A month before the fateful Camp David summit in July 2000, when U.S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (for whom I worked) made a last-ditch effort to bring peace to the Middle East, I got a call from my friend John Wallach, journalist for Hearst Newspapers and founder of Seeds of Peace, a conflict-resolution organization that brings young people, principally from the Middle East, into programs designed to promote understanding and trust, in Maine and in the region.
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John, who had already been diagnosed with the non-smoker's lung cancer that would take his life two years later, was excited and emotional as only he could be. "Aaron, you must convince President Clinton and Secretary Albright to host a delegation of Palestinian and Israeli Seeds kids at the summit. They have to tell Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak about what this opportunity means for the future, their future."
I humored John when he tended to dream about things that could never be, and told him I'd get right on it.
What I couldn't say was this: John, it's a month before one of the most decisive moments in Middle East peacemaking, and you want me to waste Albright's time trying to arrange a meeting with Barak and Arafat for a bunch of kids? It sounds like a cute photo-op. But give me a break.
It wasn't that I was opposed to the meeting in principle. But I worried that I wouldn't be taken seriously if I proposed it. After all, this was only about kids.
Only about kids, indeed.
Wallach's frame of reference -- without overly dramatizing matters -- wasn't about kids; it was about the future. I'll never make that mistake again. As adults, we say we take the younger generation seriously, but I wonder. Certainly in politics and diplomacy, that's not the case. We occupy a discrete physical space for a very short period of time and understandably consider it our time. We rarely take those without power and influence seriously, particularly teens and twentysomethings. Indeed, what we often ignore or relegate to token consideration -- because we're in charge and don't have to consider it -- is the possibility of taking the younger generation into our calculations in real time and making that generation part of our strategy.
And there's little doubt that when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, we're in need of a strategy that's generational in character. Trust me on this one. All of the problems we face today in the broader Middle East -- the Arab Spring, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Syria -- are long movies that will produce outcomes well before they'll produce solutions. And this will require time -- the ultimate arbiter of what works and is of value in life.
And what we need is a comprehensive strategy that marries transactional diplomacy (how governments can create openings to resolve conflicts) with transformational diplomacy (how non-government initiatives supported by governments can work to change attitudes and build personal ties that break down the barriers of suspicion and mistrust).
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