peacefare.net

Peacefare is 10 years old!

When I left the United States Institute of Peace in late September 2010, I knew I wanted to work on a book (that emerged three years later as Righting the Balance, to your right). I knew nothing about blogging and less about tweeting. I got a bit of encouragement from son Adam, who had begun his sterling journalistic career at Media Matters. I also had some quick technology advice from USIP’s tech chief, who said “use WordPress.” I had no idea what he meant or where this would end.

And of course it hasn’t. I continue to blog and tweet, along with dozens of dedicated research assistants and some superb occasional contributors from within and beyond DC. Collectively, we’ve produced going on 4000 posts, more than an average of one per day for a decade. I’ve tweeted too much and too often repeated myself in the blog posts, but both the blog and the tweeting have gained a significant following, including lots of editors, journalists, decisionmakers, government officials, activists, scholars, students and who knows who else. About half the followers are Americans and half not.

Peacefare has given me a good deal of satisfaction, but there have also been disappointments. I would have liked to get more contributions from others and to stimulate more discussion and comments. Unfortunately, the most frequent comments come from racists and anti-Semites. I used to publish those, and they did excite a good deal of commentary. But I decided to stop: racists and anti-Semites have lots of outlets elsewhere. I don’t need to waste my cyber real estate on them, but I will always welcome commentary from others.

Looking forward, I really don’t know in which direction to point peacefare.net. I suppose it depends in part on the outcome of this ferocious election campaign. If Trump is re-elected, it will be hard for me not to remain engaged in the effort to burst the second term lies, though that is the last thing I really want to be doing in my dotage. If Biden is elected, I may also be tempted to criticize, though I am more likely to be on board with things he will do and not do. But the question is, to what end result?

In the Balkans, I have the sense people are listening, though lots of them disagree or don’t like what they hear. In the Middle East, that is far less true. Those are the two parts of the world peacefare.net publishes on the most. The posts gain resonance when they are republished or quoted in the foreign press. Middle Easterners are far less interested than Balkanites in what Americans have to say, and my connections to the Middle East are less rooted than my connections to the Balkans.

In the US, I fear I am preaching mainly to the converted, that is to people with internationalist inclinations and foreign policy experience. Nothing wrong with that, though they have many other fonts of wisdom and foolishness to entertain them. I’ve become increasingly interested in the domestic ramifications of foreign policy, but I confess I haven’t been very successful at writing about them. Mainly I find myself warning non-Americans that Americans are not really very interested in foreign policy or foreign problems. They are far more preoccupied with their own health and welfare. President Obama did Syrians no favor when he hesitated to intervene there, but he reflected the real sentiments of both Congress and most of the US.

That is of course as it should be. I am no America firster, but I have always reminded myself that whatever I do abroad the American taxpayer foots the bill, one way or another. We need one way or another to demonstrate the benefits of international engagement , which brings with it enormous responsibilities and costs. I am convinced the benefits of the Balkan engagement have been worthwhile, partly because the costs were far lower than the later interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is what From War to Peace, the other book to the right is about.

The Middle East has not yielded to those who wanted it to find more democratic ways of governing itself. In some places, its citizens continue to seek representation and voice: Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and even Syria have not quite managed to snuff out the spirit of the Arab Spring, which their citizens maintain at terrifying cost. But violence has overwhelmed them in Yemen and Libya, while the Gulf has combined repression with payoffs to keep its autocracies in place, now with help from Israel.

There isn’t a lot America is going to be able to do about that, though I do believe if Biden is elected Washington will return to a preference for more open and accountable governance, both at home and abroad. Perhaps that is the point. The American example has been far more cost effective than American arms in exporting democratic ideals. A lot of what I did as an American diplomat was intended to illustrate what it meant to live, work, and govern in an open and accountable society that treated others with respect. Maybe illustrating that through rational discourse is not a bad goal for the future of peacefare.net as well.