extraordinary sense of security in this country.

And I think it it it to that extent, it's positive, but it also skews the way we look at smaller powers.

Intellectually, we may understand that they're small and they have predatory neighbors.

Emotionally, it's harder for us to grasp because we can't and have never felt that way.

It also explains our idealism.

We have come to believe and it's I think it's a positive and I wouldn't trade this away, that all problems in life and in foreign policy and in the world have solutions.

I wish that were the case.

I mean, I'm turning 75 in March and I've come to the conclusion that that's really not it's not a true statement.

I'm not a religious person, but I'm a devout follower of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that the best you can do is proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

If we could come up with proximate solutions to insoluble problems, both at home and abroad, we'd be way ahead of the game.

We love declaring war on things, war on terror, the war on mental illness, war on poverty, the war on racial justice.

We will win the war on cancer, for sure.

The other wars are much harder because they require systemic change in a country.

Often resistant.

So where we are is critically important because it frees it has freed us to the extent that we, any nation can be freed from the two forces that still capture most countries with which we deal the force of history, which was very heavily, whether it's Russia, China, Egypt, a putative Palestinian state.

Israel and the forces of geography.

Most countries don't have the degree of security and margin for that.

We do.

Number two, leadership, the late British story and John Keegan argued that there were six humans that more or less shaped the politics security of much of the 20th century.

Stalin, Hitler, FDR, Mao Tse tung, Churchill.

He added, Lenin, I would stop with Churchill leaders, two of which were great and good.

We don't have that kind of leadership.

That's why the passing of Nelson Mandela was so important.

Those sorts of leaders.

Greatness in our own politics, they don't exist anymore.

The word great we use I use that word great 50 times a day.

She's a great tennis player.

What a great movie.

Have a great day.

It's lost.

Really?

Meaning, any meaning when it comes to politics.

I briefed a group of Iraqi war vets roughly in their forties and fifties.

I asked them, Give you 10 minutes.

Identify a president or a politician that you would consider great, relatively in your in your life.

Life experience, life span.

They couldn't come up with one.

They asked me, I said, Martin Luther King.

And one of them said, But he was assassinated in 1968.

They said, I rest my case.

It's harder now for America to lead than at any time, in my judgment, in the modern history of the country.

There's a wonderful line from Shakespeare's Henry the fourth.

One character says to the other, You know, I can summon spirits from the vast, deep.

And the other one replies, But so can I.

The question is, do they come when you call Jack Kennedy?

Jack Kennedy.

Love that line.

Love that line.

But leading for America, it is much harder.

It's much harder because not because we're declining.

I don't by that I mean we have deficits now that we haven't had for quite a while.

But we're not not a decline.

We are not a declining power, in my judgment.

But the rest, if you believe Fareed Zakaria, is probably right.

The rest are rising China.

See, I described as a pure competitor, Russia, a power that we in some respects took for granted.

India, the whole global south.

They're not coming when we call.

Partly it's because powers, large and small are determined to frustrate American influence in power China and Russia.

Partly it's because some of the problems that we face today are transnational pandemic climate.

Preservation of biodiversity.

Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

We need cooperation with others.

We can't solve these problems by ourselves.

And then, of course, there is our own predicament at home.

President Biden says we need to lead by the not by the power, by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.

And it's not for nothing.

That Freedom House in their report, two years ago, basically came to a conclusion.

The world's two largest democracies, India and the United States, has suffered backsliding when it came to democratic norms and practices.

So, you know, we can preach all we want, but we have to follow through.

And there are many hypocrisies, anomalies and contradictions in American foreign policy, and there are more apparent in many respects.

That does not mean, however, that we can never lead.

We are.

My one of my former bosses, Madeleine Albright, she borrowed this from Bill Clinton, described The United States is the indispensable power.

I mean, de Gaulle once said that cemeteries of France are filled with indispensable people.

So I don't think that's what we are.

My friend Bill Burns, who's now running CIA, talks about the United States is a pivotal power.

That's a much more accurate, I think, definition.

We we we can pivot like on the basketball court on issues that are critically important and do require American leadership.

I was told in the wake of Vietnam, America would never lead again.

I was told in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, we would never lead again.

I was told in the wake of Afghanistan, the precipitous and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that we would never lead again.

And yet all of a sudden you have Ukraine and which is probably the greatest security political challenge on European continent since the end of the Second World War and the administration.

And nobody's perfect here.

As Joe Biden often says, you know, compare me to the to the alternative, not to the almighty.

The fact is that we did lead.

It's a long slog.

Paul Post Universe Chicago tracks the length of war since 1815.

The average length of an interstate conflict is three months, three months.

If it lasts more than a year or two, it's likely to go on for a decade.

And Ukraine, is that kind of war.

So I think we have to lead.

We have to be smart about how we lead.

However, we can't afford trillion dollar social science experiments to try to create new foundations in in countries that may or may not share our values.

And here we lack the kinds of leaders that are necessary.

My judgment to you, partners three.

The Middle East.

I'll be very clear about this.

It is a broken, angry and dysfunctional region.

It's where I spent the vast majority of my career.

It is a place, I would say internationally where usually, not always American ideas in war making and peacemaking.

Sadly, in my case, go to die.

It is not a land of opportunity.

It is not a place where where we should have anything other than a very cruel and unforgiving assessment of what is possible.

Otherwise, we get ourselves into the trouble.

The two longest wars in American history where the standard for victory was never could we win in a conventional sense, but when could we leave?

And leaving is not the metric by which you want to evaluate the success of the international communities.

In my judgment, greatest power that was those were too costly wars in so many respects.

And if you look at Middle East history, what you see is that the Middle East landscape is littered with the remains of great powers who wrongly believed they could somehow impose their will on smaller ones.

The Biden administration believed wrongly that it could somehow find a way to extricate itself.

And that was logical.

It was rational.

And no one no one that I've talked to on this side, no Palestinian analysts, no Israeli analyst, no European analyst, saw October 7th, saw October 7th coming.

You know, the one of my favorite rock groups is the Eagles.

They have this great song, Hotel California.

And they and the key takeaway line is you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

That's what the Middle East is.

And it's drawing the administration back in the Israel-Hamas war.

Now, February 7th will be its fifth month.

Right now, my cruel, unforgiving assessment is two things.

There is we're in a long, dark tunnel and there is still no way out.

The objectives of the Israelis and Hamas are mutually exclusive.

Israelis want to eradicate Hamas as a military organization, destroy its infrastructure above and below ground, kill its senior leadership and redeem the hostages.

Five mention of this war.

I would suggest that it's it's virtually impossible.

This may well be the first war if you don't count the summer of oh six, the Israeli Lebanese war, first war that Israel may actually lose and actually lose.

SA Hamas is concerned.

They wanted to sow chaos and terror to inflict the kind of pain and punishment, sadistic, willful, indiscriminate killing.

And they succeeded.

You have 150,000 Israelis uprooted from communities in the north because of the Hezbollah problem.

And in the Gaza envelope because of Gaza, these people cannot go back to their homes in response.

And if anybody thought there was a plan B, people have asked me, why did the Israelis do what they did?

Why the blockade?

Why the punishing airstrikes?

Among the most intense in the 21st century.

Why the ground campaign, which is still going on?

Why?

Why the exponential rise in Palestinian deaths?

Even if you don't believe the Hamas controlled Ministry of Health?

We're talking double, double digits in the thousands.

Maybe the Israelis have killed 8 to 9000 Hamas fighters in Gaza.

6% of the population is under the age of 15.

So the cat the losses are going to be primarily among civilians and young civilians.

The shock and the trauma of that day and how the Israelis responded, admittedly, you know, if Hamas embeds its military assets around in under civilian, which they do, which they do, there's no way you are going to prosecute a successful war and end Hamas as an organization without inflicting grievous harm, injury and death on Palestinian civilians.

No way.

And there's no way you're going to be able to surge humanitarian assistance into Gaza, which is roughly twice, twice the size of the District of Columbia in a free fire zone.

And that's the situation that exists that exists right now.

It appears that there may be a negotiation hostage for prisoner exchange, which would create not an end to the war, but might create.

And this is one of the things they're arguing over how how long this pause lasts.

A month, two months, three months.

That's not going to end the war.

For the hostages, the 200, 136, 20 of whom are probably dead, either killed on October 7th, their bodies taken back into Gaza to trade or they died in captivity.

So we're probably talking about a hundred hostages.

That's a an opening, but it's not going to address or fix the problem.

And I won't lie to you.

I see very little prospect right now for any rational, logical, easy transition to the so-called day after.

We need to take the day after, concede and retire.

It's going to be a series of transitions which may or may not work to make Gaza more stable and more secure.

Hamas is likely to survive.

When I say Israel lost the war only because I'm judging victory according to the way the Israelis have judged it, which is the eradication, the destruction of loss.

They will not succeed in that.

There are estimated 15,000 Hamas fighters they haven't killed and the senior leadership is ensconced in tunnels under Khan Yunis, which is in southern Gaza.

And Yanga, Sinwar, who planned this, has every intention of surviving this.

It's a very grim, very grim situation.

We will return to it.

Running out of time here.

And I have three more observations I want to make, but I'll be quick.

Number four.

This is a world not to be redeemed or transformed.

This is a world to be managed.

If we're lucky, I don't think anybody.

Please ask me in the Q&A.

There's not a single problem out there in the international community that has a definitive or comprehensive solution.

What do North Korea?

We don't know.

How do you deal with a rising China?

Unclear.

What do you do about Putin's ambitions in Ukraine?

What do you do about Iran's putative quest for a deliverable nuclear device?

What do you do about the Israeli-Palestinian issue?

The much the so-called much too promised land problem?

And the list goes on and on and on.

Solving these problems would require transformation, but in life, transformations are really rare.

What we need to think about is how to manage.

I would call it smart transactions, making sure that means and ends are calibrated using military force when necessary, but using it judiciously, avoiding nation building enterprises.

It bogged the United States down.

We are in no position right now to provide a lot of advice to other fledgling democracies unless we begin to address the dysfunction here and I think we need to be, again, cruel and unforgiving and divide American interests into what I call the must haves, those that are really vital for us.

And what I call the it would be nice to have the discretionary ones, the ones that yeah, it would be great to have, but it's going to be a hard lift and we have to be judicious governance of our choosing.

That's what it means to govern.

I haven't found this quote, but FDR reportedly said about Abe Lincoln, this is one undeniably greatest great presidents.

Speaking about our clearly, undeniably greatest president, he said Lincoln died a sad man because Lincoln could not have everything.

This is a man who in eight years created a second American Revolution and set the country on a new course.

So we have to be discreet.

We have to be prudent, and we have to.

My kids are tired of me saying this.

The last time the U.S. was feared, respected and admired as a great power was George H.W.

Bush and his immensely talented Secretary of State, James Baker, for whom I worked.

My kids say, dad and me, if there are no more James Baker's and Bush 40 ones, what would we have?

It's a whole nother discussion.

Five And I want to talk about domestic politics.

I will talk I'll talk around it because it's important.

It really is.

We've seen the enemy.

Okay.

And it's not President Xi and it's not Vladimir Putin.

And it's not the ayatollah and it's not Kim Jong un in North Korea.

And it's not Hamas.

Yeah.

Adversaries, enemies, governments that we need somehow manage and deal with.

But the real problem, in my judgment, is here and I make this assertion because the source of our capacity to project our power abroad has a lot to do with our domestic resilience, our national resourcefulness, our unity, even though we are diverse and divided, our unity.

And that to me is is really at risk in a binary political system with two parties.

It is not functional if one of the parties is somehow indebted not to the Constitution and the basic principles of representative government, but to an individual.

It's not functional and self-governance.

You can't have self-governance when 20 or 30% of the country can agree with the with another 30 or 40% on basic empirical facts and data.

That also doesn't work because it opens up the door for somebody else to define the truth.

And that's extreme, really dangerous.

You know, the Constitution of the United States mentions the word I only once does anybody know why.

How come?

Why would I the pronoun I which given the historian given described as the most disgusting of pronouns, but why would the word AI appear in the US Constitution?

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

The founders embedded in Article two, the inaugural oath.

Why did they do that?

I mean, I think it's because they realized that the president of the United States is constrained, indebted and positively inclined to respect the basic principles of the document.

Harry Truman said about Nixon that President Nixon may have read the Constitution, but he didn't understand it.

And in my view, I wrote a book on presidential greatness, the three great to Washington in the 18th century, Lincoln in the 19th, and FDR in the 20th.

All of them had enormous egos, incredibly ambitious men, but every one of them was able to turn the AM in me upside down.

So it became a W in we every one of them tethered themselves to goals, objectives that were broader than their own personal vanities and careers.

That is the American way.

We've we've lost a lot of that.

Final point.

I have to at least leave with some some hope.

On October six, 1973, Lindsey and I were in Jerusalem.

We'd just come out of Yom Kippur services on the way back to our apartment, and then we heard the sirens.

So October six, 1973, Egypt and Syria began a war with Israel.

The Yom Kippur War or the October War.

We watched a nation traumatized until now, the greatest intelligence failure in Israel's history, 2800 Israeli killed, countless numbers of Syrians and Egyptians.

And yet, within six years, I watched Sadat Begin and Carter signed a full treaty of peace on the White House lawn.

Six years after trauma.

We have hope.

20 years after 1973, Lindsey and I are on the White House lawn watching Clinton.

Arafat and Rabin sign the Oslo Accords.

And yet what what we see of Oslo in the Israeli-Palestinian relation lies broken, battered and bloodied somewhere in that instance.

Hope turns to trauma.

So how do you what do we do?

In the first instance?

Trauma turns to hope.

In the second hope to trauma.

I mean, my only conclusion at 75, I've been thinking a lot about this is that we really can't see what's in front of us.

And the arc of history bends in ways that none of us, including me, could possibly predict.

So what do we do?

Well, I think it's very simple, we hope.

But we also work.

We hope.

And we work to try to bend the arc in as positive a direction as we possibly can.

That's what we do.

We don't succumb to despair and hopelessness.

That's what we do.

Final point, Jack Kennedy, the first and last president who had a I was 12 when he was murdered.

An emotional impact on me.

Described himself as an idealist without illusion.

I borrowed that from Kennedy.

I think that's where America should be.

Idealism without illusion.

Never give up on the prospects of hope and change and even transformation.

But as you go through the process of hope and transformation and change, you must go through it with your eyes wide open.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

I'm Dan Walter, chief executive here at the City Club.

And as I mentioned, we are joined today by Aaron David Miller.

He's senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, taking a closer look at U.S. foreign policy, diplomacy and efforts for peace today in the Middle East and beyond.

We welcome questions from everyone, including guests, city club members and those of you joining us via our live stream at Citi Club dot org.

Our radio broadcast at 89.7 W WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

Our students who are with us today are also invited to ask questions.

If you'd like to text a question, you can text it to 3305415794.

Number again is 3305415794.

And our staff will work it into the program.

And we have our first question.

Please.

Which one?

Yes.

Do you have an explanation for why, whether it's the United States or Britain or France or Israel, we don't have these great leaders when we have, you know, better education.

You could make the argument and an opportunity.

You know, we don't have to go to my ears or the, you know, Abraham Lincoln's.

Why.

First of all, greatness is supposed to be rare, right?

I mean, you know, I mean, John Keegan identifies well, Hitler and Stalin were great and bad.

He had everybody's great good.

There just aren't that many greatness unparalleled, unrivaled, unprecedented achievement.

It's really hard and it's harder.

I mean, I share the title of my last book, which is The End of Greatness Why America Can't Have It.

Does it want another great president?

Can't have it?

Doesn't want the media has a lot to do with it because it's now a 24 seven mall which devours everything in its wake just.

One little story.

So FDR, right.

Diagnosed with infantile paralysis.

He just was reelected.

He's at Franklin Field outside Philadelphia.

He's ascending the podium, the crowd of 100,000 people waiting for FDR to speak.

He starts to ascend the podium in his speech text, which is an on an iPhone or a teleprompter, falls out of his left, briefs crumbles, and the president of the United States in front of 100,000 people starts to fall.

Head of the Secret Service and his son rally around the president, get the speech text and he proceeds to go podium and deliver the speech.

Not a single word was reported in the press or radio on that fall.

It's really hard to go.

Talked about the mystique of power.

It's really hard in this climate to to try to create that kind of detachment.

Very.

And FDR was often carried through doors and windows because he couldn't walk.

And yet Hyde Park, you'll find probably two photographs of FDR in a wheelchair.

It was a conspiracy between the press and the White House to not emphasize.

And, you know, for a nation that was down on its heels, the image of a man that people didn't care about if it FDR couldn't walk.

In fact, I think he inspired a nation.

You also can't have greatness.

And Lincoln was an undeniable president.

And yet people hated him.

And yet he was capable of doing things that even his detractors ultimately came to appreciate.

We are polarized.

We're we're not only polarized, the political science change, it's called affective polarization.

We don't it's not that we disagree with people over policy.

We don't like them.

We don't want our sons and daughters to be around them.

The stats on whether you object to your son or daughter marrying a member of the opposite party in the sixties was in single digits.

Now it's 25%, mostly, by the way, among Democrats.

So what do you do?

What do you do with all this?

And we've we've had incredibly polarizing moments in our history.

We fought a civil war, and yet it's harder now.

I wonder if it's really possible in this climate to ever have a president that is appreciated by the majority of the American public.

And I can't answer that.

At what point does the United States say to these two leaders, Netanyahu and Zelensky, we will reduce our military or support or eliminate our military support because you're not going to be able to attain obtain these goals.

Yeah, it's a fascinating question.

If you look at the Biden administration's position on Israel, even before the October seven conflict began, Joe Biden and again, it's not a global question.

We're dealing with Joe Biden, Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Joe Biden, alone among modern American presidents, has an emotional attachment to the idea of Israel.

The people of Israel, the securi precedented in the presidency.

I watched Bill Clinton, who had no history with Israel, grieve for former Prime Minister Rabin.

And Clinton writes in his memoirs, I loved Rabin as I have rarely loved another man.

That's an extraordinary statement for an American president to make.

Biden's default position is not to confront.

It's to accommodate.

And let's be clear.

It's not just the fact that Biden's support for Israel is imprinted on his emotional DNA.

It's also imprinted on his political DNA.

And this year is going to be probably among the most consequential elections in the modern history of the United States.

Biden's objective Democrats objective.

The Strategic Imperative is to not have the presumptive Republican nominee regain the White House.

That means my judgment.

I've watched presidents of both parties on this issue a certain degree of risk aversion, not risk readiness, when it comes to having sustained public fights with an Israeli prime minister, president don't like to fight with Israeli prime ministers.

It's messy, it's awkward.

It can be politically costly and usually but not always witnessed Bush 41 and James Baker, it can be counterproductive.

People ask me all the time, why doesn't Biden just pick up the phone and say Enough?

The reason is part it's part of its domestic politics.

But more than that, it's Biden's emotional bonding, particularly on October seven, in the wake of what happened on October seven.

He's much more empathetic to the Israeli case and narrative.

He tries to be, with respect to the Palestinian ends, but it never seems to convey large part because he's focused on Hamas, not on the suffering of the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza.

So I don't think that enough conversation is going to take place.

He reportedly told Netanyahu in the last call last week that he expected this war not to be going on for them for most of 2020, for and the Israelis probably not for Biden because of increasing casualties, because of the pressure from the hostage families, because of the idea of recognition, Israeli defense forces recognition, they cannot and will not destroy Hamas as an organization.

Hamas is the embodiment of an idea.

It's an objectionable idea.

Obstructed the destruction of the state of Israel.

But they're going to be left standing if if this ends with Hamas's sovereignty in Gaza eroded.

In other words, Hamas cannot dictate who governs.

Hamas cannot dictate what aid goes in.

And Hamas cannot recreate a military option.

It could be a success, but that's that's going to be extremely difficult to achieve because the Palestinian Authority already weak, with no credibility.

Mahmoud Abbas now in the 18th year of a four year term at 88, has no credibility in the West Bank in order to bring the Palestinian Authority back to Gaza.

You're going to have to have elections.

You're going to have to figure out how to empower Palestinians.

And that is going to be extremely difficult in in this environment.

As as Alinsky's concern are people I respect believe that conversation with Vladimir Alinsky is long overdue.

My question is, for 20 years we fought a war against the Taliban and we came back and gave the power back to the Taliban.

Ah, is that what is going to be repeated in Israel regarding Hamas?

A second point is when Bibi doesn't want to have a two state solution, he has very clearly articulated it and our policy always have been two state solution.

But killing off 10,000 or 20,000, whatever the number is.

Does that make that possible, that at some point that two state solution will ever be placed?

Right.

Okay.

So after October seven, the odds of Israelis and Palestinians living happily ever after under one roof is crazy separation through negotiations.

Now, in order to have a meaningful negotiation leading to that, you need three things and you don't have it.

Number one, you need leaders on both sides that are masters of their politics, not prisoners of their ideologies.

Number two, you need these leaders to care more about their negotiations and getting this done than any outside power you ever heard the quip that in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rental car?

Do you know why people don't wash their rental cars?

Because people care only about what they own.

That's why.

And there is insufficient ownership on the part of Israelis and Palestinians.

That, by the way, is the most profound piece of philosophy that in the day that I heard that Larry Summers and Tom Friedman are still fighting, I think, over who originated that expression.

I think neither of them, by the way.

I but lack of ownership.

And finally in agreement on the core issues border security, Jerusalem, refugee, peace and ultimately end of all conflict and claims the gaps on those issues before October 7th were this wide.

I was at the last serious effort to solve that problem.

Camp David, July 2008 and the gaps coming out of that summit, which we advised Clinton, I think he didn't need any advice, but it really was not a good idea because our fund, Barack, Barack, put some pretty heroic proposals on the table, but there was no way Arafat would or could have accepted, and particularly Andrew.

And then you had the second intifada, and Arafat unleashes the tiger from the cage.

And the Israeli-Palestinian relationship had not recovered from the second intifada.

And now you have October seven, if you're a ten year old Israeli or Palestinian, if you're 15 years old now, what happened on October 7th and the Israeli response to October seven is going to sear your consciousness for the rest of your life.

That is the lift that anybody who chooses to take this on the killing was on the Palestinian side, was indiscriminate, discriminate and savage.

Are the Israelis did the Israelis adhere to international humanitarian law, which are two, two issues, distinction and proportionality?

I don't think the Israelis willfully and intentionally set out to kill innocent Palestinians.

I believe their rules of engagement expanded, expanded.

And in many respects, they were prepared to sacrifice accuracy for doing damage.

If you read The New York Times today, there's a there's a piece on Israel's strike on Jabalya refugee camp to kill one Hamas leader and several of his compatriots.

I think there were several hundred Palestinians, New York Times reports.

And the casualty figures, I mean, are not authoritative.

And so it's it's a legitimate target.

Yes.

The military advantage accrued by a strike is outweighs the harm done to civilians.

I'm not an international lawyer.

Those are the sorts of questions about every single strike.

So if you want to, you know, international Criminal Court, we're not a member.

The Israelis aren't a member.

Even the International Court of Justice, you know, came out with their ruling today.

It'll take two years to decide whether or not the Israelis were guilty of genocide.

I think that's frankly unfounded.

And it's rich coming from a country like South Africa that introduced the brief, who basically has acquiesced and supported what may actually be its sufficiently legitimate charge of genocide.

Putin's campaign against Ukraine.

Putin set out to extinguish extinguish the idea of Ukraine and to kill as many Ukrainians as he possibly could.

And literally to have Ukraine cease to exist.

It seems to me there is already an existing two state solution.

A Jordan has roughly 80% of its population is Palestinian.

The Queen of Jordan is a Palestinian, which means the next king of.

Jordan.

Will be a Palestinian.

So there's a Palestinian state already.

Any Comments?

Yeah.

I mean, and don't don't take it from me.

I mean, just listen to what the Israelis have to say.

Number one, that's Israel's longest and arguably least defensible border, longest and arguably least defensible border.

There's no way you talk to anybody in Shin Bet, Mossad, Israeli military that they're going to say.

You're right.

Let's do that.

That's a strategic defeat for the state of Israel.

And number, who's to say Jordan's not a democracy for sure.

Had its with stability.

Who's to say that ten, 15, 20 years from now, political uncertainty or turmoil in Jordan wouldn't produce a leadership that is fundamentally honest, hostile or willing to break the peace treaty, which was signed in 1994.

No, I think a Palestinian state in Jordan would be a strategic defeat for Israel, and I don't think it makes sense.

Your names are worried about it, Hashemite said.

Is again, the two state solution right now is a thought experiment.

I mean, there's just 2024 be the year of Gaza.

Should Joe Biden get a second, second term?

It's conceivable that and you have new leadership in Israel and on the Palestinian side.

But again, I mean, it's just it's very hard for me to imagine that, I would say during my lifetime, but it's very difficult for me to imagine hearing the following.

Israeli prime minister before the Israeli Knesset, Palestinian prime minister, president before the Palestinian Legislative Council, they stand up before their constituencies and the world.

And they say the following We don't have peace.

But on the core issues that drive this conflict border security, refugee, Jerusalem and end of all conflict and claims we declare no irredentism, no aspirations.

It's all done.

It is almost inconceivable to me that I would be able to hear those speeches given.

To do that, you need a mandela, a de Klerk.

You knew no one believe that apartheid in South Africa would ever end the way that it did.

And South Africa has a lot of political problems, but it did end, and it ended in large part because of leadership.

And we don't have that anywhere.

There's no Sadat, there's no begging, there's no Rabin.

There's no King Hussein.

Even Arafat in his first incarnation.

No, I mean, I see you frowning.

But Rabin, who felt incredibly uncomfortable dealing with Arafat, also admitted to us repeatedly.

I said during the first incarnation, 93, until Rabin's murder in 95, that Arafat had taken some extremely difficult decisions.

You could look at the Oslo agreements and you will not find any mention of a Palestinian state.

You will you will not find any mention of a settlements freeze.

You will find no mention of Palestine in not even control.

Forget sovereignty over Jerusalem, none of that.

Now, that was the left.

That was the last concession Arafat was prepared to make.

But nonetheless, it was a heavy lift and Rabin understood it.

That's what you need.

You don't have that.

I've been singing this song since January of 2003, and it's not a happy song.

It's annoyingly negative.

It's why a lot of people just hit the delete button because they don't want to hear this.

And we had Camp David fell into that trap.

We trivial ized these issues.

We did not respect the issues.

Jerusalem, both sides asserted sovereignty.

We came up with these proposals.

We'll give the Palestinian sovereignty above ground because that's where that's where the Dome of the Rock, the Reliquary and the Al-Aqsa mosque are.

And we'll give you Israeli sovereignty below ground, which is where the remains of the first and second Jewish temples are to be found.

Then we then we proposed taking sovereignty away from them.

This was a divine, overlapping, sacred space.

Why does why do either of them need sovereignty?

And we toyed with an idea of setting up a functional committee.

We didn't get just how powerful the Jerusalem issue was, is and will remain.

And that's just one example.

Forget the other issues territory, borders, security, refugees.

So it got to be humble.

And I am the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.

Because if that if that happens, you neither get the perfect nor the good.

And that's just hard in this conflict.

It's not for nothing.

There's no conflict, any solution.

And I might add, it's not for nothing that the Israelis avoided going into Gaza in a comprehensive, massive way since Hamas took over in 2007.

Because what they're encountering is something that they didn't plan on the 450 miles of tunnel infrastructure.

It just they didn't.

And frankly, the American military I interviewed David Petraeus a while back.

Fallujah took five days.

He told me he lost 75 Marines.

He killed 2200 fighters.

Five days.

We're now in the fifth month of the war and Hamas still survives.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

Should I ask on my daughter?

Yes.

Thank you so much.

Aaron David Miller.

Thank you, Aaron, for joining us here today.

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Aaron David Miller, once again, thank you so much for your work and for joining us.

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