The Peace That Some Cannot Afford: An Opinion

What follows is my opinion, and mine alone.

A man can tell a great deal about a country by watching what frightens it, and this week I have been watching who flinches at the rumor of peace. On Sunday the President of the United States told Benjamin Netanyahu that an agreement with Iran might be signed within days, and the word went out as good news, the way the end of any war is supposed to be good news. Yet I notice that not everyone in this story wants the thing they claim to be fighting for. I notice that some men prosper in the fire and would not know what to do with the morning after.

Consider what Mr. Netanyahu actually says, not what we wish he said. Even as Washington reaches for a deal, he insists that Israel will retain its freedom of action, which is a careful phrase, a diplomat's phrase, meaning the right to strike when and where he chooses regardless of what any American signs. His government bombed Beirut and drew a rebuke from the very President now selling the peace. And inside his cabinet sit men like Bezalel Smotrich, who has stood before maps of a greater Israel and spoken plainly of expansion, of a Palestinian state strangled in the cradle. These are not my inventions. They are public acts and public words, and a citizen is permitted to read them.

Here is my opinion, offered without apology. A stable Iran, reintegrated and solvent, is of no use to a faction whose ambitions require its neighbors weak, divided, and afraid. A nation at war is a nation that cannot organize against you. So the peace that an American mother prays for, the one that brings her son home and lets the oil flow and lets the region breathe, is not the peace that every ally desires. Their interests and ours diverge, and the divergence is not a secret. It is written in their votes and their maps.

We have been here before, we Americans, financing wars sold to us as brief and cheap, wars that were going to pay for themselves, wars that left us poorer and our word weaker. We are a generous people and an easily flattered one, and flattery is the oldest instrument for spending another man's blood and treasure. The question a free people must ask, the question I am asking, is simple and unwelcome: whose peace is being negotiated, and whose is being quietly undone?

I do not know how this ends. But James Baldwin gave us the rule for a moment like this one, and it has lost none of its edge: "I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." When the powerful announce peace with one hand and reserve their freedom of action with the other, a free people is obliged to believe the deed and not the declaration. I am watching what is done. I would ask you to watch it too.