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Theodore Roosevelt: Now I am going to tell you something about Woodrow Wilson that Woodrow Wilson does not like to hear. The self-determination principle, as he applied it in Paris in 1919, was selective. Korea asked for self-determination. Wilson could not help them because Japan was an ally. India asked for self-determination. Wilson could not help them because Britain was an ally. The Arabs of greater Syria sent a formal petition to the King-Crane Commission expressing their wish for a unified Arab state. Wilson commissioned the study and then buried the report when it arrived with inconvenient conclusions. The principle, as actually practiced by its most famous advocate, applied to Europeans and not to anyone else. I find this a curious foundation for a theory of Middle East peace.
Woodrow Wilson: You are correct that the application of self-determination at Paris was inconsistent. You are correct that colonial powers were not held to the same standard as the defeated empires. And you are correct that I did not do enough to force the issue. I have lived with that failure. But the answer to an imperfect application of a correct principle is not to abandon the principle. The lesson of 1919 is that self-determination requires sufficient political will to apply it even when it inconveniences powerful allies.
Theodore Roosevelt: The principle failed because we did not apply it hard enough, and the solution is to apply it harder next time. I wonder if anyone has ever considered the possibility that the principle itself requires modification in light of a century of evidence.
Woodrow Wilson: And I wonder if anyone has considered that a century of great power imposition and the steady dismissal of the consent of the governed has produced the evidence of failure you are now citing as a reason to continue doing it. We are looking at a hundred years of what power-based settlement has actually produced in that region, and you are recommending more of it.
Theodore Roosevelt: I can point to places where the power-based approach worked. Portsmouth. The Congress of Berlin. The Concert of Europe at its best. You cannot point to a place where a diplomatic framework built on the consent of the governed resolved a genuine conflict between two peoples who both believed the land was theirs by right. Because that has not happened. Not once in recorded history.
Woodrow Wilson: Germany in 1990.
Theodore Roosevelt: I will give you that one.
Woodrow Wilson: The first concession. I expected to wait considerably longer.
Theodore Roosevelt: Germany reunified peacefully because both sides had been exhausted by forty years of a divided status quo and a framework existed through which reunification could be processed. I will take Germany. Now you find me a case in the Middle East where anything resembling that structure has been assembled.
Woodrow Wilson: That is precisely what I am arguing we should build. We have had Camp David, we have had Oslo, we have had the Road Map, and in each case the process was undermined not by the failure of the consent model but by the failure of the parties to commit to it and of the United States to hold them to it. You are arguing that the model is wrong. I am arguing that the model has never been faithfully applied.
Theodore Roosevelt: A model which requires perfect conditions to work is not a model. It is a wish. Now. My prescription. The first thing you have to understand about the Middle East is that it is not a problem of ideas. The problem is a shortage of settled facts. And settled facts in international relations are produced by one thing and one thing only, which is the credible presence of a power that has both the capability and the will to enforce a settlement and does not go home when the going gets difficult.
Woodrow Wilson: So your prescription is permanent American military occupation of the region?
Theodore Roosevelt: My prescription is permanent American commitment to a settlement, which is a very different thing. I am talking about the United States making clear that the terms of the settlement are non-negotiable, that any party that violates them will face immediate and severe consequences, and that we mean this for longer than one administration's electoral cycle. The reason Oslo failed was not that it was a bad agreement. It was that the moment the agreement became politically inconvenient for both sides to honor, we did not enforce it. The United States blinked. And when the United States blinks, everyone in that region notices.
Woodrow Wilson: I want to steelman your position before I dismantle it, because your position has a genuine intellectual core that deserves to be acknowledged before I explain why it is ultimately self-defeating. The Rooseveltian case, at its strongest, is this: the parties to the conflict are not capable, by themselves, of reaching or sustaining a settlement, because the internal political costs of compromise are too high for any leader on either side to survive. Therefore an external power must create the conditions, through credible enforcement, under which leaders on both sides can accept a deal they could not otherwise sell to their own constituencies. The enforcer is not imposing peace but enabling it, by removing the political excuse that the other side will inevitably cheat. This is actually a coherent argument. It is the argument that produced the Egyptian-Israeli peace in 1979, which has held for four decades despite everything.
Theodore Roosevelt: Thank you. I accept that.
Woodrow Wilson: Now here is why it fails in the Palestinian case. The Egyptian peace held because Egypt is a state with a government that controls its territory, commands a professional army, and has the domestic institutional capacity to honor a commitment over time. The Palestinian situation does not have those features. You cannot enforce a settlement with a party that does not have the institutional coherence to be bound by it. Without institution-building first, there is nothing to enforce a settlement against.
Theodore Roosevelt: Institution-building does not happen in a vacuum. It happens under conditions that make it necessary and possible. The Palestinian Authority did not begin to look like a governing institution until the Oslo process created the conditions under which it had to function as one. It then collapsed not because institution-building is impossible but because external support was withdrawn before the institutions were strong enough to stand. You are citing the failure of an incomplete application of a strategy, and using that failure as an argument against the strategy itself.
Woodrow Wilson: I am citing the failure as evidence that the commitment you are describing has never actually been provided. The American political system does not sustain the kind of multi-generational commitment your prescription requires. Administrations change. Each new president arrives with a new framework and a new special envoy and a determination to succeed where his predecessor failed, and then repeats precisely his predecessor's mistake of withdrawing American pressure at the moment the parties are closest to a deal. This is an argument about institutional capacity, and it applies to Washington as much as to Ramallah.
Theodore Roosevelt: And here I must say something genuinely uncomfortable, which is that you are right about that. The American political system as it currently operates is not capable of the sustained commitment my prescription requires. This is a real problem.
Woodrow Wilson: I did not expect to hear that.
Theodore Roosevelt: I am full of surprises. But here is what I draw from it. You draw the conclusion that since American power cannot sustain the commitment, we should fall back on process and the consent of the governed. I draw the conclusion that we need to reform American foreign policy institutions so that they can sustain that commitment. The problem is not the prescription. The problem is the pharmacy.
Woodrow Wilson: That creative metaphor does not change the underlying reality. You cannot reform the American political system as a prerequisite for Middle East peace. The people of the region are dying now. The prescription has to work with the institutions that actually exist, not the institutions you wish existed.
Theodore Roosevelt: And now you have inverted the very argument you made against me. You told me the Palestinians could not consent to a settlement because they lacked institutional capacity. I told you the capacity has to be built. You said you cannot build capacity as a prerequisite. Now I say American commitment has to be built and you say I cannot require a prerequisite. You have applied different standards to the two sides of the same argument, and I think you should account for that.
Woodrow Wilson: The cases are not parallel. Palestinian institution-building can be supported through the international frameworks I am advocating. American political reform is a separate domestic project with nothing to do with Middle East diplomacy. You are conflating two different problems.
Theodore Roosevelt: I am pointing out that both of our prescriptions require conditions that do not currently exist. The difference is that I admit it and you do not. And that difference, I would suggest, is not a small one. We will continue this in Part Three.
Woodrow Wilson: I will be there. With the same precision I have brought to this conversation. And with considerably less patience remaining.
