The Martha Road School of International Affairs

The school—not Princeton, not Columbia—which truly taught me international affairs.

The following are the remarks written for the Wilson Center in Washington where I was recently named The Joseph B. Gildenhorn Distinguished Fellow. Last week, representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency entered the center and all but closed it down. The speech, I believe, still deserves to be read. It’s about the school—not Princeton, not Columbia—which truly taught me international affairs.

By Michael Oren

One of the great orators of this century, President Barack Obama, will be known for many memorable quotes from during his presidency, some of which might resonate today. “My fellow Americans,” he declared. “We are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.” And, “I’m the president of the United States, not the emperor of the United States.”

But there’s one quote you won’t find on BrainyQuote.com, and it’s my favorite. On foreign policy, the president opined, “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”

The 44th president, who grew up in a nice and tolerant neighborhood in Hawaii, did not grow up in my neighborhood in Northern New Jersey. President Obama did not grow up on Martha Road.

Martha was home to solidly working-class and mostly Sicilian families—it’s where they shot parts of the Sopranos, until the Sicilians told them to get out—and one Jewish family, mine. The local kids, many of whom in high school became my dear friends, were at first keen on calling me a Christ killer and emblazoning me with a black eye or two on a regular basis.

Very early on I understood that the only way to survive Martha Road was to pick out the biggest bully and very publicly bloody his nose. The fact that he and his friends would come back and bloody my nose was immaterial. I had to prove to everyone that I was willing and able to fight, even if my victory proved to be Pyrrhic.

On Martha Road, bloodying a bully’s nose just to show I could was not the dumbest reason for doing it, but the smartest reason. The existential reason.

Sadly, perhaps, I learned more about international affairs and foreign policy-making on Martha Road than I did during the far too many years I spent at some of the world’s preeminent universities. On such campuses, the study of foreign policy falls between two extremes.

The first—what I’ve come to call the pacifists—conflates the goals and motives of foreign policy with those of a humanitarian aid organization or a course on conflict resolution. The notions that conflict is endemic to the human condition and that wars, especially those conducted against demonstrably evil enemies, are sometimes necessary, are alien to this field—or worse, repugnant.

Graduates of universities where they learned not strategic studies but peace studies, the pacifists reject von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is policy by other means. War, rather, for them, is the failure of politics by all means. And if war does break out, the objective of the pacifists is to end it as swiftly as possible, almost irrespective of the winners. The goal of war is not, God forbid, to win.

Though overwhelmingly secular in its outlook, the pacifists have their catechism based on the belief that soft power can prevail without hard power—that one can walk softly and not carry a big stick—and that the arc of international relations bends toward peace. That pacifist school of thought, moreover, has its trinity: engagement, de-escalation, ceasefire.

Throughout its history, beginning with Moses’s interaction with Pharaoh to Chamberlain’s with Hitler, Nixon’s with China, and Trump’s with North Korea, the record of engagement has been far from stellar. Yet, for the pacifists, engagement remains a hallowed idea, a diplomatic end in itself.

De-escalation, or its faddish neologism, deconfliction, is also a virtue, even when dealing with dangerous rivals. The idea that real de-escalation might be achieved only by escalating is, once again, dismissed by the pacifists.

Finally, ceasefire—it, too, is an objective to be achieved at almost any cost, irrespective of the destructiveness of the fire that will break out once the ceasefire is over.

No pacifist would react with anything but revulsion to the recommendation of the classical historian and contrarian analyst, Edward Luttwack, who insisted—pace John Lennon—that nations must sometimes give war a chance.

Recent events have seen the impact of the pacifist approach. In Ukraine, the United States and the West provided democratic forces with enough military wherewithal to stem the Russian invasion of Ukrainian soil but not enough to reverse it. As international conflict scholar Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a recent edition of the Atlantic, President Biden “treated the Ukrainian conflict as a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.”

In the absence of a battlefield victory, the pacifists will stress—no surprise here—engagement, de-escalation, and ceasefire—walking softly while Russia, alas, holds the bigger stick.

In the Middle East war that began with the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, American policy went through several transformations. From an open commitment to back Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas to the more nebulous, to ensure that another “October 7 can never happen again,” to calling for a ceasefire and the return of all the hostages. Finally, Biden administration officials demanded, “This war must end.”

Scarcely, throughout, did policy makers acknowledge that Israel was fighting forces inimical to everything America stands for, that sought to kill Americans and all their Middle Eastern allies, that had murdered dozens of U.S. citizens and kidnapped others. Not once did those policy-makers declare that the aim of the war—perish the thought—was to win.

In the year after October 7, while Iranian proxies launched over 200 rocket and drone attacks against U.S. bases in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, killing and wounding American servicemen, not once did the U.S. strike back at Iran. Not once was Iran made to pay a price for backing the Houthis as they blocked international shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb Straits or their repeated missile and drone attacks against Israel. Instead, Washington worked to restrain Israel’s retaliation against Iran. When, after ten months of utterly unprovoked Hezbollah shelling of Israel, the IDF finally mounted a counteroffensive, the White House’s initial response was to oppose the move and call for a three-week ceasefire.

As in Ukraine, the U.S. provided Israel with an immense amount of arms and munitions. No doubt, the president paid a high political price for that largess. But as in Ukraine, American military aid to Israel was hardly unlimited and string free, with significant ramifications on the battlefield.

The U.S. also moved major military assets into the Middle East—aircraft carriers, F-22 jets, B-52 bombers. The stick was visibly big but internally hollow, as no one in the Middle East believed that the U.S. would actually wield it. Instead of broadcasting strength, the presence of all that military hardware projected weakness.

With American officials daily declaring their fear of a regional conflagration—this while a regional conflagration was fully raging—no one could possibly fear their wrath. President Biden warned “Don’t” and everybody—Palestinians, Iranians, Israelis—did.

Among the pacifists, how many would answer the question once posed to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, “What keeps you awake at night?” by responding as he did, “Nothing. I keep others awake at night.” How many of those students would subscribe to the less eloquent axiom of General George S. Patton, according to which “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”

Alongside the pacifists, there exists another school, the so-called realists who are, in reality, anything but. Opposite the Noam Chomskys who fantasize about what the world could be and lament what it isn’t, are the John Joseph Mearsheimers who yearn for what they believe the world once was and bemoan what it’s since become.

Realism, too, is a type of religion in which foreign policy is made in a prelapsarian precinct sometimes known as the ivory tower or, more simply, Eden. It’s where rarefied statesmen remain far removed from the hoi polloi of special interests, ideologies, and passions.

A realist might say, “So what if Ukraine is a democracy and if it’s invaded by a totalitarian state—so what? What’s in it for us?” A realist would say, “So what that many tens of millions of Americans read the Bible and believe in a God who says, ‘Those who bless my people will be blessed?’ So why should we be aiding the state of those people, the realist asks, especially when it angers strategically more important states? Who cares what the feelings are of the people purportedly represented by their country’s foreign policy?”

Nations, the realists maintain, vaguely echoing nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston have no feelings, no friends. They only have interests. And to defend those interests, the realists are ready to use force—they aren’t pacifists—but to use it without first consulting the great unwashed.

Neither school, pacifist nor realist, more accurately describes the real world of foreign policy-making than my childhood school, the Martha Road School of International Relations.

There, I learned that genuine security is founded on credible deterrence—convincing your enemies that you have the strength and are willing to use it. There, I learned that foreign policy is not merely a matter of interests, but is rather an amalgam of many factors, among them, faith.

Faith, as my great friend Walter Russell Mead has repeatedly pointed out, permeates America and powerfully influences its foreign relations. So, too, on Martha Road, faith—Catholic, Jewish—impacted the relations between neighbors.

Faith, according to both schools, the pacifist and the realist, is what people turn to in desperation. Remove the despair, they’ll argue, and you’ll evaporate the faith. But faith, of course, is intrinsic to the human condition, an irreducibly potent motivator of peoples, rich and poor alike, and a constant component of foreign policy. Education, family values, love of home, fears, and desires—all played a role in the interpersonal interactions on Martha Road, as they do, daily, in foreign relations.

On Martha Road, there was no place for the neoconservative belief that people can be made to be more like us—to see the democratic light—by force of arms. On Martha Road, I could bloody a bully’s nose but that wouldn’t make him emulate or even like me. No one, no matter how deterred, was trading in his cannoli for a knish.

And on Martha Road, there was no isolationism. One could lock oneself inside the house, but the windows of that house, we learned, could be smeared with antisemitic graffiti and one time smashed with a rock.

America might want to turn its back on the world, but the world won’t turn its back on America. The world is coming to a neighborhood near you. Soon.

The lessons of Martha Road are especially relevant today as the United States embarks on a new era of foreign policy-making—or rather returns to an older one. In dividing up the globe into spheres of influence—American, Russian, Chinese—President Trump harkens back to an earlier, pre-World Wars, period of Great Power diplomacy. In doing so, however, he must contend with the influential isolationist camp in his own party and even within the White House. He must assume that the other Great Powers will, as in the distant past, play by the same rules.

America, for example, could implicitly acquiesce in China’s claim to Taiwan and remain passive in the face of the island’s conquest. But Beijing is unlikely to be satisfied with operating within its own sphere and continue extending its influence into America’s. Russia, similarly, will not cease seeking to broaden its hegemony beyond Ukraine. Russian naval forces are already active in the Arctic, close to America’s shores. Failure to respond forcefully to such aggression—so the Martha Road School teaches—could lead to vastly more destructive clashes.

President Trump’s foreign policy is singularly personal with a pronounced realist streak. And like the realists, he is not averse to using military force. But he also prefers negotiating over warmaking and seemingly takes into account the faith and feelings of the great many Americans who care passionately about Israel and the Middle East. Though he operates principally out of a business, rather than a diplomatic model, President Trump, far more than his immediate predecessors, appears to have taken a course or two on Martha Road.

Just over a year ago, my mother, of blessed memory, died. She was still living in the same house she and my father raised me in, and she was still the only Jewish person on the block.

Growing up, I couldn’t wait to escape Martha Road. My experiences there, I thought, left me scarred. But now I know better. Now that the house is sold and occupied by others, I long to return and pay my respects to a place that taught me so much—that, in fact, has colored my entire conception of world affairs. If I could, on that very corner where I bloodied that bully’s nose, I’d erect a plaque.

“Welcome to the Martha Road School of International Relations,” it would read, “where students learn how the world really works.”