In Washington today, Hagel’s views are mostly associated with those of Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Hagel calls himself a “principled realist.” He remains skeptical of American attempts to foster democracy through unilateral intervention. He calls for the United States to create a “new world order” by reforming and reshaping international organizations to take account of the rise of countries like China, India, and Brazil. He wants the United States to understand the limits of its power to unilaterally effect events, whether in Syria or Iran. He backed the Obama administration’s decisions to leave Iraq and to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. He has energetically backed the “peace process” and a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine.
This last position is what is now causing Hagel trouble. He stands accused of recommending that the United States talk to individuals, groups and countries that are seen as enemies of Israel. In 2002, he urged Bush to meet with Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat. “We cannot hold the Middle East peace process hostage by making Yasser Arafat the issue,” he wrote in the Washington Post. In 2007, Hagel sent a letter to Bush advocating direct talks with Iran to “create a historic new dynamic in U.S.-Iran relations, in part forcing the Iranian to react to the possibility of better relations with the West.”
In 2009, Hagel was one of eight notables to sign a report to Obama recommending that the United States shift “its objective from ousting Hamas to modifying its behavior.” The U.S. should “offer it inducements that will enable its more moderate elements to prevail, and cease discouraging third parties from engaging with Hamas in ways that might help clarify the movement’s views and test its behavior.” Hagel and the other signatories (including Brzezinski, Scowcroft, Lee Hamilton, Carla Hills, and Paul Volcker) also called for the U.S. to encourage rather than block “Palestinian national reconciliation” between Hamas and Fatah as long as Hamas was willing to accept President Mahmoud Abbas’s role as “chief negotiator” with Israel.
There are, of course, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans who would disagree with Hagel’s stands on these issues. But these are not reason to block someone from being Secretary of Defense. For starters, Hagel would not be in charge of America’s diplomacy--that job falls to the Secretary of State. Beyond that, Hagel has the right approach. When America has refused to talk to adversaries, or to adversaries of its allies, it has courted disaster. That was certainly the case with the American decision not to recognize China after the Chinese revolution. If the United States had had relations with China in 1950, the Korean War might not have occurred, or might have been much shorter.
America had to break relations with Iran after the hostage crisis in 1979, but two decades later, the United States was ignoring overtures from Iran that could have eased tensions. Similarly, if the United States had not appeased Israel in 1975 by refusing to talk to the PLO, the U.S. might have been in a position to bring the PLO into Camp David in 1978 and to cut short the war in Lebanon in 1982. On the other side, the United States’ willingness to maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War may have prevented World War III. Hagel may have been too optimistic about the results of such diplomacy, but he was right about the dangers of avoiding diplomacy altogether.
The rightwing Republican case against Hagel doesn’t stop there. His opponents have repeatedly cited what Hagel told former peace negotiator Aaron David Miller, which Miller quoted in his 2008 book, The Much Too Promised Land. Citing AIPAC’s clout, Hagel told Miller, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.” The Republican Jewish Coalition saw Hagel’s statement as evidence of a “visceral sentiment” against Jews and Israel. Another critic called it an “anti-Semitic meme.” But referring to AIPAC as a Jewish organization is about as scandalous as referring to the NAACP as an African-American organization; and any reporter who has covered foreign policy on Capitol Hill learns very quickly that Senators and House members have taken positions on Middle East issues not out of conviction, but out of fear of retaliation from AIPAC.
