The Art of Losing Well

Losing well can turn into winning. We won't know until we try.

I just submitted a draft of the full manuscript of my new book to the publisher. It was originally titled “On Power: The Case for American Dominance.” Now I’m just calling it On Power until we figure out something else. I can’t in good conscience tell people that American dominance is good, better, or otherwise positive in light of what the Biden administration enabling in Gaza. What the U.S. is doing—or not doing—in Gaza isn’t just hypocrisy. This is something more, or at least something different.

Hypocrisy is inevitable, and as the French author de La Rochefoucauld once said, “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” In other words, good people (and good nations) tend to appear more hypocritical, because at least they try to be good, where the bad among us can’t even be bothered. The trying part, here, is important. The hypocritical actor must demonstrate good faith. The hypocrite must understand that he is, in fact, being hypocritical. Without such a realization, correction or improvement is not possible.

What worries me here is the Biden administration’s lack of self-awareness, its obliviousness. It seems indifferent to the hypocrisy that seems so obvious to so many of us on the outside looking in. And I’m not even just talking about Gaza here. Our policy in Gaza can’t be isolated from broader U.S. policy in the region, a policy that is structurally oriented around Arab authoritarian rulers who supposedly provide stability. Longtime readers will know that I believe that this “stability” is an illusion, and I wish this was more evident to others. But it’s not. To me, though, it seems beyond obvious: Our reliance on dictators has not made the Middle East particularly stable. If anything, the opposite. But that it might be an illusion doesn’t change the fact that U.S. policy in the region remains stubbornly committed to the illusion.

This is how I described it in my book The Problem of Democracy:

“Stability” has long been the watchword, but it is worth putting it in scare quotes and questioning the easy resort to a word that can easily mislead. The stability provided by authoritarian regimes is illusory. If we look at developments in the Middle East over the past several decades, backing autocrats has not actually worked. It has contributed to the spread of terrorism, long-running insurgencies, the outbreak of civil war, and ill-considered military interventions that prolong those civil wars.

And that’s not even regional or cross-border wars of the sort we are seeing in Gaza and the interstate hostilities now being waged by Iran and Israel against the other. This is the regional order America has helped build.

I’m often asked why I decided to write The Problem of Democracy the way I did. I give different answers depending on my mood. At some level, it was an effort, futile as it may have been, to set a marker or a sign along the path. I knew that my ideas had no realistic prospect of being adopted in the short or even medium-term. But I wanted to lay out, in as much detail as possible, what an alternative to the status quo might look like. Could we even begin to imagine—not just as an aspiration but in practical terms—the outlines of a fundamentally different U.S. policy in the Middle East? It could only be “fundamentally different” insofar as it was based around different starting assumptions and first principles.

If I wrote the book and tried my best to promote the book’s arguments, I told myself, then perhaps I could rest easier knowing that I had done my part. I had tied my camel. The rest was up to God, so to speak. And then I could give myself, knowingly and perhaps with a sense of relief, to the futility of it all. There is a certain pleasure in giving up, in admitting defeat. Those of us on the “pro-democracy” side of the debate had fought valiantly and lost, largely due to forces outside of our control. We were just writers, analysts, and, occasionally, senior policymakers, but there were never enough of us with enough power.

We (or I) could maybe even stop focusing on the Middle East. After all, what more was there to say beyond what we had already said?

I like the idea of futility and lost causes. There is a kind of honor in losing well. We do the best we can, and then we learn to let go. If you find yourself in a position of influence where you can do some good, do it. But also be aware that whatever you do will have to co-exist and compete with what everyone else is doing. Yours is a contribution to a broader give-and-take of ideas and interventions.

Which brings me to what I felt to be a vaguely analogous event, in the last days of Ramadan. I was at a Muslim community space, in the prayer area. It was before the night prayers, or tarawih, and the Imam, who was visiting, was giving a short talk. Instead of focusing on why we were actually there, during the final blessed nights of the holy month, he made some odd comments about some of the younger women present not covering their hair in the entrance area, which he apparently experienced to his dismay as he walked in. I found this deeply irritating. I started to feel myself getting hot. I thought to myself, seriously, we’re still doing this? It reminded me of the way I felt whenever people said that Arabs weren’t ready for democracy. It was a really dumb thing to debate, in my view, but for whatever reason it remained inescapable. You were always going to run into dead-enders. Bad ideas, dumb ideas, that I had spent such a long time refuting, and now I had to refute them again.

So it wasn’t really anger; it was anger mixed with exhaustion, an affront to my desire to disappear into the crowd and not have to engage on something I didn’t feel like engaging on. I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t want to talk about this. I just want to be left alone, with my own thoughts. But now I have to pay attention, now I have to make a decision, now I have to say something. And so I did. I interrupted the talk and laid out my concerns in a tense back-and-forth with the Imam, who was himself somewhat caught off guard. I felt someone had to, and without going into too much detail about the context, I was probably the only person there who was a regular public speaker, so if I wasn’t going to say anything, it was unclear if anyone else would.

I had no idea, at the time, if what I was said would matter or really change anything. But I felt that the younger people there had to know that this wasn’t okay. I had to set a marker.

This is what we do. We set markers. We register our discontent and sometimes even our anger. We have no idea whether what we do and say will have any significant effect, but we do know what we say will be heard by at least some people. It can be a few people, it can be dozens of people, or it can be thousands. Regardless, the people who will have heard us will know that a marker has been set, a sign along the path. Is that enough? I don’t know. But it’s the least we can do. Sometimes, it’s the most we can do.

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