#iran hostage crisis

[deadpresidents]

Is there any truth to the 1980 October surprise theory?

The New York Times published a story earlier this year where Ben Barnes -- a Republican supporter of Reagan's in 1980 who had once served as Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and protege of former Texas Governor John Connally -- confirmed that the Reagan campaign absolutely encouraged Iran not to release the American embassy hostages before the election because Reagan would give the Iranians a better deal if he was elected President. Barnes admitted that he was present as Connally passed that message around while on a trip to the Middle East in order to get word to the Iranians. It's not exactly a smoking gun because virtually everyone seemingly involved in implementing the October Surprise is dead other than Barnes, but it's a weird thing for Barnes to lie about 45 years later, especially considering how close his relationship was with Governor Connally. Plus, we know that there were shady contacts between people in the Reagan Administration and Iran because of the Iran-Contra scandal.

I think there is definitely some truth to the theory, but I also believe that the Iranians were more than happy to spite President Carter by not releasing the hostages until literally the moment Reagan took the oath of office. The Iranians were still furious with the Carter Administration for letting the Shah come to the United States for medical treatment after he was forced to leave Iran as the Iranian Revolution exploded and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to become Supreme Leader. Carter had also helped broker the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which also infuriated Iran and much of the Islamic world. Plus, Carter had ordered Operation Eagle Claw -- the failed attempt to rescue the hostages by force -- and that was seen as an act of war. So, the Ayatollah and leaders of Revolutionary Iran had no love lost for President Carter and weren't interested in doing him any favors before he left office.

The October Surprise that many people overlook is the one which took place in 1968 shortly before the Nixon vs. Humphrey election. When it looked like there might be some progress made in peace talks to bring the Vietnam War to a close, Nixon and his advisers got word to the South Vietnamese to hold off on working toward peace until Nixon was elected and could give them better terms. It was such an egregious act that LBJ actually told people around him that he felt Nixon had committed treason and that he had the blood of American soldiers on his hands for sabotaging peace talks. We even have the tapes of LBJ's phone calls after finding out about Nixon's actions where President Johnson straight-up says, "This is Treason!"

[alanfromrochester]

like Nixon convincing the North Vietnamese to not make a deal with LBJ

For every righteous and correct step forward, reactionary Republicans drag the country back decades.

Ronald Reagan was in his 70s and pretty much said 'fcuk you' to younger generations.

That is how all conservatives act: they get so lonely/greedy with their money, they leave the country/society much worse off.

[xtruss]

Jimmy Carter’s Rock-and-Roll Legacy

The former President has a surprisingly long list of musician friends, some of whom, in the past days and weeks, have been reflecting on the time they’ve had with him.

In recent weeks, the former President has mostly been listening to favorites like Willie Nelson, whose music helped get him through the Iran hostage crisis. Photograph by Thomas S. England/Getty

In the decades since Jimmy Carter left the White House, there have been many reconsiderations of the former President’s legacy. Among the more unexpected of these is “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,” a documentary released in 2020, which chronicles Carter’s overlooked relationship not only with rock and roll but also with country, jazz, folk, and other genres. The movie had accidental beginnings: its lead producer, Chris Farrell, who’d previously worked in finance and had never made a film, set out to make a movie about the Allman Brothers Band, a group that, like him, hails from Jacksonville, Florida. Then a friend suggested that he call up some people in Atlanta who had worked for Carter.

“They start telling me all these amazing stories about Carter and the Allmans,” Farrell recalled recently. Carter had struck up a friendship with the band’s members when he was the governor of Georgia, in the early nineteen-seventies. One night, Carter and Gregg Allman, the band’s lead singer, were drinking scotch on the porch of the Governor’s Mansion, and Carter told Allman he was going to be President. (Allman said that they had had “just about all” of a bottle of J&B; Carter recalled only “a drink.”) “We all thought, Oh, really,” Chuck Leavell, the band’s pianist at their peak, in the early seventies, told me. “But we did some concerts for him. We thought, Wouldn’t it be great to have a President from Georgia?” The band had split, temporarily, by the time Carter took office, but they were invited to some formal White House events. “We weren’t sure how to act,” Leavell said. Greg Allman came to one dinner with his then wife, Cher, who mistook a finger bowl for a drink and downed it.

The former Carter staffers Peter Conlon and Tom Beard had more stories—about Willie Nelson, for instance, who, Farrell learned, had smoked pot on the White House roof with the President’s son Chip. At Nelson’s Georgia shows, Carter would sometimes take the stage and pretend to play the harmonica during “Georgia on My Mind,” while Mickey Raphael was really playing it in the wings. After these and other tales, Farrell was about to say goodbye to Conlon and Beard when one of them asked, “Wanna hear about Bob Dylan?”

The stories that Farrell heard that day immediately changed his focus. (Conlon, who became an executive producer on the film, and is now the chairman of Live Nation Georgia, told me that making a film about “the first President to embrace rock music in his campaign” was his idea.) Farrell called an old friend, Mary Wharton, who had produced and directed a number of music-related TV shows. She agreed to direct the film. The veteran music journalist Bill Flanagan helped track down and interview the musicians who appeared in the movie: Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Larry Gatlin, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Buffett, Rosanne Cash, Bono.

Dylan, who rarely grants interviews, was maybe the most coveted target on the filmmakers’ list. “Bob was the white whale,” Farrell told me. Flanagan, who was close with Dylan’s manager, put in a request, and eventually got good news. “Even on the day it finally happened,” Farrell said, “I remember waiting for him to show up and thinking, I don’t know.”

“He wanted to do his interview in a kitchen,” Wharton told me. “I was, like, I wonder if he’s gonna share some recipes with us.” They met at a house in Connecticut, near a gig that Dylan had at the time. When he arrived, Dylan made it clear that he didn’t like the kitchen. He helped Wharton decorate another room to his taste. (Among the items he suggested was a triptych of three goddesses.) “He’d come prepared with things he wanted to say,” Wharton told me. They did a few takes, as Dylan worked out the rhythm of his words. “There’s many sides to him,” he said, of Carter. “He’s a nuclear engineer, woodworking carpenter. He’s also a poet. He’s a dirt farmer. If you told me he was a race-car driver, I wouldn’t even be surprised.” It seemed to Wharton “like he’d written a song about Jimmy Carter.” Dylan also told the story of the first time he and Carter met. “The first thing he did was quote my songs back to me. It was the first time that I realized my songs had reached into, basically, into the establishment world.” He called Carter “a kindred spirit to me of a rare kind.”

“He’s not generally loquacious,” Conlon said, of Dylan. “But around Carter he’s totally different. He relaxes and tells stories. Not the Dylan you’re used to.” When Carter sat for his interviews for the movie, in 2018, “he was kind of rigid at first, but, when he realized that all we wanted him to do was talk about music, it was almost like a light bulb went off and you could see the joy emanating out of him as he recounted all these stories,” Farrell said. The former President described Dylan as “one of my best friends.”

Part of the argument of the documentary is that Carter, who is now ninety-eight and in hospice care, changed the relationship between rock and roll and political power. “Previously,” Conlon explained, “the thinking was that there was too much risk mixing politicians and rock and roll—‘You can’t be around this guy. He does drugs.’ But Carter was very accepting of people and their frailties.”

Beard helped put on concerts in support of Carter’s Presidential campaign—including one headlined by Lynyrd Skynyrd that nearly went off the rails when the singer Ronnie Van Zant was too tanked to perform—and later served as deputy assistant to the President. Beard’s basement office occasionally hosted musicians waiting their turn to see Carter. Among those who stopped by were members of the group Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Stephen Stills, who had performed in the concerts that Beard helped to organize, told me about the band’s visit. “We took the pictures and stuff,” he said. David Crosby’s 2006 memoir refers to an unnamed member of the band “smoking a joint somewhere in the White House, just to say he did.” Stills told me that Crosby himself, along with one of the band’s managers, “lit up a doobie in the Oval,” although people who worked in the White House at the time cast doubt on the likelihood of this. “I was so embarrassed I didn’t speak to him for a couple of days,” Stills said, insistent that it happened.

Stills found the connection to Carter ennobling: “He made you take yourself seriously, you know? In a very offhand kind of way, he’d kind of remind you that you had a part to play here. I don’t know, I bit.”

Conlon recalled another occasion in the White House, in 1977, when he was hanging out with Carter’s call screener one night “and Elvis called.” Apparently, Elvis called sometimes. “I talked to Elvis for a minute,” Conlon said. Years later, Conlon asked Carter about the call. “First of all,” he recalled Carter responding, “Elvis and I are cousins. The Carters and the Presleys go way back.” Then the former President explained: “Elvis was calling because a friend of his was in jail in Memphis for passing bad checks and he wanted me to give him a Presidential pardon.” Carter told him he couldn’t help.

Musicians were occasionally asked to do more than just play. “He tasked me to do things, and I’d carry them out,” Stills said, noting that, on a musical-diplomacy visit to Havana, in 1979, Carter’s people had told him, “Pay attention while you’re in Cuba.” He added, “It wasn’t transactional. I liked him. My favorite thing about Jimmy was his laugh. He had this sort of half guffaw and half bray that came out when he was really tickled.” I asked Stills when Carter had been the happiest during his Presidency. He was often happy, Stills said, “but I heard he had more fun at Camp David than any other time in his life—riding around between those little houses while he told them to say the helicopter is broken.” Stills was on the South Lawn the day that the Camp David Accords were signed.

“Musicians are drawn to his spirituality and authenticity,” Conlon said, offering a theory for why Carter became friends with so many of them. “He’s deeply soulful and open-minded. He doesn’t judge people. Wouldn’t that be nice, in the current political environment?” (Conlon once asked Carter what he thought about Donald Trump. He chuckled at the one-word answer that he said Carter gave, with a wry smile: “Interesting.”)

Jim Free, who served as special assistant to the President for congressional liaison, told me a story that seemed to illustrate this characterization. When China’s Ambassador visited the United States in 1979, Carter asked whether there was anything he could do for the envoy. The Ambassador was a fan of country music, and wanted to go to Nashville. Free was tasked with putting the visit together. The Ambassador saw the Fisk Jubilee Singers and visited the Grand Ole Opry. The weekend ended on Sunday morning, at the home of Tom T. Hall, the musician and short-story writer, who’d invited “everybody who was anybody in the Nashville music industry,” Free recalled. Minnie Pearl, Jimmy C. Newman, Johnny and June Carter Cash all came. “When it came time to say the blessing, there was this awkward moment,” Free said. “And all of a sudden John and June started singing, ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ I still get chills.”

Leavell appreciated Carter’s generous spirit, too, recalling a Newport-style jazz festival that took place on the South Lawn, which featured Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, and Cecil Taylor, among others. “I remember Carter running over at the end of Taylor’s piece and giving him this huge hug,” Leavell told me. “I thought, If Carter gets that atonal stuff, that’s pretty cool.” Carter also joined Gillespie onstage to sing his bebop tune “Salt Peanuts,” which Carter did enthusiastically, later calling it “a very peculiar song.”

Before “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President” premièred, Wharton asked Jason Carter, the President’s grandson, about the title. Jason told her, “He says that the two things he’s most proud of in the world are, No. 1, having a U.S. Naval submarine named after himself, and, No. 2, being called the rock-and-roll President.”

Conlon told me that, in recent years, Carter noted his admiration for current musicians, including Jason Isbell, the singer-songwriter formerly of the Drive-By Truckers. But, at home in Plains, Georgia, in recent weeks, in the same house where he has lived since 1961, he has been listening to favorites like Willie Nelson, who helped get him through the Iran hostage crisis. “I would play Willie Nelson music primarily,” Carter said, of the time that he spent alone, in his study, in 1980, “so I could think about my problems and say a few prayers.”

Stephen Stills said, “Jimmy thought that the artists had a kind of a view over the horizon by intuition that some other people didn’t—a canary-in-a-coal-mine sort of aspect to us that he paid attention to. And he called upon us to comment, and he supported our commentary—the troubadour aspect to us. He just liked our deal.” ♦

[o-the-mts]

It’s also a reminder that contrary to the fairytale the public is being fed by many of these same sources, US politics and the GOP were far from bastions of decency and righteousness until the dastardly Donald Trump came along and messed everything up. It was Reagan, the Republican president most often cast these days as Trump’s polar opposite, who carried out something close to treason to win an election, before carrying out a host of other crimes and outrages as president. Everything in our scandal-filled times is, sadly, part and parcel of decades of US political tradition.

Once Dismissed as Absurd, Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Is Now Confirmed as True

[lamajaoscura]

Reagan Allies Sabotaged Carter With US Hostage Release Delay: Witness – Rolling Stone

[trendynewsnow]

U.S. State Department Investigates Arrest of Iranian-American Journalist in Iran

The U.S. State Department has confirmed that it is looking into reports regarding the arrest of an Iranian-American citizen in Iran. This development comes at a time when tensions between the Islamic Republic and the United States are once again escalating. Iran has a history of detaining Western citizens as a means of leverage, and this incident could further strain relations following recent…

[agentfascinateur]

Code Pink's Medea on where things stand

🩷

[thenerdcantina]

The House on Sun Street by Mojgan Ghazirad: Book Review

Moji is a young girl living in Tehran, Iran. She and her younger sister Mar Mar love spending time with their grandfather Agha Joon, listening to the fascinating stories in One Thousand and One Nights. But it is 1979, and Iran is on the brink of a tumultuous revolution to overthrow the monarchy. With her home and family in danger, Moji unknowingly views history in the making. A cultural and…

[countesspetofi]

We just assumed that it happened, But Ben Barnes was in the room where it happened

Reagan was truly a sack of shit

[heritageposts]

MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes. TIM WALZ: Well, thank you. And thank you for those joining at home tonight. Let's keep in mind where this started. October 7th, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1400 Israelis and took prisoners. Iran, or, Israel's ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental, getting its hostages back, fundamental, and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.

so intent on getting all his pre-approved zionist talking points across in the allotted two minutes that he forgot he wasn't supposed to say the quiet part out loud. and this is supposed to be the ''progressive'' voice of the harris campaign.

[icedsodapop]

This is so foul

Red carpets may be a chance to talk up current projects while wearing high-wattage fashion, but they’re also an opportunity for stars to express their support for vital issues — that’s why viewers of Sunday’s 2024 Golden Globe Awards are seeing some attendees wearing yellow ribbons at tonight’s ceremony.

J. Smith-Cameron of Succession and John Ortiz of American Fiction are among the stars who have arrived sporting a yellow ribbon to show support for the roughly 130 hostages who are still being held in captivity by Hamas since the terrorist organization attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The symbolic effort was organized by Bring Them Home, an Israeli hostage advocacy organization that has been working behind the scenes to supply the ribbons, and is being coordinated by Ashlee Margolis, founder of Beverly Hills-based branding agency The A List. While the Israeli hostages are the main focus of the effort, the hostages reportedly represent 30 nationalities.

The choice of yellow is rooted in the origins of the symbol. Yellow ribbons became a popular emblem of support during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held in captivity in Tehran for 444 days. Worn on lapels and seen on front porches and trees across the U.S., the yellow ribbon became the most widely used symbol of bringing the hostages safely home.

It's to support US imperialism, pure and simple.

- mod sodapop

[the-art-of-evil-thoughts]

It's worth mentioning that the Reagan campaign similarly delayed the negotiation talks being conducted by the Carter administration throughout 1979 and 1980 to release the American hostages in the Iran hostage crisis in order to similarly influence the results of the 1980 presidential election, which of course Reagan won. William Casey, Reagan's campaign manager, was the architect of that particular dipshittery.

I'm not really in the loop, who is, or should I say was, Henry Kissinger.

Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford. He was responsible for multiple genocides notably including those in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Cambodia. He also helped to put Pinchet in Power and Played a major role in the escalation of the Vietname war . And despite his numerous crimes he was given the fucking Nobel peace prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam after he directed lead to the millions of deaths caused by the war

[mariacallous]

The story is told of the U.S. Secretary of State, who on a diplomatic mission to London, Moscow, and Jerusalem, decided to take a break and look for some new clothes. In each city, the secretary went to the tailor to ask, “For $100, what can you make me?” The British tailor offered to make a sweater and a tie. The Russian tailor could make a vest and a pair of pants for that sum. But in Jerusalem, the answer came as a surprise. “For $100 I can make you several shirts, a sport coat, and I’ll throw in a few pairs of pants,” the Israeli tailor said. Stunned, the U.S. diplomat asked how the same money could buy so much more in Israel. “It’s really quite simple,” the tailor replied: “Out here, you’re not so big.”

As we mark the first year of the Israel-Hamas war and the escalating crisis on another front between Israel and Hezbollah, nowhere is the United States’ “out here, you’re not so big” problem more stunningly and tragically apparent. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has not been a potted plant. While the flow of assistance to the suffering population of Gaza has been galactically insufficient, not a scintilla of aid would have gotten through without U.S. pressure. Nor would negotiations to secure the release of 105 out of roughly 252 hostages during the temporary cease-fire in late 2023 have succeeded without a central U.S. role. The Biden administration has also been successful through deterrence, pressure, and diplomacy in preventing the escalation of the Israel-Hamas war into a broader regional war—until now, that is.

Nonetheless, it should be painfully obvious that, despite its tireless efforts, Washington has been unable to negotiate a cease-fire to de-escalate the Israel-Hamas war, let alone end it. Indeed, over the past year, Washington has failed to fundamentally alter the strategic calculations of the conflict’s two principal decision-makers, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While Washington and other allied stakeholders have attempted to pressure and persuade, they have yet to succeed in reshaping the two decision-makers’ convictions that continuing the conflict held greater benefits than de-escalating it. (Israel’s ground operation in Lebanon and Iran’s missile strikes on Israel this week also demonstrate the way the administration has been unable to control events in the region).

Some view the U.S. failure with moral outrage given the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the humanitarian catastrophe imposed upon the people of Gaza. Others just shake their heads, wondering why the world’s most powerful nation—with great leverage over Israel and allies who had significant sway with Hamas—couldn’t do much more to end the conflict. Why not, indeed.

That the United States could not have its way through force or diplomacy in response to perhaps the most complex Middle East crisis in decades should have surprised no one. CIA Director William Burns, one of the most astute analysts of Middle East politics, couldn’t have said it better. In his four decades of involvement in the Middle East, Burns said in January that he’d “rarely seen it more tangled or explosive.”

Indeed, the complexity of the conflict has only highlighted the limitations of outside powers. In a conflict where the stakes are perceived to be existential—involving the political or physical survival of key decision-makers and the traumas to their respective publics—the ability of outside powers to exert significant influence diminishes. At the same time, local resistance to external pressure grows.

The attack on Oct. 7, 2023, was a unique and unprecedented crisis that only magnified the “out here, you’re not so big” problem, leaving the United States in the role of a modern-day Gulliver, wandering around the region, tied up by the interests of smaller powers that were not its own and driven to try well-intentioned diplomacy that had little chance of succeeding.

The Oct. 7 Problem

Oct. 7 presented the Biden administration with a veritable mission impossible. Hamas’s indiscriminate killing, raping, torture of civilians, and hostage-taking was followed by Israel’s punishing airstrikes, which seemed to put a focus on damage rather than accuracy. The invasion that followed guaranteed thousands of civilian deaths, given Hamas’s decision to collocate its military assets in, around, and below civilian populations and structures, and virtually guaranteed that U.S. influence would be limited.

Indeed, through most of the last year, it was Netanyahu and Sinwar who controlled the trajectory of the conflict, leaving the United States to react to the table they set. Israel’s goals were maximalist: to destroy Hamas as a military organization and end its control of Gaza. And Netanyahu’s politics—his constant looking into the rearview mirror to ensure that his extremist ministers wouldn’t bolt from the governing coalition—hovered over his security decisions, making it impossible to do any postwar planning and facilitate a steady flow of badly needed assistance to Gaza.

Sinwar’s goals focused on restoring the centrality of Palestinian rights on the international and regional agenda; blocking normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia; and demonstrating that it was Hamas, not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, that was to be the agent of Palestinian redemption. He also hoped to incite a broader war between Israel and regional countries. In any case, reconciling what Sinwar sought and what Netanyahu wanted was impossible. These were hardly the kind of positions that would lend themselves to a negotiation that the United States could broker.

The Biden administration’s influence was further constrained by the nature of a conflict between a close U.S. ally and a group that, by statute and force of law, the United States considers a foreign terror organization. Biden’s emotional statement in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre and his early visit to Israel reflected his deep and abiding support for the country. These served to tether Washington to Israel’s war aims almost from the outset and left little incentive to pressure Israel, let alone break with the Netanyahu government over disagreements with Israeli tactics and how to achieve those aims. Toughness with Israel was invariably interpreted as being weak on Hamas—an unsustainable position in light of Hamas’s taking, abusing, and murdering hostages, including Americans.

Once the United States developed the idea of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire as a mechanism to de-escalate the war, Washington was forced to work within the parameters of the two leaders, neither of whom saw much value or utility in closing a deal. The United States was played by both sides. And neither Qatar nor Egypt, the primary go-betweens for Hamas, had the power, incentive, or inclination to appear to be pressing Hamas while Israelis were carrying on a war against the group—and in the process wreaking misery on the Palestinian population.

The Netanyahu Problem

Perhaps nowhere is the “out here, you’re not so big” challenge more acutely demonstrated than in the dynamic between the Biden administration and Netanyahu, the longest-governing prime minister in the history of Israel. Long mistrustful of the United States, Netanyahu has played the president and the administration, at times crudely, at times like a finely tuned violin.

Let’s be clear: Hamas leader Sinwar also played the Americans. But Sinwar heads a militant organization that executes Americans and is inimically opposed to U.S. interests. He’s not the leader of a country closely aligned with the United States and its president, whose support for Israel seemed to have no limit. No reciprocity or cooperation is to be expected from Hamas. In Netanyahu’s case, the image of a close ally seemingly exploiting the largess of another highlights the perennial problem of the small power taking advantage of the big. And when it becomes a pattern of behavior, it reflects the paradox of the small power demonstrating focus and strength and the dominant power exhibiting weakness and indecision.

U.S.-Israel relations have had their ups and downs in the past. And former U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers have argued over policy. But what made the current Biden-Netanyahu dynamic even worse and diminished U.S. credibility even further was the perception—grounded in reality—that the divide wasn’t so much driven by Israel’s national interests but by Netanyahu’s political interests.

What this meant in practice was that on many issues—facilitating international assistance into Gaza,  prioritizing the return of hostages, planning for postwar Gaza, and avoiding an explosive situation on the West Bank—Netanyahu’s decision-making was shaped by the demands and requirements of his right-wing government, particularly his two extremist ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

This dynamic was most clearly on display when it came to negotiations over an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, highlighting the humiliation and embarrassment of the big power at the hands of the small. Time and again, the prime minister would say yes, then maybe, and then no. Netanyahu would send his negotiators but with limited mandates.

Sinwar was clearly as much responsible—perhaps even more, in the wake of Hamas’s execution of six hostages—for the impasse as Netanyahu. But Sinwar wasn’t conveying commitments directly to the president and senior administration officials. Indeed, just last week, Netanyahu committed himself to a U.S.-French proposal for a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon only to walk that commitment back, temporarily seeming to endorse its aims while knowing full well that he had set into motion the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The Leverage Problem

So if the great power is being taken advantage of by smaller ones, then why doesn’t the Biden administration—or the vaunted international community, for that matter—impose a single cost or consequence on Israel or Hamas that would alter the trajectory of the conflict?

Let’s do the easy ones first. We have no answer to the question of how to alter the behavior of a Palestinian decision-maker safely ensconced in tunnels that have not been made accessible to the thousands of Palestinian civilians exposed and killed by Israeli bombs. Having spent two decades in Israeli prisons, Sinwar surely knew how Israel would respond to Oct. 7, how many Palestinians would die, and how he would at some point meet his end at the hands of Israel. Whether any single Arab state or collection of states could force Sinwar to end the conflict or agree to de-escalate it will have to remain a thought experiment. None was likely able or willing to try.

As for Israel, it should be quite clear by now that the Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, has been unwilling and unable to apply maximum pressure, let alone break with its Israeli ally over the conduct of Israel’s prosecution of its wars against Hamas or Hezbollah. Former presidents have been willing to use discrete pressure at times. The Nixon administration kept Israel from destroying Egypt’s third army to preserve prospects for a diplomatic breakthrough between Egypt and Israel. Former President Ronald Reagan suspended the delivery of advanced fighter aircraft over Israeli policies in Lebanon. The administration of GeorgeH.W. Bushdenied housing loan guarantees because of Israel’s settlement construction as it was trying to put together the Madrid peace conference.

In fact, when I first heard the anecdote about the Israeli tailor, it was attributed to Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker. I asked Baker whether it was his yarn—he laughed and said he wished it was.

But real pressure? You’d need to go back to the Eisenhower administration, when the president threatened to sanction Israel unless it withdrew its forces from Sinai during the failed British-French-Israeli campaign to seize the Suez Canal from President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

It’s not that the Biden administration lacks leverage on Israel. The president has many tools in his arsenal, such as conditioning or restricting U.S. military assistance to Israel; introducing or supporting a United Nations Security Council resolution that is critical of its policies in Gaza; demonstrating its displeasure by joining 140-plus countries—most recently Ireland, Spain, and Norway—in recognizing a Palestinian state, or joining near-international consensus in calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, threatening consequences if neither side complied.

Biden chose none of these actions due to a confluence of factors: the president’s deep emotional commitment to the idea, security, and people of Israel honed over decades; the United States’ domestic political landscape, where the Republican Party has emerged as the “Israel-can-do-no-wrong” party, and a policy fixated on a cease-fire that required the agreement of both Israel and Hamas. Biden’s anger grew and slipped out from time to time. But with the exception of a delay in the shipment of some heavy bombs, that anger never translated into concrete or sustained changes in policy.

Would the application of pressure have worked? We’ll never know, though there’s reason to doubt it. Stephen M. Walt argued here in Foreign Policy that a patron’s leverage over a client diminishes when the matter at hand is of vital importance to the latter and when shared values as well as political and institutional constraints impose costs on the patron for exerting pressure. Add to that the often ignored but critically important reality that when it comes to its friends, partners, and allies, the United States rarely (if ever) uses sustained pressure or leverage on an issue that the latter considers vital to its own national or political interests. And if few U.S. presidents want to tangle with their friends that lack significant political resonance, why would a president want to break with an ally that has significant domestic support?

No U.S. administration has ever faced a situation with its Israeli ally quite like Oct. 7, where the unique nature of the conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah were seen in near existential terms; an Israeli prime minister was determined to do most anything to remain in power; and the absence of a realistic diplomatic pathway combined with a preternaturally pro-Israeli president and domestic politics, especially in an election year, to limit the United States’ options and influence.

It’s Not Our Neighborhood

The story of the secretary and the tailor makes a powerful point that U.S. diplomats and negotiators often forget: For all their military and political muscle, great powers are not always so great when they get mixed up in the affairs of smaller ones in a neighborhood owned by the latter.

The U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the standard for victory was never “could we win” but rather “when can we leave and what will we leave behind,” is perhaps the most tragic cautionary tale. And the set of U.S. diplomatic successes in helping to resolve the long-term Arab-Israeli conflict is stunningly small. The United States has had great success against the Islamic State and al Qaeda and has kept the homeland secure from foreign terrorist attacks. But the Middle East is littered with the remains of great powers who wrongly believed that they could impose their will, schemes, ambitions, dreams, and peace plans on smaller ones.

Indeed, this region is more often than not a place where American ideas go to wither or die. This is particularly the case in conflicts that have long histories where identity, trauma, memory, and religion play dominant roles.

As we mark the first year after Oct. 7, we should remind ourselves that ignoring the region, let alone leaving it to its own devices, isn’t an option. But neither is transformation. The United States has allies, interests, adversaries, and vital interests there. The locals will always have a greater stake; be more invested; and be willing to run greater risks for good or ill than the United States ever will.

U.S. leadership is important, but it isn’t the key. What matters more is having Israeli and Palestinian leaders who are masters of their politics, not prisoners of their ideologies—leaders who are not extractive and who care about the future of their own people and are willing to reach out to one another with a vision of a shared future.

Without that, we have nothing; with it, we at least have a chance to create a better pathway forward for Israelis and Palestinians alike.