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The first Monday of the new year began in Baghdad with a unique debut: the ribbon-cutting for the world’s largest and most opulent American Embassy, and at the very moment the administration that made it most necessary (and least affordable) is headed for the exits.

We are indeed, as the Chinese proverb so aptly notes, living in interesting times. Some of Wall Street’s wisest prognosticators (if that is not an oxymoron in itself) are predicting a market surge this year that could rival that of 2000 when the Internet bubble was in full flight and companies with nothing but bottled air for products commanded stratospheric prices on the wings of inflated expectations.

Over the past year, our expectations have fallen to a new low, or at least our confidence. So does this signal a rock bottom of despair? Perhaps. How indeed could things get much worse than today?

There is always something worse. War in Gaza could expand to include southern Lebanon and Hezbollah, drawing Iran into the equation. Markets could resume their slide even in the face of mega-wealth pouring in from every leading central bank around the globe. The diplomatic packet on Monday from India to Pakistan detailing Islamabad’s role in last year’s Mumbai terror attacks could simply be a prelude to armed conflict along that always tense frontier. China could decide to stop funding the excesses of the American consumer, sending the dollar into a fatal tailspin. Oh, and then there’s oil: as desperate a case at $40 a barrel as $140.

But what of the upside? Could we see oil again at $80 a barrel (double last month’s low prices), stocks up 20 percent (over their desperate lows of November), and a new president that inspires us all (not to mention another $700 billion or so in “stimulus” that he’s bringing along in his little gift bag to his inaugural the week after next)? How about a truly green revolution that begins in Washington and spreads globally—government funding that primes the pump much as Franklin Roosevelt did in buildin America’s great infrastructure projects during the last depression? Could a tough Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, read the riot act to Hamas and Kadima alike, knocking heads in the interest of peace in Palestine? Or what about the prospects of regime change—a new president for Zimbabwe with that monster Robert Mugabe gone (no matter what it takes), the victory of a moderate in Iran’s next presidential election?

Whichever direction the world turns, our pleasure will be to chronicle its twists and revolutions, offering unique insight and incisive writing as the year rolls out—and to hear from you, our reader. Comments and suggestions encouraged.

David A. Andelman is the editor of World Policy Journal. A veteran domestic and foreign correspondent and editor of The New York Times, CBS News, and most recently Forbes.com, he is the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

Back 17 years ago, in the winter of 1991–92, when I was contemplating Israel’s future in World Policy Journal, it was supposed to be the dawn of a new age—and I was there. We were about to enter the roaring globalization years of the 1990s and to be downloaded into a borderless world in which the archaic nation-state would vanish.

Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, would cease fighting each other over holy temples and olive trees and emerge in our new and brave world as the prime agents of global commerce, competing over market shares and investment flows, as Tom Friedman’s McDonalds Law (“no two countries that had McDonalds had gone to war with each other”) had forecasted. The “new cosmopolitans” and “global hybrids” would be the winners in this nascent universe where the prime determinant for business, political, and cultural success would be a multicultural sense of self. Pass that Cuban-Chinese falafel, please. Continue reading…

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

It’s October 2033 and Shahinaz Abdel- Salam, 55, has just been appointed Egypt’s first female interior minister.

She’s about to address the nation by live holofeed to explain why she’s accepted a post that as a young woman she’d always dreamed would be abolished because, in the Egypt where she grew up, interior minister was synonymous with “chief torturer.”

Her office is in New Cairo, an area which was once desert but over the past few years has buzzed with university campuses and businesses freed from the suffocation of downtown Cairo. But her address to the public will be made from what used to be the downtown headquarters of the Interior Ministry called Lazoghli. For years, the building’s underground dungeons had held hundreds of thousands of political prisoners—at its peak estimated to be around 20,000—mostly Islamists. Continue reading…

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

By 2033, two states, Israel and Palestine, will be living side-by-side in an uneasy peace, with the risk of war between them and terrorism across their common border diminishing year by year. This two-state solution will not be imposed by the United States or the Arab world. It will be freely chosen by the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. The growing Palestinian majority living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River will continue to insist on nothing less. And a solid majority of Israelis will by then have come to see a two-state partition of Palestine as essential to Israel’s survival as a tolerable place to live and raise their families.

That is not the only outcome possible for 2033. But it is the most likely—and it is the most attractive one for Israelis, Palestinians and the outside world.

Consider the alternatives.

The safest prediction for anywhere is normally some version of present realities, projected forward. But there is nothing safe or normal about the existing situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These territories are neither Israel nor Palestine, and their unfolding demographic arithmetic assures that they are not going to evolve into one or the other without very bold political decisions being taken by both sides. Continue reading…

In trying to imagine how a Marshall Plan for the Middle East might look 25 years from now, I naturally did a lot of guessing in my essay for World Policy Journal’s 25th anniversary issue. We don’t, as yet, have a clear idea of the help and advice that the Arab states in the Middle East are prepared to accept from the West, let alone the United States.

But the election of Barack Obama shows that under the right circumstances change can come faster than we imagine. Obama’s belief in a sixteen-month schedule for withdrawing American combat brigades from Iraq, a timetable twice as fast as that provided for in the current draft of the American and Iraqi accord, is already paying dividends in how America is seen. “Before the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no schedule of troop withdrawal by December 31, 2011,” Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, told The New York Times three days after Obama’s election victory. “This is a positive step to have the same theories about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

Obama demonstrates that it is possible to change the tarnished image the Bush administration has given the country—without losing sight of American interests. On a personal level, Obama shows that if America gets its own internal social problems in order, it can pay in foreign policy dividends. Obama’s personal appeal to the Muslim world as a result of his color and ancestry is not just symbolic. It makes clear that the widespread stereotypes about racism in American society need to be seen with much more subtlety than they traditionally have. American democracy—and by extension racial American attitudes—are capable of genuine change.

Even more important, Obama’s commitment to a foreign policy based on political realism rather than ideology illustrates America’s capacity for approaching the Middle East as a thoughtful partner rather than a dominant superpower. Obama is no softy.

“I’m not opposed to all wars,” he said in his memorable 2002 speech against the invasion of Iraq. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Obama will, when it is necessary, use force, but clearly force is not a first step for him, and in that sense of proportion he harkens back to the diplomatic values of post-World War II America. The pragmatism he promises to bring to American foreign policy suggests the route by which a future Marshall Plan for the Middle East might not be such a dream after all.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. His article, “A Marshall Plan for the Middle East,” can be found in World Policy Journal’s 25th anniversary issue, on newsstands now.

The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal. For the month of November, read the entire 25th anniversary issue, fall 2008, for free!

At the heart of the moving puzzle the world faces over the next quarter century are the diverse Muslim populations, collectively known as the “Global Muslim Community.” Spanning the globe and speaking nearly every language, they are united by one faith—Islam. Collectively, they make up one-fifth of the world’s population and sit on 75 percent of its oil wealth. Understanding the emerging trends of these societies is perhaps the world’s leading strategic imperative.

But who will speak for Islam in the future—on democracy, the role of women, or violence? Over six years ending in 2007, the Gallup organization undertook more than 50,000 interviews (representative of the 1.3 billion Muslims who reside in more than 35 nations with majority or significant Muslim populations) in an effort to explore current trends and examine the future. The results, reflective of more than 90 percent of the world’s Muslim community, are the end product of the most comprehensive survey of its kind ever conducted; they defy conventional wisdom and the inevitability of a global conflict— even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue.Continue reading…

Juval Aviv, an Israeli-born New York private investigator, gave a presentation on August 8 at the annual American Bar Association (ABA) convention held in New York. Aviv is president of Interfor, Inc., which describes itself as an “international investigations firm offering comprehensive domestic and foreign intelligence services to the legal, corporate, and financial communities” with offices in thirty-six countries.

Aviv has created a mystique about himself by claiming to be the “Avner” character in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, hand-picked by former Prime Minister Golda Meir to lead a team of Israeli assassins to avenge the deaths of the 11 Israeli athletes killed by Black September during the 1972 Munich Olympics. As Aviv told the ABA audience, “Steven Spielberg bought the rights to my life story and Munich is based on that.”

Last week, however, Aviv was removed as the keynote speaker at a security conference scheduled for October after I and another security professional brought our concerns about Aviv to the conference director.

Aviv gained notoriety when Pan Am hired him to investigate the downing of Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. His investigative conclusion: the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the explosion on board the flight. According to his report, the CIA had allowed Syrian drug dealers to ship narcotics to the United States via U.S. aircraft in exchange for intelligence. Someone, however, slipped a bomb into the shipment aboard Pan Am 103, bringing down the plane.

While this defense did not help Pan Am in court, Aviv’s report, commonly referred to as the “Interfor Report,” merited a chapter in The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen (Citadel Press, 2004) and can be found on websites and discussion boards across the Internet. (See number 9 in Another Ten Conspiracy Theories, right after the famous Beatles rumor “Paul is Dead.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By all accounts, the Israeli-Syrian indirect negotiations through Turkish mediation are going well, and the fact that a fourth round of talks is scheduled for the end of July suggests that both sides expect to make further progress. The reports from Damascus and Ankara, however, indicating that Syria will not enter into direct negotiations with Israel before the advent of new American administration show an obstructive apprehension on the part of the Syrian government. Indeed, Damascus should not only agree to direct negotiations with Israel—as Turkish officials strongly recommend—but time has come for it to make a bold move toward the Israelis. A high level meeting, for example, between Israel and Syria can change overnight the dynamic of their negotiations and dramatically increase the Bush administration’s stakes in its successful outcome.
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SOUTHAMPTON, NY—For many American Jews there is the apparent moral conundrum—how do you support Tibet (the Dalai Lama) over China without supporting Palestine over Israel? Simple. In this equation, Israel is the underdog—at least when it comes up against the combined might of the Arab world and the (real or imagined) nuclear power of Iran just around the corner.

I’m not saying that this is an equation that I can even entertain. Still, this was the nature of part of the discussion around the dinner table Saturday night at Louise MacBain’s place in Southampton.

Louise, who three years ago launched the extraordinary Global Creative Leadership Summit and called together a few of us for the weekend to brainstorm this Fall’s session, invited a couple of high-powered investment types to join us for dinner on Saturday. Both, with their wives, happen to
be committed Zionists, though in deference to the clearly off-the-record nature of the evening, I’ll refrain from identifying them.

The context is the fact that Louise, who’s an extraordinary entrepreneur in her own right with her stable of art publications including Art+Auction and the landmark ArtInfo.com, has also taken up the cause of China and its efforts to reach some form of modus vivendi with the Dalai Lama and return peace to Tibet. Recently, she returned from a round of shuttle diplomacy between Lhasa and Beijing. “I want only what is best for the Dalai Lama and his spiritual foreigners,” she says most diplomatically, “and to embrace the reasonable demands of China as well.”

She’s also quite committed to bringing all sides together in Palestine and Israel as well, along with close friends James Wolfensohn and Mortimer Zuckerman. But more about them in a moment.

Above all, Louise believes in communication—all sides talking to each other, removing barriers to free movement of people, ideas and goods (so she’s a big free-trade and Doha advocate as well).

Inevitably, the talk on Saturday turned to Israel and Palestine. But only after we had thoroughly explored Louise’s recent efforts in China and Tibet where she travelled to gain support for an international fund administered by her Foundation for the cultural preservation of Tibet—a fund that would complement China’s already existing $70 million investment into the preservation of the region’s cultural heritage. She believes fervently that the Dalai Lama and China should sit down and talk, work out their differences and move on to peace and development for the benefit of the Tibet Autonomous Region. She is persuaded that the Dalai Lama and his supporters have been somewhat outrageous in their demands—which appear to amount to a takeover of a quarter of the territory of China itself, or “Greater Tibet” as it is often put.

Her guests were as reluctant to spring to China’s defense as they clearly were to spring to the defense of the Palestinians.
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Israel’s recent peace offensive may have been motivated in part by personal or domestic politics, but the driving force to negotiate is part and parcel of a much larger plan. As the dynamics in the Middle East shift in response to Iraq war backlash, and as Iran develops its nuclear program, Israel has finally conceded that peace with Syria is the key to rapprochement with the rest of the Arab world, including the Palestinians. If comprehensive peace with Syria can be reached, Israel will be better poised to successfully negotiate with Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, and will be better equipped to deal with Hezbollah and Hamas—all which will become extremely important as Israel gears up to face Iran.

Israel has planed to engage Syria in peace talks for more than a year. I have been privy to some of the indirect talks between the two sides, and know first-hand that Israel would have commenced these talks much earlier had it not been for objections from the Bush administration.
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