The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead.

The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead. Video. Tikvah Fund, June 2, 2016. YouTube. Also at The American Interest.

The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4 (July/August 2008). Also here, here.

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. By Walter Russell Mead. New York: Knopf, 2017. Publication date April 4, 2017. Amazon.com.

The Revenge of Tribalism. By Ben Shapiro.

The Revenge of Tribalism. By Ben Shapiro. National Review Online, June 8, 2016.

Shapiro:

Americans reject Locke and embrace Hobbes.

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.”

Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.

The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).

Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”

So, who’s right?

They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves.

The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”

Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.

But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But the Founders still feared tribalism. They called it “faction” in The Federalist Papers, and were truly worried about the seizure of the mechanism of government in order to benefit one group over another. They may have agreed with Locke over Hobbes about the proper extent of government power, but they never believed that tribalism had disappeared. That is why they attempted to create a government pitting faction against faction, cutting the Gordian knot of tyranny and tribalism with checks and balances. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

It was a brilliant solution to an intractable problem — so long as it worked.

It no longer does. Tribalism has had its revenge.

It began with the decline of American religion in the 1950s. As religion declined, Americans looked for new sources of community — and in the 1960s, the Marxist Left provided Americans communal meaning in ethnic and racial solidarity. Even as America began to move beyond its historic racism, the Left hijacked the conversation around race and divvied Americans up into subgroups of ethnic haves and have-nots. City governments became playgrounds for racial factions taking control of government and expanding their power. Student groups divided along racial and sexual lines. The social fabric frayed.

The unrest of the 1960s and 1970s provoked a law-and-order backlash — a desire for a government that would tamp down the unrest and restore order. For three decades, Americans rejected tribalism as a mode of politics (Ronald Reagan believed in universal human freedoms, and Bill Clinton famously rejected Sister Souljah’s race-baiting). Not surprisingly, the rejection of 1960s tribalism ushered in an era of smaller government dedicated toward the proposition that constitutional checks and balances were the best protection against tyranny.

And then came the Obama presidency.

President Obama’s tribal politics have crippled America. Americans hoped that Obama — after campaigning on the notion that he would provide the capstone to America’s non-tribalism — would heal our wounds and move our country beyond racial politics. He, in his own persona, was to be a racial unifier. He represented the hope that America could reject tribalism in favor of American universalism.

Instead, Obama has rejected checks and balances as a matter of principle, and has used tribalism to grow his own power. By cobbling together a coalition of racial and ethnic interest groups, Obama knew he could maximize the power of the government to act on their behalf. And so his Department of Justice has crippled police departments based solely on the race of police officers. He constantly suggests that America has an inborn, unfixable problem with racism. He poses as a rejection of the Founding ideology.

Donald Trump is the counter-reaction. But he is not a Reaganesque or even Bill Clinton-esque counter-reaction. He, like Obama, is tribal. His tribalism is the tribalism of Pat Buchanan, who suggested in 2011 what appears to be Donald Trump’s electoral strategy: “to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority.”

“Why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” Buchanan asked, concluding that “white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people.” Instead of attempting to set checks and balances to prevent faction, instead of attempting to educate Americans in our Founding principles, this philosophy focuses on tribalism of a different sort, making the crucial error of linking skin color to culture.

And so we may have reached the end of the era of small government. As tribalism rises, Americans look again to the strongman. We begin the cycle anew. But first, we feel the rage of riots in San Jose and Ferguson, and the spiteful glee of the white-nationalist alt-right. We watch contests between tribal figures like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We wonder which tribe will win, even as America disintegrates before us.

Mideast Identity Politics Is Here to Stay. By Hisham Melhem.

Could the defeat of ISIS turn to pyrrhic victory? By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya English, June 4, 2016.

Melhem:

The recent military setbacks suffered by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the beginning of attacks by local forces to retake Fallujah, Iraq and Manbij City, Syria, backed by US-led coalition airstrikes, coupled with the steep decline in the number of foreign fighters flowing to Join ISIS, portends the eventual defeat of the Caliphate as a significant military threat maybe as early as 2017. But given the trajectory of the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts in recent years, the corrosive role of most outside powers, and the frightening human toll of identity politics, the defeat of the monstrous Caliphate could turn to a resounding pyrrhic victory.

Since the Second World War, the United States has had a poor record in translating its military victories into political successes. It is very likely that the two longest wars in American history will end with political forces that are either hostile or unfriendly to the United States controlling both Afghanistan and Iraq. The real challenge for the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and in Syria was never military in nature, but rather political. After the eventual military defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria the perennial question of “what’s next politically?” will be asked just as it was asked after the liberation of Afghanistan from Soviet occupation in 1989, the defeat of Iraqi forces in Kuwait in 1991, and after the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq in 2011.

The victory of identity politics

Ironically, the defeat of ISIS, a positive development in and of itself, in the absence of acceptable political scaffoldings to begin healing these societies, could presage the victory of foreign powers like Iran and Russia, a genocidal regime in Damascus and a sectarian corrupt regime in Baghdad both of which are beholding to Tehran. More importantly in the long run, the defeat of ISIS if it is not accompanied or followed by the eventual demise of the Assad regime in the context of an overall political resolution that guarantees the civil and political rights of all Syrian communities, and in checking Iran’s destructive influence in Iraq, will result in the overwhelming victory of “identity politics”.

The fights for Fallujah and Manbij City are raising serious fears not only of massive civilian casualties, but of deepening sectarian and ethnic cleavages leading to more death by identity and the creation of more refugees. The United States is currently providing air power to support the Iraqi government forces attacking ISIS forces in Fallujah, but these conventional forces are augmented by Shiite militias backed and trained by Iran and led by Iraqis who are very loyal to Iran. These largely Shiite militias make up the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces (al-Hashd al-Sha’bi),were created in response to ISIS’ occupation of Mosul in June 2014. These militias engaged in widespread abuse in Sunni cities liberated from ISIS in recent months.

Following the eviction of ISIS from Tikrit last year Human Rights Watch documented the “Ruinous Aftermath” in the city thus: “in the aftermath of the fighting, militia forces looted, torched, and blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings in Tikrit and the neighboring towns..” While it is true that the U.S. in the past criticized the sectarian practices of these militias and asked the Iraqi government not to allow them to participate in liberating Sunni cities from ISIS, a request that was ignored by Baghdad, there are ample signs now that Washington has lessened its opposition to some of these militias. In fact last spring US Consul General Steve Walker expressed sympathy with some of the wounded members of the Popular Mobilization Forces during a visit to a hospital in Basra.

Deepening sectarian and ethnic divides

Just as the city of Ramadi was essentially destroyed in order to be “saved” from ISIS, a similar fate could befall Fallujah. There are credible concerns that the decision to attack Fallujah which came after a short notice to the U.S. is in part a political maneuver by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to deflect attention from his domestic travails following a series of deadly bombings in Baghdad, and growing social unrest against corruption and calls for reforms that almost paralyzed his government. Iran, the hidden hand behind major Iraqi decisions, was on display recently when the ubiquitous Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force commander General Qassem Suleimani showed up in photos taken at an operations room outside Fallujah, discussing maps of military operations with senior militia commanders. The absence of a unified countervailing moderate Arab Sunni force to ISIS in Iraq and Syria will guarantee that the defeat of ISIS, will likely lead to the birth of a new form of Sunni radicalism in years to come.

The fight for Manbij City, which is a prelude for a major attack on ISIS controlled Raqqa is raising concerns about potential ethnic conflicts between Kurds and Arabs. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed coalition of armed groups led by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), has been with U.S. logistical support mobilizing thousands of fighters in the countryside north of Raqqa to isolate the city. American Special Forces in Syria have been training and advising and possibly fighting along with YPG fighters. In fact U.S. military personnel have been “embedded” with YPG fighters, as seen in recent photos showing U.S. soldiers wearing emblems of the YPG on their shoulders.

But while the Kurds of Syria have legitimate political and cultural grievances and demands that should be fairly addressed in a post-Assad Syria, nonetheless the YPG which represent the most powerful Syrian Kurdish group has been accused by human rights organizations of engaging in ethnic cleansings and forcing Arabs and Turkmens from their areas and demolishing their homes in areas under YPG control. It is ironic that the YPG, which came into existence with the help of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) of Turkey a group designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group, is also receiving help from the Russians in Syria. If the YPG leads the fight to retake Raqqa and its environ, a region inhabited by mostly Syrian Arabs, the outcome will likely result in new tensions and possibly violence between Arabs and Kurds.

The disintegration of states

In recent years we have witnessed the destructive triumph of identity politics during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the Sudan or between the Hutu and the Tutsi. Since the beginning of the Arab uprisings five years ago, we have witnessed the collapse of the state system in a number of Arab countries. Many a historian and analyst have had their chance in recent weeks to ponder the legacy or legacies of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the other treaties and arrangements that led to the birth of the modern State system in the Middle East after the First World War. One clear conclusion is that many of those societies failed to develop modern state institutions, good and efficient governance based on fair representations of the components of those societies, a failure that led to the calamitous present in Syria, and Iraq ( the same can be said about Yemen and Libya)..When the uprisings failed to create alternative political structures, the brittle regimes in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen collapsed into chaos or civil wars. (a similar situation occurred in Iraq, with the failure of the invading power to create a functioning and fair governance). With the fears and uncertainties spawned by the collapse of order, particularly in heterogeneous societies, people fell back on their bedrock certainties and identities. When people are threatened as members of a community (a religious sect or an ethnic group) they tend to develop a strong sense of solidarity with other members of the group as a form of self-defense. The identity of the group is almost always exaggerated, and the threat is invariably described as existential. That is one reason why civil wars are the most passionate of wars. It is so because the combatants know each other, and because they have irreconcilable views and visions about their way of life, their future and their very own identity. Extreme identity politics reduce us to mere members of a large tribe.

The region is going through a historic convulsion that will last for years, maybe decades. But the raging sectarian wars and mounting ethnic tensions are recent and the product of power struggles, political decisions and events and not the result of “ancient hatreds”. The Sunni-Shiite wars are unprecedented because they are the product of the last few decades. The 1979 revolution in Iran was a milestone in modern Shi’a assertiveness. Sunni political Islam after suffering crushing blows by the Arab Nationalists in the 1950’s and 60’s began to reassert itself after the Arab defeat in the war with Israel in 1967 by claiming that the return to true Islam is the solution. The disastrous Iraqi decision to invade Iran was a huge blow to Sunni-Shiite coexistence, and it revived Arab-Persian enmity. In Syria, the ascendency of the Alawite minority (an offshoot of Shi’ism) to power and their control of the army and the security agencies deepened the rift with the Sunni majority. This situation led to a low intensity civil war beginning in 1978 and culminating in the massacre of Sunni rebels in the city of Hama in 1982. Finally the American invasion of Iraq, which empowered the Shiites who have been marginalized in the modern state of Iraq and oppressed as a community by the regime of Saddam Hussein, led to the most sectarian bloodletting between the two sects in modern times. The U.S. cannot mediate the Sunni-Shiite divide, but at least it should not pursue policies in Syria and Iraq that will make it irretrievably worse.

In the last fifty years, many groups in the region engaged in crass expressions of identity politics, and outright discourse of exclusion; this is true of Arabs and Jews, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites and Christians and Muslims. Identity politics and practices have become the norms, even in cities like Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad that were once cosmopolitan. Dissent against the prevailing orthodoxy of the tribe became prohibitive, particularly under autocratic regimes, where the state is unable or unwilling in most cases to help those who dare to challenge the discourse of identity politics. There are few dissenting Shiite and Sunni voices in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other states were these two sects live, who would oppose publicly the course of the tribe.

Ironically, the digital age which allows the peoples of the region, particularly the youth tremendous opportunities to look beyond the confines of the tribe, to be informed instantly of events and trends, to be exposed to practical and theoretical knowledge, is in fact contributing to the atomization of the region and deepening the attachment to identity politics. Death by identity need not be the future of the region, but until the various tribes are exhausted, and until new uprisings emerge against the sins of both the in-group and the out-group, the scourge of extreme identity politics will continue to devour the region.

Hillary Clinton Is to the Right of Donald Trump on Foreign Policy. By Judith Miller and Doug Schoen.

On foreign policy, Hillary Clinton leans more to the right than Donald Trump. By Judith Miller and Douglas E. Schoen. With video. FoxNews.com, June 3, 2016. YouTube.





Miller and Schoen:

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have now delivered major speeches on foreign policy. If you are looking for a presidential candidate who favors conservative foreign policy prescriptions and such traditional Republican positions as promoting free trade, strong alliances, and the selective but robust projection of American force abroad, look no further than the presumptive presidential nominee – Hillary Clinton.

That’s right. In most key foreign policy issues, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is to the right of her rival, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Consider the following.

On Russia, while Mrs. Clinton has called Putin a “bully” and has described the relationship between Washington and Moscow as “complicated,” Mr. Trump has floated the idea of establishing a new alliance with Russia, whose cooperation he says is needed to help end the six-year war in Syria, fight terrorism, and diffuse tensions. While he says that more should be done to support Ukraine, which has been battling Russia-backed separatists since Russia annexed Crimea, he has not detailed what specifically he would do to help end Russia’s occupation of Crimea and combat Russian meddling in Kiev’s internal affairs.

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has become steadily more critical of Russia since 2009 when she and Mr. Putin famously pushed a red “reset” button on their relationship. By the end of her tenure as secretary of state, The Wall Street Journal reported, she had written a private memo to President Obama declaring the Russia “reset” dead and asserting that relations with Moscow had hit a new “low.”

To combat Russian aggression, Mrs. Clinton, like most Republicans and Democrats, has staunchly supported working closely with the 28-member NATO alliance which helped contain the Soviet Union until it collapsed in 1991. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has criticized the alliance as “obsolete” and too costly for America, saying he would insist that either its members “pay up” or “get out.”

Or consider America’s war in Iraq. While then New York’s Senator Clinton voted in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq in 2002, Mr. Trump now claims to have opposed that intervention.  Putting aside the pesky issue of whether that claim is true (and several contemporaneous and recent reports indicate that Mr. Trump once supported the invasion) he now asserts that “From the beginning I said it’s gonna destabilize the Middle East and Iran will take over Iraq…We decimated that country’s military and now the country’s  a mess.”

Mrs. Clinton has said that if she had known then what she knows now, she would have voted differently on the Senate resolution authorizing intervention. But she has not apologized for her action. And she has proposed more intrusive intervention in Syria to stop the civil war than either Mr. Trump or President Obama. A proponent of arming “moderate” or pro-western rebels in Syria and expanding American airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria, she has also pushed for establishing a no-fly zone over Syria to protect refugees. President Obama rejected that option partly because it would put the U.S. in potential direct military conflict with Russia, which has sent military advisers to Syria to protect Syrian president Bashar Assad and bomb not only ISIS but other rebel forces there.

For his part, Mr. Trump has talked tough about defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq, saying he would bomb the “expletive” out of them and kill families of terrorists, which Mrs. Clinton and others have noted would be a war crime). But he has consistently refused to disclose his plan for defeating the jihadis on grounds that it would deny Washington the element of surprise. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, he has opposed arming Syrian rebels. In his isolationism and reluctance to use force to secure American goals, Mr. Trump resembles Democratic presidential aspirant Senator Bernie Sanders more than he does Hillary Clinton.

Or consider North Korea. While Mrs. Clinton has adopted a tough stance towards North Korea’s brutal young dictator Kim Jung Un, whose abuse of his people and quest for nuclear weapons she denounced yet again in her foreign policy speech in San Diego Wednesday, Mr. Trump has offered to sit down with Mr. Kim and try to negotiate a deal. While Mrs. Clinton would shudder at being praised by the mercurial leader in Pyongyang, Time magazine reported this week that official state media called Mr. Trump a “wise politician” and “farsighted candidate who can reunify the Korean Peninsula.”

Mr. Trump has also threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea if Seoul does not pay more to support them and also to let South Korea and Japan – and even Saudi Arabia – develop their own nuclear weapons (another position he now denies having embraced) rather than depend on American military deterrence. Mrs. Clinton has proposed stiffening sanctions against Pyongyang to force Mr. Kim it to abandon his nuclear program. Plus, she has strongly opposed nuclear proliferation in any region, preferring to rely on American leadership thru traditional alliances to deter Russian and Chinese aggression and to fight ISIS.

On trade policy, too, Mr. Trump sometimes seems to the left of his Democratic rival. While Mrs. Clinton has opposed the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, she strongly embraced the trade talks that led to the free trade agreement when she was secretary of state. Mr. Trump, by contrast, argues that the trade deals so beloved of fellow Republicans have invariably cost Americans jobs and revenue at home. He vows to tear them up, negotiate better deals, or start a trade war with China if necessary. “We’ve been taken advantage of by globalization because we have leaders that are incompetent,” he says, often sounding more protectionist than his Democratic rival.

On Israel, Mrs. Clinton has been a fierce champion, praising the Jewish state and vowing to defend it yet again in her speech today. Not so, Mr. Trump, who having retracted an earlier desire to be “neutral” in negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, has questioned Israel’s commitment to peace. “I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to make it,” Mr. Trump said, adding: “A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants to make the deal — whether or not Israel's willing to sacrifice certain things. They may not be, and I understand that, and I'm OK with that. But then you're just not going to have a deal.’”

Staunch support for Israel is among the issues that have led many prominent neo-conservatives, most prominently Bill Kristol, once supportive of Republicans, to embrace Mrs. Clinton and oppose or be skeptical of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has staunchly criticized Mrs. Clinton for her interventionism – what he calls her mishandling of foreign policy as secretary of state during her 2009-2013. He has been especially harsh on her preference for military interventions in Libya and her handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack by Islamist militants on an U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, where jihadists killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. While he has talked tougher than his Democratic rival about the need to make America’s foes “respect” America again and has condemned her embrace of the Iran nuclear deal and recognition of Cuba – two areas where Mr. Trump appears more hawkish than Mrs. Clinton -- there is less practical difference between them than it may seem. Mr. Trump has vowed to renegotiate the nuclear deal, though how he would do that is unclear, and has endorsed toughening sanctions on Iran to secure concessions. But he has not echoed Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s vow to tear up the agreement on “day one.” Nor is he likely to walk back recognition of Cuba.

While Mr. Trump will have to cope with his myriad foreign policy faux pas and flip flops, Hillary Clinton will have her own challenges. Whatever her current views, she has little to show for her years as secretary of state. Perhaps harder, she will have to separate herself from the legacy of President Obama's foreign policy – two still failing wars, over 500,000 dead in Syria, tens of millions of refugees displaced from their homes and flooding Europe, and the disdain of so many Middle Eastern and other allies for America's indifference and lack of leadership.

Small wonder that neither candidate may want to dwell on foreign policy as they head to November.     

Lovable Bernie Whacks Israel. By Charles Krauthammer.

Lovable Bernie Whacks Israel. By Charles Krauthammer. Washington Post, June 2, 2016. Also at National Review Online.

Krauthammer:

Sanders’s anti-Israel sentiment stems from his old-Left roots.

Part of Bernie Sanders’ charm is that for all of his arm-waving jeremiads, he appears unthreatening. He’s the weird old uncle in the attic, Larry David’s crazy Bernie. It’s almost a matter of style. Who can be afraid of a candidate so irascible, grumpy, old-fashioned and unfashionable?

After all, he’s not going to win the nomination, so what harm can he do? A major address at the party convention? A say in the vice presidential selection? And who reads party platforms anyway?

Well, platforms may not immediately affect a particular campaign. But they do express, quite literally, the party line, a written record of its ideological trajectory.

Which is why two of Sanders’s appointments to the 15-member platform committee are so stunning. Professor Cornel West not only has called the Israeli prime minister a war criminal but openly supports the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions), the most important attempt in the world to ostracize and delegitimize Israel.

West is joined on the committee by the longtime pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby. Together, reported the New York Times, they “vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.”

This seems a gratuitous provocation. Sanders hardly made Israel central to his campaign. He did call Israel’s response in the 2014 Gaza war “disproportionate” and said “we cannot continue to be one-sided.” But now Sanders seeks to permanently alter — i.e., weaken — the relationship between the Democratic Party and Israel, which has been close and supportive since Harry Truman recognized the world’s only Jewish state when it declared independence in May 1948.

West doesn’t even pretend, as do some left-wing “peace” groups, to be opposing Israeli policy in order to save it from itself. He makes the simpler case that occupation is unconscionable oppression and that until Israel abandons it, Israel deserves to be treated like apartheid South Africa — anathematized, cut off, made to bleed morally and economically. The Sanders appointees wish to bend the Democratic platform to encourage such diminishment unless Israel redeems itself by liberating Palestine.

This is an unusual argument for a Democratic platform committee, largely because it is logically and morally perverse. Israel did in fact follow such high-minded advice in 2005: It terminated its occupation and evacuated Gaza. That earned it (temporary) praise from the West. And from the Palestinians? Not peace, not reconciliation, not normal relations but a decade of unrelenting terrorism and war.

Israel is now being asked — pressured — to repeat that same disaster on the West Bank. That would bring the terror war, quite fatally, to the very heart of Israel — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport. Israel is now excoriated for declining that invitation to national suicide.

It is ironic that the most successful Jewish presidential candidate ever should be pushing the anti-Israel case. But perhaps not surprising considering Sanders’ ideological roots. He is old left — not the post-1960s, countercultural New Left. Why, the man honeymooned in the Soviet Union — not such fashionably cool communist paradises as Sandinista Nicaragua where Bill de Blasio went to work for the cause or Castro’s Cuba where de Blasio honeymooned. (Do lefties all use the same wedding planner?)

For the old left, Israel was simply an outpost of Western imperialism, Middle East division. To this day, the leftist consensus, most powerful in Europe (which remains Sanders’ ideological lodestar), holds that Israeli perfidy demands purification by Western chastisement.

Chastisement there will be at the Democratic platform committee. To be sure, Sanders didn’t create the Democrats’ drift away from Israel. It was already visible at the 2012 convention with the loud resistance to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But Sanders is consciously abetting it.

The millennials who worship him and pack his rallies haven’t lived through — and don’t know — the history of Israel’s half-century of peace offers. They don’t know of the multiple times Israel has offered to divide the land with an independent Palestinian state and been rebuffed.

Sanders hasn’t lifted a finger to tell them. The lovable old guy with the big crowds and no chance at the nomination is hardly taken seriously (except by Hillary Clinton, whose inability to put him away reveals daily her profound political weakness). But when he makes platform appointees that show he does take certain things quite seriously, like undermining the U.S.-Israeli relationship, you might want to reconsider your equanimity about the magical mystery tour. It looks like Woodstock, but there is steel inside the psychedelic glove.

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy and Anti-Trump Speech.

Hillary Clinton National Security Policy Address. Video. C-SPAN, June 2, 2016. YouTube. Transcript at Time.com.

The Questions Clinton Didn’t Answer in Attacking Trump. By Christopher A. Preble. The National Interest, June 2, 2016.

How Bad Is Trump’s Brand of Authoritarianism? By Christopher A. Preble. The National Interest, May 27, 2016.

A Vote Against Trump Is Not a Vote For Hillary. By Dov S. Zakheim. The National Interest, June 2, 2016.

The Trump Trap. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Policy, June 3, 2016.

How to Save America From Donald Trump. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Policy, May 24, 2016.

We can’t have more of the same: The very real dangers of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy. By Patrick L. Smith. Salon, June 4, 2016.





Transcript excerpt:

Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.

He is not just unprepared – he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes – because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.

We cannot put the security of our children and grandchildren in Donald Trump’s hands. We cannot let him roll the dice with America.

Nationalism Is Rising, Not Fascism. By George Friedman.

Nationalism Is Rising, Not Fascism. By George Friedman. Geopolitical Futures, May 31, 2016.

Friedman:

The claims of an increase in fascism in Europe and the U.S. derive from a misunderstanding of the term.

Recently, there have been a number of articles and statements asserting that fascism is rising in Europe, and that Donald Trump is an American example of fascism. This is a misrepresentation of a very real phenomenon. The nation-state is reasserting itself as the primary vehicle of political life. Multinational institutions like the European Union and multilateral trade treaties are being challenged because they are seen by some as not being in the national interest. The charge of a rise in fascism derives from a profound misunderstanding of what fascism is. It is also an attempt to discredit the resurgence of nationalism and to defend the multinational systems that have dominated the West since World War II.

Nationalism is the core of the Enlightenment’s notion of liberal democracy. It asserts that the multinational dynasties that ruled autocratically denied basic human rights. Among these was the right to national self-determination and the right of citizens to decide what was in the national interest. The Enlightenment feared tyranny and saw the multinational empires dominating Europe as the essence of tyranny. Destroying them meant replacing them with nation-states. The American and French revolutions were both nationalist risings, as were the nationalist risings that swept Europe in 1848. Liberal revolutions were by definitions nationalist because they were risings against multinational empires.

Fascism differs from nationalism in two profound ways. First, self-determination was not considered a universal right by fascists. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco, to mention three obvious fascists, only endorsed nationalism for Germany, Italy and Spain. The rights of other nations to a nation-state of their own was at best unclear to the fascists. In a very real sense, Hitler and Mussolini believed in multinationalism, albeit with other nations submitting to their will. Fascism in its historical form was an assault on the right of nations to pursue their self-interest, and an elevation of the fascists’ right to pursue it based on an assertion of their nations’ inherent superiority and right to rule.

But the more profound difference was the conception of internal governance. Liberal nationalism accepted that the right to hold power was subject to explicit and periodic selection of the leaders by the people. How this was done varied. The American system is very different from the British, but the core principles remain the same. It also requires that opponents of the elected have the right to speak out against them, and to organize parties to challenge them in the future. Most important, it affirms that the people have the right to govern themselves through these mechanisms and that those elected to lead must govern in the people’s name. Leaders must also be permitted to govern and extra-legal means cannot be used to paralyze the government, any more than the government has the right to suppress dissent.

Fascism asserts that a Hitler or Mussolini represent the people but are not answerable to them. The core of fascism is the idea of the dictator, who emerges through his own will. He cannot be challenged without betraying the people. Therefore, free speech and opposition parties are banned and those who attempt to oppose the regime are treated as criminals. Fascism without the dictator, without the elimination of elections, without suppression of free speech and the right to assemble, isn’t fascism.

Arguing that being part of the European Union is not in the British interest, that NATO has outlived its usefulness, that protectionist policies or anti-immigration policies are desirable is not fascist. These ideas have no connection to fascism whatsoever. They are far more closely linked to traditional liberal democracy. They represent the reassertion of the foundation of liberal democracy, which is the self-governing nation-state. It is the foundation of the United Nations, whose members are nation-states, and where the right to national self-determination is fundamental.

Liberal democracy does not dictate whether a nation should be a member in a multinational organization, adopt free trade policies or protectionism, or welcome or exclude immigrants. These are decisions to be made by the people – or more precisely, by the representatives they select. The choices may be wise, unwise or even unjust. However, the power to make these choices rests, in a liberal democracy, in the hands of the citizens.

What we are seeing is the rise of the nation-state against the will of multinational organizations and agreements. There are serious questions about membership in the EU, NATO and trade agreements, and equally about the right to control borders. Reasonable people can disagree, and it is the political process of each nation that retains the power to determine shifts in policy. There is no guarantee that the citizenry will be wise, but that cuts both ways and in every direction.

The current rise of nationalism in Europe is the result of European institutions’ failure to function effectively. Eight years after 2008, Europe still has not solved its economic problems. A year after the massive influx of refugees in Europe, there is still no coherent and effective policy to address the issue. Given this, it would be irresponsible for citizens and leaders not to raise questions as to whether they should remain in the EU or follow its dictates. Similarly, there is no reason for Donald Trump not to challenge the idea that free trade is always advantageous, or to question NATO. However obnoxious his style and however confusing his presentation, he is asking questions that must be asked.

In the 1950s, the McCarthyites charged anyone they didn’t like with being communists. Today, those who disapprove of the challengers of the current system call them fascists. Now, some of the opponents of the EU or immigration may really be fascists. But the hurdle for being a fascist is quite high. Fascism is far more than racism, tinkering with the judiciary, or staging a violent demonstration. Real fascism is Nazi Germany’s “leader principle” – which dictated absolute obedience to the Führer, whose authority was understood to be above the law.

We are seeing a return to nationalism in Europe and the United States because it is not clear to many that internationalism, as followed since World War II, benefits them any longer. They may be right or wrong, but to claim that fascism is sweeping Europe and the United States raises the question of whether those who say this understand the principles of fascism or the intimate connection between nationalism and liberal democracy.

Trump’s Industrial Belt Appeal. By Joel Kotkin.

Trump’s Industrial Belt Appeal. By Joel Kotkin. Real Clear Politics, June 1, 2016.

Kotkin:

In his still improbable path to the White House, Donald Trump has an opening, right through the middle of the country. From the Appalachians to the Rockies, much of the American heartland is experiencing a steady decline in its fortunes, with growing fears about its prospects in a Democratic-dominated future. This could prove the road to victory for Trump.

The media like to explain Trump’s appeal by focusing on the racial and nationalistic sentiments of his primarily white supporters in places like the Midwest and in small towns. Perhaps more determinative are the mounting economic challenges facing voters in that part of the country. Much of this has to do with an industrial structure facing growing challenges from a high dollar, decreasing commodity prices and a pending tsunami of environmental regulation.

Unlike the Democrats’ coastal strongholds, which depend increasingly on such professions as media, software, finance, and high-end business services, the middle swath of the country depends far more on manufacturing, resource extraction, and agriculture. All these so-called “tangible” industries are facing serious declines, which in a close election could swing some critical states such as Ohio, Colorado, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Iowa into the Republican column. Seven of the 10 most manufacturing-dependent metro areas in America are in the Midwest battleground states. Another lies in yet another purple state, North Carolina.

Economic Slowdown in Mid-America

When President Obama ran for re-election in 2012, the tangible economy was on a roll. Super-charged by the federal bailout, the car industry was roaring back, restoring jobs and confidence in the country’s midsection. The president was even described by The Washington Post as a “man on a mission” to save American manufacturing. And the two states then with the fastest declines in unemployment since the onset of the Great Recession—Ohio and Michigan—are in the Midwest.

At the same time, Obama benefited from the resurgence of domestic oil and gas production that   stimulated growth in steel, heavy equipment, and industrial sector employment. This fortunate confluence was fortuitous for the Democrats, who carried most of the states outside the South buoyed by this nascent industrial rebirth. Good times in coal country helped the president in parts of Virginia; the energy boom helped lock up Colorado for him.

Hillary Clinton likely will not enjoy a similar tailwind this year. Manufacturing indexes have tended downward over the past year, and the energy sector has been in full-scale retreat. This not only impacts oil patch bastions Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, which are unlikely to vote Democratic anyway, but also the battlegrounds states Pennsylvania and Ohio. Agricultural economies in the midsection are also reeling.

Clinton will argue that job growth is on the rise nearly everywhere, but more than half of the increase has come in low-wage sectors such as retail and food service, which is one key reason for persistently weak income growth.

The damage is not yet universal, but can be seen clearly in many areas. Many Rust Belt and Appalachian regions are once again hemorrhaging residents. In a recent survey of metropolitan economies for Forbes, economist Michael Shires and I traced the job growth in communities across the country. The bottom 10 among the 70 largest metropolitan areas reads like a stroll down Rust Belt Lane: Hartford, Conn., Milwaukee, Detroit, Albany, N.Y., Newport News, Va., Birmingham, Ala., Cleveland, Newark, N.J., Pittsburgh, Buffalo and -- in last place -- Rochester, once one of the beacons of industrial innovation in the country and now part of New York’s upstate disaster area.

Last year, amid some decent employment growth nationally, almost all these areas suffered sub-1 percent job declines after enjoying growth rates well above that in previous years. More grievously affected are a host of smaller communities, many of them in the Midwest and industrial Northeast, several already seeing negative job growth. At the bottom of the list are places like Johnstown, Pa., and Elmira, N.Y., where the Democrats’ “hope and change” promise has failed to reverse dismal local economies.

Enter Trump 

Throughout his divisive campaign, Donald Trump has fattened up on these voters, winning by landslides in places like upstate New York, central and western Pennsylvania, the industrial suburbs of Detroit, northern Indiana and the resource-dependent parts of Colorado. In hard-hit Erie County, N.Y., home to Buffalo, Trump won two-thirds of the primary vote.

Also appealing to similar populist sentiment, Bernie Sanders has won some of the same areas, often decisively. For his part, Trump’s only serious Rust Belt setbacks occurred in Ohio (where John Kasich ran as a virtual favorite son candidate), Iowa (where evangelicals still wield outsized influence) and Minnesota, which is arguably the most post-industrial of the central states. Recent announcements by such large companies as Ford and United Technologies  to move jobs to Mexico have reinforced Trump's appeal.

Trump’s support, as Nate Silver has shown, is not comprised only of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. On average, they earn above-average incomes and boast education levels that also exceed the national average. Some are professionals and merchants on Main Street, who acutely ride the ups and downs of the tangible economy. These voters may also be susceptible to rants about Mexican “rapists” and certainly would not favor a massive incursion of Muslim refugees. But their primary concerns are economic, not social. If they really favored regressive social policies, Ted Cruz was their man.

The trajectory of the Democratic race—as well as that of the economy—could help Trump expand his appeal to such voters. Hillary Clinton once tended to be supportive of industrial and energy development; her State Department gave tacit approval to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Now, under pressure from Bernie Sanders’ left-wing legions, she has backed away from support for this organized-labor-backed project. The divisions between the public sector unions and those in the industrial sector could boost Trump’s turnout in states where manufacturing and energy still matter.

To make matters more difficult, Clinton may be saddled at the convention with a ban on fracking. This stance warms the hearts of bicoastal enviros, but is unpopular in large parts of the nation’s heartland. Likewise, the Obama administration’s all-out assault on fossil fuels has already cost Clinton any shot at formerly Democratic-leaning West Virginia, and is likely to hurt her across the Appalachian belt, which includes portions of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio. Even if oil and gas prices rise, the Obama proposals for higher taxes and regulation of energy seem destined to slow any recovery in this high-paying, largely blue-collar industry.

In addition, Trump is showing unanticipated strength in several key states dependent on coal-fired electricity. He’s currently running even with Clinton in Ohio and Pennsylvania, both of which twice went for Obama. This should be enough to keep Clinton’s advisers, who are planning to deploy massive resources to these states, awake at night.     

In this respect, Clinton faces a difficult situation. Ever more dependent on her party’s post-industrial urban core, she will be hard-pressed to moderate her stance on environmental issues.     Her predecessor and her husband were able to finesse this ground by feinting toward the moderate middle in campaign years, but such ideological contortionism is getting harder to pull off.

Megabuck donors like San Francisco’s Tom Steyer are committed to forcing Clinton to embrace   progressive green orthodoxy. This will leave many mid-America workers and businesspeople feeling abandoned and, thus, potentially more receptive to Trump’s pitch. Ultimately, suggests historian Michael Lind, Trump could presage the transformation of the GOP into a middle-class populist party, with a strong Midwestern as well as Southern base, while the Democrats rest their hopes on an unlikely coalition of the coastal gentry, the hyper-educated, minorities, and the poor.

So far, the crass New York billionaire has played brilliantly on middle-American resentments, many of them well-founded. He promises repeatedly to cut a “better deal” for them. If he can convincingly make his case, Donald Trump also might yet close the most successful real estate deal of his lifetime: occupancy of the White House.

Yuval Noah Harari: AI Will Create a “Useless Class” of Human.

“Most of what people learn in school ... will be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50,” says Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

AI will create “useless class” of human, predicts bestselling historian. By Ian Sample. The Guardian, May 20, 2016.

Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known. By Carole Cadwalladr. The Guardian, July 5, 2015.

The theatre of terror. By Yuval Noah Harari. The Guardian, January 31, 2015.

Sample:

Smarter artificial intelligence is one of 21st century’s most dire threats, writes Yuval Noah Harari in follow-up to Sapiens.

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins.

The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

At least that is the future predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose new book says more of us will be pushed out of employment by intelligent robots and on to the economic scrap heap.

Harari rose to prominence when his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, became an international bestseller. Two years on, the book is still being talked about. Bill Gates asked Melinda to read it on holiday. It would spark great conversations around the dinner table, he told her. We know because he said so on his blog this week.

When a book is a hit, the publisher wants more. And so Harari has been busy. His next title, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is not out until September but early copies have begun to circulate. Its cover states simply: “What made us sapiens will make us gods”. It follows on from where Sapiens ends, in a provocative, and certainly speculative, gallop through the hopes and dreams that will shape the future of the species.

And the nightmares. Because even as the book has humans gaining godlike powers, that is only one eventuality Harari explores. It might all go pear-shaped, of course: we sapiens have a knack for hashing things up. Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution.

Harari calls it “the rise of the useless class” and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. In a nutshell, as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition.

“I’m aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far. It’s basically the boy who cried wolf,” says Harari. “But in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time.”

The way Harari sees it, humans have two kinds of ability that make us useful: physical ones and cognitive ones. The Industrial Revolution may have led to machines that did away with humans in jobs needing strength and repetitive actions. But the takeover was not overwhelming. With cognitive powers that machines could not touch, humans were largely safe in their work. For how much longer, though? AIs are now beginning to outperform humans in the cognitive field. And while new types of jobs will certainly emerge, we cannot be sure, says Harari, that humans will do them better than AIs, computers and robots.

AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. “Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.”

Even so, jobless humans are not useless humans. In the US alone, 93 million people do not have jobs, but they are still valued. Harari, it turns out, has a specific definition of useless. “I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint,” he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues.

None of this puts us in the realm of the gods. In fact, it leads Harari to even more bleak predictions. Though the people may no longer provide for the state, the state may still provide for them. “What might be far more difficult is to provide people with meaning, a reason to get up in the morning,” Harari says. For those who don’t cheer at the prospect of a post-work world, satisfaction will be a commodity to pay for: our moods and happiness controlled by drugs; our excitement and emotional attachments found not in the world outside, but in immersive VR.

All of which leads to the question: what should we do? “First of all, take it very seriously,” Harari says. “And make it a part of the political agenda, not only the scientific agenda. This is something that shouldn’t be left to scientists and private corporations. They know a lot about the technical stuff, the engineering, but they don’t necessarily have the vision and the legitimacy to decide the future course of humankind.”

Cadwalladr:

The author of the bestselling Sapiens says that the future of life on Earth is now, worryingly, in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.

By rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history. He’s a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. Or that he’d join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari’s case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind.

When I meet him, he’s just been the star turn at Penguin Random House’s global sales conference. In May, he packed out Hay. Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk. And last month, he received the ultimate imprimatur when Sapiens was selected by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for his online book club. He’s invited his 38 million followers to read what he describes as “a big history narrative of human civilisation– from how we developed from hunter-gatherers to how we organise our society and economy today”.

That’s a workable description of what Sapiens is, though it’s a history book only in the sense that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is a physics book (Sapiens’ subtitle – A Brief History of Humankind – suggests that this is not entirely coincidental). Its scope is so hugely ambitious that I had expected Harari to be one of those overconfident telly historian types, all male ego and a crushing sense of certainty, whereas, in the flesh, he’s a slightly nerdy, more thoughtful figure. Academic superstardom seems to have caught him by surprise as much as anyone.

The book was based on an introductory course on world history he taught when none of his more senior colleagues wanted to take it on, and it was turned down by almost every major publishing outfit in Israel before finding a receptive editor. Since then, however, its success has been swift and resounding: it became a bestseller in Israel and has gone on to be published in 20 countries around the world. But then, the book’s success, and the way that Harari has been taken up by the global tastemakers, makes sense in that he considers himself a historian of globalisation. “In a way, it’s like in the 19th century with the rise of nationalism. You establish an independent national state and the first thing you do is to write a history of that state. Now we have a more global world, you need the history of the whole of the global world, not of a particular country, or religion, but the history of humankind as a whole.”

This is entirely characteristic of the way that Harari speaks. In full sentences, paragraphs, even. My transcript, which is usually a mess of elipses, reads like it’s been lifted off the page. And his book is a brilliant read. He zips from subject to subject, through thousands of years of human history, alighting on whatever seems to take his fancy but gradually builds up a picture of us as… well, as what exactly? As more successful monkeys, basically, so successful that we’ve enslaved all the other animals and bent the planet to our will. But whereas sharks and lions evolved over millennia to take their place at the top of the food chain, Harari compares us to “banana republic dictators” who just got here. “They came to power very violently and lately so they feel extremely insecure about their position. So all the time they just take more and more power to beef up their position.”

A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band.

Because, in Harari’s view, we have no real idea what we want even at the most basic, personal level, let alone as a species. “Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.” There’s nothing “natural or obvious” about taking a holiday abroad, he says by way of example. “A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their futures building pyramids and having their corpses mummified but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon.” We’re all victims of the “myths of romantic consumerism”, he says.

But everything is a myth, a story, according to Harari. Justice is a story. Human rights are a story. Money, he told the moneyed elite at TED, is “the greatest story ever told”. So what’s your story?

“About the history of the world?”

No, about you. Your story, about yourself.

“Oh, myself? For me, I suppose the most important thing is the search for the truth. I really want to understand reality, what’s really happening here. As far back as I remember, this was something that I was extremely preoccupied by. I remember in high school asking my parents and my teachers to explain what’s happening here, what is life, what’s it all about, and so forth.

“What struck me most was not that they didn’t tell me an answer but that they weren’t really concerned about it. Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions, what’s the meaning of life, what are we doing here, then somewhere in their 20s they seem to say, ‘I’ll just get married. I’ll just have kids. I’ll get back to that later.’ But they never do. For me, it kept boiling. And it still is boiling.”

He grew up in a secular Jewish family of eastern European origin in the Haifa area and there are a few things he recognises about himself that have informed his world view, or at least his desire to question other people’s view of the world. The first is being gay.

“You don’t take the accepted view for granted just because everybody believes it. It really affects the way that I view everything. Nothing should be taken for granted even if everybody believes it. It forces you to look at society a bit from the side.”

Another influence was the collapse of the Berlin Wall when he was a teenager in 1989.

“It means I don’t take capitalism and neo-liberalism for granted. I teach all these 20-year-old students and they were born into a capitalist world. It’s the only system. There’s no alternative and nobody can even imagine that there could be. But I remember the time when these things were really hotly contested. And also the way that you can live in a certain type of world and be sure that this will go on for ages and ages and suddenly everything collapses.”

In some ways, I say, it struck me that Sapiens isn’t actually a history book – it’s a philosophy book that asks the big, philosophical questions and attempts to answer them through history.

“Yes, that’s a very accurate description. I think that I see history as a philosophy laboratory. Philosophers come up with all these very interesting questions about the human condition, but the way that most of them – though not all – go about answering them is through thought experiments. But if you’re interested in, say, justice, history is full of empirical evidence about justice in human society.”

It’s no surprise, either, that he’s come to the attention of Mark Zuckerberg. Harari is one of the very few thinkers around who’s really looking at what’s happening now. Sapiens is his attempt to tell the story of the past to understand the present: the great technological advances that we are all living through now.

The way you tell it is that we’re at a point of inflection: that we’re on the cusp of perhaps the greatest change for the human race ever?

“Probably, yes. I mean the one thing that has remained constant in history was humans themselves. Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.”

The “next revolution”, as Harari sees it, the latest in a line that began with the cognitive revolution and takes in the agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution, is what is happening in the biotech field, in artificial intelligence.

“When people talk about merging with computers to create cyborgs, it’s not some prophecy about the year 2200. It’s happening right now. More and more of our reality exists within computers or through them.”

But this is only the start of it. For the first time in history, “we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities”. And while we have enough imagination to invent new technologies, we are unable to foresee their consequences.

“It was the same with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years, which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the consequences.”

Only now, the decisions are being taken by “a small international caste of business people, entrepreneurs and engineers”. Governments have become “managers”, he says. They have no vision, “whereas meet the people in Google, in Facebook, they have tremendous visions about the future, about overcoming death, living for ever, merging humans with computers. I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.”

But then, even those of us who are aware of the arguments aren’t necessarily losing sleep over it, a fact that Harari puts down to one of our unique attributes as humans: our cognitive dissonance, our ability to hold two utterly conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time. That we can say, what a cute dog and yum, yum, what a delicious steak and not see a problem with that somehow.

Harari is a vegan and the dire plight of animals, particularly domesticated animals, since the agricultural revolution is something he riffs on in the book, but there are countless other examples. “In modern secular societies, people believe in equality and people believe in freedom and they don’t realise that usually freedom and equality are contradictory. The more freedom you give people, the more inequality you have.”

His views on inequality – that the 20th century was a blip basically; we’ve always been unequal and we’re heading back that way – link him to that other great intellectual du jour, Thomas Piketty, but much of Sapiens feels inventively original, a fact that he puts down to his longstanding interest in meditation. Harari, it seems, doesn’t succumb to the myth of romantic consumerism when it comes to deciding what to do on his holidays. Last summer, he went on a 60-day silent vipassana retreat. He discovered it at Oxford when researching his PhD.

“I suddenly had a tool to scientifically observe directly my mind… and I realised I had no idea who I really was. I had this fictional story in my head but the connection between that and my reality was rather tenuous.” It changed him, personally, he says, but also professionally. “It gave me the ability to focus on what is really important. When you look inside, you find that there are so many different voices inside you. Most of life, we just allow all these voices just to pull us any which way.”

It’s an interest that he shares with the Silicon Valley types he critiques (Steve Jobs was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism) and, in a distracted age, focus – and its handmaiden, mindfulness – is more fashionable in west-coast America than curly kale. But without meditation, he says, “I would probably be far less satisfied and happy. And I would probably be a far worse historian. I suppose I would still be researching medieval military history, but not the neanderthals or cyborgs.”

It’s bracing, Harari’s focus on the big things. His next book is “about the human agenda for the 21st century in terms of dangers, opportunities, questions”. Mark Zuckerberg will no doubt read it. Probably the rest of us should too.