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Theodore Roosevelt: Now, I am going to tell you something about myself right at the start, so we understand each other. I have hunted lions in Africa, charged up San Juan Hill, negotiated a peace treaty between two great empires, and won the Nobel Prize for it. I say this not to boast, which I would never do, but simply to establish that when I speak about how nations behave in the world, I am not speaking from a faculty lounge. I am Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth President of the United States, and I am here to talk about the Middle East, which is a region that has been failing at peace for a very long time, largely because people keep applying the wrong medicine.
Woodrow Wilson: I am Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth President of the United States, President of Princeton University before that, and the architect of the most consequential peace framework in the history of modern diplomacy. I mention my academic credentials not to intimidate, which would be beneath me, but because the subject before us today requires precision of thought, not merely energy of temperament. The question of Middle East peace architecture is a question about legitimacy, about the consent of governed peoples, and about whether the arrangements powerful nations impose upon weaker ones will hold. I have views on that subject that I suspect will not align with my colleague's.
Theodore Roosevelt: "Colleague." That is a generous word coming from a man who kept a whole nation out of a war it should have entered while writing eloquent speeches about why he had not entered it yet. But I bear no grudge. I hold grudges the way a tornado holds a barn. Briefly and with great enthusiasm.
Woodrow Wilson: Keeping a nation out of a war until the moment was right is called statecraft, not cowardice. The record speaks for itself.
Theodore Roosevelt: The record says Lusitania. It says 116,000 Americans died after we finally did what we should have done in 1915. But fine. The Middle East, where your particular brand of statecraft has been leaving wreckage for a hundred years.
Woodrow Wilson: The question is what kind of architecture produces a peace that lasts longer than the last ceasefire. Durable peace requires legitimacy. Legitimacy requires consent. Consent requires that the people who live in a place have a voice in determining who governs them. These are not complicated ideas. They are the foundation of the American republic itself.
Theodore Roosevelt: The self-determination principle is a beautiful idea. It is the kind of idea that makes a man feel very good about himself for having it. The trouble is that it does not describe how the world actually works, has ever worked, or is likely to work any time we can see from here. The Middle East has not failed to achieve peace because it lacks a sufficiently pure expression of the consent of the governed. It has failed because no power has ever been willing to enforce a settlement with sufficient firmness and stay long enough to let it take hold.
Woodrow Wilson: And your alternative is what, precisely? That we simply arrange the board to suit the great powers, assign territories to whoever has the larger army, and hope that the people living there will quietly accept the verdict? Because we tried that. The Sykes-Picot Agreement tried that. The British mandate tried that. The result was a century of insurgency, civil war, and resentment that has made every subsequent American intervention harder, not easier.
Theodore Roosevelt: You have accidentally made my argument for me. Sykes-Picot failed not because it was imposed by great powers, but because it was imposed by great powers who then refused to stay and enforce it. The British drew lines on maps and then went home. That is not what I am advocating. I am advocating American power, applied with commitment, maintained with nerve, and not abandoned the moment the domestic audience gets tired of reading about it in the newspapers. The Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 did not ask both sides whether they felt sufficiently validated. It asked them whether they were ready to stop fighting, gave them terms they could live with, and it held because I stood behind it.
Woodrow Wilson: You brokered a peace between two empires with no underlying dispute about the legitimacy of each other's existence. The Middle East situation involves peoples who have been told, repeatedly, by outside powers, that their national aspirations are secondary concerns. The Portsmouth model does not transfer. You cannot broker a peace between parties when one party has been told by the brokers themselves that its consent does not matter.
Theodore Roosevelt: Now we are getting somewhere. You are referring to the Palestinians. Say the word, Woodrow. You have never been afraid of words, only of actions.
Woodrow Wilson: I am referring to the broader principle of self-determination as it applies to all peoples in the region. The entire regional architecture since 1916 has been built on the assumption that outside powers know better than the people who live there what kind of political arrangements are suitable for them. That assumption has produced Lebanon, it has produced Iraq, it has produced Syria, and it has produced a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that no imposed settlement has been able to resolve because neither side has fully consented to the terms.
Theodore Roosevelt: I am going to steelman your position now, because I think it is the fair thing to do before I explain why it leads directly off a cliff. The Wilsonian case, at its strongest, goes like this: any peace imposed by outside powers without the genuine consent of the parties is inherently unstable, because the parties will undermine it the moment the external enforcer relaxes. The only peace that sticks is the peace the parties themselves want, which means it has to emerge from a political process in which both sides have a real voice. The Abraham Accords, from this view, are a structural fraud, because they achieve normalization between Arab governments and Israel while doing nothing about the people who are actually in dispute, namely the Palestinians, who were not at the table and did not consent. I grant that this is a serious argument. I grant it is internally consistent. Now watch me explain why it is completely wrong.
Woodrow Wilson: I am waiting with what I can only describe as restrained anticipation.
Theodore Roosevelt: It is wrong because it assumes that consent is something you can achieve through process. But consent in international affairs is not given, it is earned. It is earned through the application of sufficient power to change the facts on the ground until the parties stop believing they can get a better deal by fighting. The reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not been resolved is not that we have failed to apply the right diplomatic framework. It is that neither side has ever been fully convinced that its maximum position is unachievable. The moment one side or the other is genuinely convinced that the best available deal is the deal on the table, you will have a settlement. And the only thing that convinces parties of that is the presence of a power they cannot outlast.
Woodrow Wilson: What you are describing is not peace. What you are describing is submission. And submission produces compliance, not stability. A people that has been forced to accept terms it finds unjust does not abandon the cause. It passes it to its children. The Palestinian national movement has survived a hundred years of exactly the kind of pressure you are recommending, and it has not been extinguished by it. It has grown. Because the grievance is genuine, and genuine grievances cannot be suppressed indefinitely by force.
Theodore Roosevelt: I did not say suppress. I said resolve. There is a very significant difference between those two words, and the fact that people of your persuasion use them interchangeably tells me something about the precision of your thinking.
Woodrow Wilson: You say resolve. What you mean is decide. You want a great power to decide the terms of the settlement on behalf of parties who lack the power to resist. You dress this in the language of resolution, but it is the language of dictation. And dictation has a long and instructive history in the Middle East. It is called the history of everything that has gone wrong there.
Theodore Roosevelt: That is the most convenient misreading of my position I have heard today, and I look forward to correcting it in Part Two.
Woodrow Wilson: I look forward to being corrected in Part Two with the same enthusiasm I have brought to being corrected so far, which is to say none whatsoever.
