Wisdom-based Foreign Relations
The wisdom norm of insight
That we become wiser when we learn from experience is fundamental to the wisdom tradition. When history repeats itself because no one is listening, we become more foolish. Here we have entered a field of vision called insight, and much of the insight that we find in the old-world wisdom writings arose from observation over time, as the sages learned lessons about life and relationships from studying both human behavior and the order of the world to gain understanding of what has been called the “act-consequence connection.” More popularly: you reap what you sow. The literature abounds with such insights. For example: do not love sleep or you will grow poor; the first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him; for lack of guidance, a nation falls (Proverbs 20:13; 18:17; 11:14). The sages, however, also accepted that there were contradictions to such principles, that, for instance, the godly person may suffer or the crook may prosper. Exceptions to rules, then, is also basic to the tradition’s insight about human life and relationships.
Insight gained from learned lessons derives from what the distinguished scholar of the Old Testament Gerard von Rad calls “experiential knowledge.” In Wisdom in Israel he writes that no one “would be able to live even for a single day without incurring appreciable harm if he could not be guided by wide practical experience. This experience teaches him to understand events in his surroundings, to foresee the reactions of his fellow men, to apply his own resources at the right point, to distinguish the normal from the unique and more besides.” And yet we may miss the insight an experience offers us, or lack the capacity to register it, perhaps because we are incapable of fitting it into the limits of our current understanding. Because of this, von Rad concludes that experiential knowledge is both very complex and very vulnerable.
If we think for a minute about the bilateral relations between Iran and the United States, we know from their past thirty-year history that the ideological orientations of both governments are implicated in why those relations are now stuck tangled. It is also arguable from history that political leaders of such nations who try to thaw their adversarial relations by hunkering down as loyalists to ideological orientations can be doomed to failure. To put it crudely, if the parties really want to work toward better relations, it’s no use to keep relying on tools that tangle. When those tools, however, are ones the leaders and their advisors choose to employ, we also know from history that war, as they say, becomes a continuation of politics. A wisdom-based policy would seek not to cut the knot with the sword but to untangle it.wise insight for more cooperative relations will come from talking to each other outside the ideological box
The bilateral situation between the United States and Iran, not to mention between Israel and Iran, is screaming for fresh insight to move the relationship away from the precipice. The situation needs a reasonable and responsible way ahead that can be accepted as equitable by both governments and their domestic populations. Although Americans tend to be impatient and want to see immediate results, fresh insight for a wiser way ahead in this relationship may come but it will not be easily applied, as President Obama and his foreign policy advisors have discovered. It can take place, though, if the parties are willing to talk openly and honestly and compromise. As Moshe Dayan, an Israeli military leaders, once said, “If you want to make peace you don’t talk to your friends; you talk to your adversaries.”
For American and Iranian leaders, and those of Israel, wise insight for more cooperative relations will come from talking to each other outside the ideological box. Such insight, however, will not emerge overnight in relations as different and difficult as those between America and Iran, or Israel and Iran, are. This is why face-to-face listening of each other’s cries is crucial. But as Ringo Starr still sings, “You know it don’t come easy.” In The Prophets, Rabbi Heschel, a seminal figure in twentieth century religious studies and political activism, wrote: “Insight is a breakthrough, requiring much intellectual dismantling and dislocation.” It is a process that “begins with a mental interim, with the cultivation of a feeling for the unfamiliar, unparalleled, incredible. It is in being involved with a phenomenon, being intimately engaged to it, courting it, as it were, that after much perplexity and embarrassment we come upon insight – upon a way of seeing the phenomenon from within. Insight is accompanied by a sense of surprise. What has been closed is suddenly disclosed. It entails genuine perception, seeing anew.”
In The Creative Word, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls this way to wisdom a “great brooding” process. With wisdom, he writes, we are “in touch with a mystery that cannot be too closely shepherded, as in the Torah, or protested against, as in the prophets. There is here a not-knowing, a waiting to know, a patience about what is yet to be discerned, and a respect for not knowing that must be honored and not crowded. It works at a different pace because it understands that its secrets cannot be forced.” He continues: “Wisdom is found in the experience of the specific, concrete experiences which individuals discern for themselves…. That is where wisdom shall be found — in the stuff of life, the world, our experience…. It holds for the patient, diligent observer what needs to be known.”
Insights from learned lessons help leaders and their advisors apply good judgment for foreign policy decisions. President Obama seems to get this, although it is being strongly resisted by powerful political ideologues in America and Israel, as it is by the ultrafundamentalists who currently rule Iran. It remains to be seen whether the president will be able to sustain even his own personal momentum to keeping talking with Tehran, especially if he keeps getting the runaround by the regime.
In short, wisdom reveals herself in the dialogue among learners. Wisdom is a way of seeing the past in the present to prevent future shock.
The wisdom norm of skillful diplomacy and negotiations
When kings of ancient Egypt, Israel, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia ruled at various times over parts of what is now the modern Middle East, the wisdom way was invaluable in the halls of power for their ambassadors, foreign ministers, policy advisors, and other government officials. One of the principle duties of these high-level old-world officials, writes von Rad, “was to advise the king on political matters.” Further, despite the different religious ideologies of those kingdoms, which were no less controlling than religious ideology is in today’s Middle East, it was the wisdom tradition that provided old-world rulers and their diplomats with a pattern for constructing and conducting their more cooperative international relations.
To use some specialist language for a minute, a broad class of prominent high officials (chiefly men but occasionally some women) within ancient Israel’s government were known as the hakamim. (When referring to the class itself, the hakamim are occasionally short-handed in the literature simply as “the wise.”) They served as what today we would call cabinet ministers, policymakers, statesmen, foreign ministers, secretaries of state, diplomats, and political advisors; occasionally, ecclesiastical figures and even generals were included. Individuals of this sort make brief appearances in the literature as advisors to the pharaohs, and as integral to the rudimentary forming of Israelite jurisprudence under Moses after the flight from Egypt but before the wilderness wanderings had ensued. During that period of Israelite history, hakamim were commissioned as judges to hear disputes and to render their decisions fairly and impartially, whether between two Israelites or between an Israelite and a non-Israelite. [Editor’s note: All Hebrew words in this article, such as hakamim, are spelled without their diacritical marks.]
This last point is significant. It often goes unnoticed that ancient Israel’s nascent social and political experiment under Moses and Joshua, as well as its later monarchical rule over the land of Canaan, included many peoples who were not Israelites. It was in a pluralistic context, therefore, that ancient Israel’s hakamim emerged and evolved as a class of government advisors essential to the proper domestic functioning of Israel’s somewhat pluralist society. Quite specific guidelines are given, for instance, to the pre-monarchical hakamim in the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, where they are instructed to be impartial — literally, taking no one’s part, or side. They are to hear disputes free from outside pressures and render their decisions fairly between an Israelite and a non-Israelite. (It fascinates me that this began with the sage advice to Moses from Jethro, who was not an Israelite but a Midianite priest.) Further, the goal of the hakamim’s impartiality in judging was that there might be peace, shalom, human flourishing within this pluralistic society (see Exodus 18:23).the wisdom norm of skillful diplomacy can be given free rein, or it can be reined in, often depending on the ideological motivation of an administration
Afterward, during the monarchical period, the hakamim were also essential to Israel’s proper functioning in its international relations, as scholarship has discovered in the transition of the people Israel into a formal nation (a monarchy), what today we would call a state. Once up and running as a nation among nations, if Israel wanted to benefit as an actor in the international scene, and it did, it would need to be recognized by the region’s other nations (also monarchies) as a formal participant in the pattern that had been established for conducting the international relations of that time and place (think of the need today for a new state to join the United Nations and the benefits that would accrue to it). Although religious traditions were part of the mix, there are many indications in the wisdom literature, in other biblical writings, and in modern scholarship to suggest that the wisdom tradition loomed large in the established regional pattern for conducting international relations. Israel’s hakamim, then, engaged with their counterparts in wisdom traditions of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and elsewhere.
In other words, when old-world Israel became a formal nation, it turned a political corner that demanded changes whereby it could gain the kind of international footing that came from being “like” the other nations. This meant, for instance, enthroning a king, picking a cabinet, raising an army and the taxes to fund both it and the new bureaucracy, drafting and institutionalizing new national laws, establishing a capital, and so on. “Israel,” writes wisdom scholar William McKane in Prophets and Wise Men, “became a state with a new political structure which demanded the creation of a cadre of royal officials through whom the king governed….” It was a political structure in which there was associated with the king “a class of royal officials who had to do with the army, finance, foreign embassies and administration. Such officials were a ‘people of the king’ and had a common interest with him” both in domestic peace and prosperity and in cooperative international relations. McKane also writes that during the long reigns of Israel’s second and third kings, David and Solomon, Israel was strongly in the Egyptian sphere of influence, and that “we ought to seek there for the models of Solomon’s bureaucracy.” His conclusion is that “the Israelite state was modeled on the great states of the ancient Near East and [in particular, early on] acquired a structure similar to that of Egypt.”
Evidently, this transnational property of wisdom was taken completely for granted in the halls of power and domestically throughout the region. That is, no one questioned it in principle. (Even the prophets did not object to it in principle. What they objected to were the unjust policies of the wise.) In fact, the wisdom way was such an accepted fact of international politics that even devoutly religious believers in Yahweh could serve with clear consciences in “pagan” governments, whose rulers felt completely confident to employ. The person whom Christians call Daniel the prophet immediately comes to mind, as does the person often referred to as “Ezra the priest.” The Book Daniel, however, appropriately enough, appears in the Hebrew Bible in “the Writings,” and not, as in the Christian Bible, in “the Prophets.” And Daniel himself, although a devout Jew, was educated to become a statesman in the Babylonian wisdom tradition, where he graduated with top honors and afterward had a long and distinguished political career serving at the highest levels of government within the elite of wise men who advised kings of Babylon. Ezra, though a Jewish priest, also functioned as a Persian diplomat at the end of a long period of Israelite change and reorganization under Persian rule.
It was not just the hakamim, however, who were part of the old-world wisdom tradition. Other classes are too numerous to mention here, but one of these should be described. Close colleagues of the hakamim, the soperim are another prominent group of officials who were indispensable to old-world domestic and international politics. Some soperim appear in the literature as diplomats themselves, but many were political secretaries or professional writers whom English translators of the Hebrew often call scribes.
There is a bit of mischief surrounding that word today, however. “Scribes” has been reduced — through popular books and films like The Name of the Rose — to medieval monks in secluded monasteries leaning over stand-up desks translating or copying old religious manuscripts (good book, though). Although old-world scribes did function in religious contexts, others held careers in government. They were educated to hold political offices, and their curriculum included the specialized training in writing and languages requisite to such a career. Some of them seem to me to have functioned not unlike today’s sherpas do, as wordsmiths for our heads of state and their international negotiating teams. I see something of this in role of Ezra, not so much as a priest but in the often overlooked fact that this Israelite was also a prominent soper (scribe) who, as an expert in Mosaic law, represented exiled Israel in the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes. Jerusalem was at this time under Persian rule, and during times of crisis between the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem and their Persian overlords five hundred miles away, Ezra served Artaxerxes as a shuttle diplomat between the Persian capital and Jerusalem.
Referring to a period long before Persian dominance over the region, McKane writes that at the time of Israel’s political reorganization under David and Solomon, as international negotiations and agreements with other nations were becoming normative for Israel’s kings, a soper “had to master foreign languages for the purposes of diplomacy, and that in doing so he acquired a knowledge of foreign literatures and assisted in their dissemination.” He finds this similar to Egypt and Babylon, whose soperim served “in the circle of a high establishment which plays an important role in the political and cultural life of the time [and thus] these scribes have to be distinguished from mere writers. [It] may not be going to far too say … that these men, although primarily statesmen and administrators, were born middlemen in the international exchange of literature.”
As today, old-world diplomats entertained their counterparts in their own capitals and journeyed on political missions to foreign capitals. Also today, as then, the wisdom norm of skillful diplomacy can be given free rein, or it can be reined in, often depending on the ideological motivation of an administration, whether that of the Iranian regime, or the White House, or 10 Downing Street. As critics of President Bush’s first term (2001-2004) like to point out, the steely refusal of his neoconservative advisors and hard-nosed realists to talk to Iran unless the regime first met certain non-negotiable preconditions was a lose-lose policy, because for Tehran these preconditions were seen as ultimatums.diplomacy and negotiations not reined in by ideological constraints may free the parties to search out the wisdom for easing tensions and reaching agreements
Of course one could ask: What if Bush’s neoconservative advisors had entered talks with Tehran? The question then becomes: Given the religious-like authority that neoconservative ideology can hold over its adherents, would such a negotiating team have been a wise course of action? In such a situation it seems doubtful that the wisdom norm of skillful diplomacy would have had much of a chance, given that the talks would have been between the Bush neoconservatives and the ultrafundamentalists of the Iranian government.
This norm at least had a fighting chance during President Clinton’s second term (1996-2000), after the surprise landslide election of the reformist politician Seyyed Mohammed Khatami as Iranian president in 1997. Khatami shaped a foreign policy around a remarkable initiative he called “a dialogue of civilizations,” using it to reach out first regionally to the Arab world, which produced a thaw in Arab-Iranian relations, and then farther afield to Europe and America. This changed the tenor of Iranian politics, and the second Clinton administration sought to capitalize on that. EU-Iranian relations improved, and a number of public speeches and warm comments from Khatami about the United States were reciprocated by Clinton and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright. The signals being sent by both states were noteworthy, as were the practical, if tentative, gestures and initiatives of mutual outreach that followed, even if they indicated only the possibilities of a new beginning.
It was a good start. The wise give-and-take began thawing the bilateral relations. This continued somewhat, albeit not without bickering, for more than a year after 9/11, but with a different administration. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell and his team of advisors at the State Department had succeeded in reaching out to Iran for crucial help in ousting al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan. As the Bush administration turned its sights to Iraq, however, the neoconservative policymakers (brought into the Bush administration by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) worked incessantly to derail furthering bilateral cooperation, even though that was possible at the time. By May 2003 they had succeeded. Khatami, still president of Iran and hoping to build on the cooperative efforts regarding Afghanistan, had persuaded the regime to take a huge risk. It sent a formal diplomatic letter to the Bush administration seeking the start of direct high-level talks on a wider array of issues crucial to the relationship between both countries, and to multilateral relations in the region, and to the Israeli–Palestinian situation.
The unprecedented offer was immediately rebuffed by Cheney and Rumsfeld. The ultrafundamentalists in Tehran quickly used the snub to undermine the credibility of Khatami, his team, and other reformist politicians, who had been sticking their necks out since 1997 for friendlier relations with the United States. And the rest, as they say, is history, beginning with another surprise election, that of the radical and controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June 2005.
No one has yet convinced me that it is wise for the United States not to talk with Iran. The current situation between the two nations is such that even some diplomatic principles that have been considered inviolable may need to give way to wiser approaches (on both sides). If not, the thinking of each actor may become even less known to the other than it already is, the actions of each less predictable, and the prospect of miscalculation leading to conflict more likely.
On the other hand, as seems to be being practiced at this time by the Obama administration, diplomacy and negotiations not reined in by ideological constraints may free the parties to search out the wisdom for easing tensions and reaching agreements. Two stunning examples from the Middle East, only briefly noted here, are the Israel-Egypt (1979) and the Israel-Jordan (1994) peace treaties. Many political ideologues in Israel and America had been arguing that democracy in the Arab world was a necessary precondition for any normalization of relations between Israel (a democracy) and her (more autocratic) neighbors. Yet Israel managed to conclude peace treaties with Egypt under Sadat, and with Jordan under King Hussein, and these have both withstood perilous times.
The wisdom way involves diplomats, negotiators, and their teams in the exercise of boundless sensitivity to the parties’ problems and great tact and pacing when working toward an agreement. To get the parties to Yes, wisdom helps negotiators submerge their own ideologies to show an evenhandedness for gaining the confidence of all sides. It also helps address what Dennis Ross, in Statecraft, calls the parties’ “comfortable myths,” that they may see reality as it really is and adjust expectations to that, to reach midpoints that both sides can accept.
Wise diplomats, then, are more like dialecticians than apologists or polemicists. Imagine the absurd, if not disastrous, outcomes if foreign ministers met across the table during crises merely to vent political polemics or engage in religious apologetics. Instead, wise diplomats and negotiators on both sides could, I believe, take the toxicity out of U.S.–Iran relations. “Negotiations are probably the most essential tool of statecraft,” writes Ross. “Problems or crises can be resolved through negotiations…. Every single instrument of statecraft in one way or another involves negotiations.”
In the diplomatic field, you can’t move your counterparts in other nations out just because you have a problem with them. Like professors in a college environment, you’re stuck with your fellows, for decades perhaps, in situations where intense conversations continually go on among you about things that cannot keep being shoved aside but which have to be negotiated, even basic ideas about the teaching and the research. This plays a large role in why colleges and universities can and do renew, if not reinvent, themselves over time. If they remain static, if their institutions are non-negotiable, the world moves on, life begins to pass them by.
So, too, in the diplomatic field, which is likewise a long-term environment for intense conversation, but one between nations, where many are the things to think about and many the ways to think about them. For international relations that are stuck in an unacceptable status quo, the wisdom way enables diplomats and negotiators to work together to apply insights and good judgments for wise decisions for new ways ahead. Which brings us to the wisdom norm of mutuality, and its amazing relevance and potential at the rough intersection of the secular and the religious in Western–Middle East relations.
