The Biden team is reportedly considering veteran diplomat Dennis Ross to be the United States’s ambassador to Israel.
Stephen Flatow, the father of Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old victim of a Palestinian terrorist attack, outlined arguments against Ross’s appointment based on Ross’s record and policy choices. Flatow’s arguments are powerful.
During his decades in diplomacy, Ross was not simply implementing policy but was shaping it, operating on incorrect assumptions and with disastrous consequences. In Dancing with the Devil, a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorist groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, I put Ross’s record further under the microscope.
Elections matter, however, and President-elect Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, his choice for secretary of state, have very different positions on foreign policy than President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. I may be a Never Trumper (and unrepentantly so), but personal antipathy for the president’s character does not justify Trump Derangement Syndrome. A dispassionate assessment of Trump’s Middle East legacy suggests that senior adviser Jared Kushner and Pompeo were right when many in the peace process establishment, including Ross, were wrong. In four months, they achieved four major normalization deals and now leave Biden and Blinken a path to extend the streak.
The disqualifying factor for Ross, however, should not simply be his record but rather his penchant for writing. Ross profited handsomely for penning The Missing Peace, his inside account of time spent in former Presidents George H.W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s peace teams.
Now, Ross is not alone as a Washington insider seeking to amplify his experience in a book. It’s a rite of passage for former presidents. Successive secretaries of state have done it (Henry Kissinger, multiple times), and national security advisers have as well. In recent years, ambassadors and envoys, such as Samantha Power, Zalmay Khalilzad, Wendy Sherman, and Bill Burns, have cashed in on the opportunity.
The problem is not writing a book chronicling his experiences as an insider, but rather, it is that he did not recognize the impact on those featured in it. Diplomats must be discreet. To be effective, they must be men and women of confidence. Successful ones are part lawyer, part psychologist, and part historian. They should not be gossips.
When diplomats go into a room to negotiate with politicians, military officers, terrorists, or other officials, they do so not as reporters but rather as representatives of the U.S. and its president. To expose conversations or criticize interlocutors is poor form, even if it has become standard practice. And to expect that such actions will not burn bridges is unrealistic.
Ross has been forthright in his assessments of both Israeli politicians and Palestinian officials. He used them to increase his public stature and as a springboard to achieve higher aspirations. Fair enough. But by doing so, he has undercut any ability to be effective, at least in the portfolios he once supervised. No Israeli politician, especially those who know from Ross’s writings just what the former envoy thinks about him or her, is going to give Ross the benefit of the doubt. The line between autobiographies recounting events, which occurred just years previously, and WikiLeaks-like reveals is a fine one.
Advocates of reinvestment in diplomacy rightly speak about the talent roaming the halls in Foggy Bottom. Investing in diplomacy means more than increasing budgets, however. It is time to invest in a newer generation of diplomats, one not constrained by baggage of his own making.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
