Arab-Israeli peace expert at Princeton

By Sarah Morrison

September 12, 2008

Middle East policy expert Aaron David Miller is participating in the Public Affairs series at Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, with a lecture on Sept. 22. He will talk about his new book, "The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace."

"I wrote this book in large part because I was tired of seeing America fail in one specific area: the Arab-Israeli conflict," Miller, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. said. "There's no mistake, we have become masters of failing over the past 60 years. The focus of my public talk will be about why we are failing in the Arab-Israeli issue."

Miller has an extensive background in foreign policy. He worked in the U.S. Department of State for 24 years. He served under former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush in foreign policy matters for 16 of those years.

"America has been failing in how to make peace and how to make war," Miller said. "We're failing in a part of the world which is critically important to our interests. The sources of our failures, to a large degree, are generated by events beyond our control. We're operating in a very dysfunctional part of the world, but we can't fix it and we can't run away from it. As long as we're stuck in the region -- and we are -- we at least need to try to figure out how we can reduce our exposure, support our friends to the degree that we can, and make it much harder for our enemies (to thrive)."

Miller will also discuss the difficulty in spreading democracy to other parts of the world, a reason that he says is partially responsible for America's political shortcomings.

"We don't see the world the way it is," Miller said. "We persist in trying to see the world the way we want it to be. Although it's an ideal way of looking at the world, it is not how policy should be made... we have a unique security. We're surrounded by non-predatory neighbors. That security leades to our naivete and arrogance. We've never been occupied and invaded. We don't see the world clearly, and that is a source of enormous numbers of problems for our incompetence in Arab-Israeli issues."

Miller's lecture will touch on what he believes is one of America's foremost weaknesses in forming foreign policy in the Middle East.

"We're not tough enough," Miller said. "We very rarely put American interests first. Sometimes, we allow domestic policy to guide us, but we don't seem to have capacity to say no to our friends. I feel like that is a very serious failure for a great power operating in such a volatile part of the world. We certainly are not responsible, but we do make it worse... Come to the lecture if you want to understand how America is failing."

The talk will be held at 4:30 p.m. in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus. It is free and open to the public.