Robert Malley
Jewish Currents, Feb. 4, 2021
“He embraced a strong Arab nationalistic worldview and I can’t recall him ever evincing much understanding for or even desire to understand Israelis and their state.”
Robert Malley’s critics—who failed last month to prevent Joe Biden from naming him special envoy to Iran—called him a radical. Senator Tom Cotton alleged that Malley “has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel.” Hawkish columnist Eli Lake claimed that Malley’s appointment would constitute Biden’s “first foreign policy blunder.”
The suggestion that Malley is outside the Beltway mainstream is false. In fact, he’s a denizen of the American foreign policy establishment: credentialed by Yale and Harvard Law school, a clerkship on the Supreme Court, and stints on Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s National Security Councils. Prior to joining the Biden administration, he ran the International Crisis Group, a prestigious conflict-resolution think tank based in Washington, DC. What distinguishes Malley is not his radicalism. Instead, as this previously unpublished June 2008 lecture reveals, it is his willingness to grapple with radicalism—in particular the radicalism of anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—and for the most intimate of reasons.
In his lecture, delivered as part of an annual series at Oxford in memory of the Egyptian-Lebanese diplomat George Antonious, Malley poignantly navigates several gulfs that separate him from his enigmatic, crusading, anti-imperialist father. The first is generational. Simon Malley devoted his life to the secular Third World nationalism ascendant in the 1950s and 1960s. His son looks back at that era from an early 21st century where America is dominant, leftist movements are weak, and Islamism has become the lingua franca of revolt against the West. The second gulf is national. Rob Malley is an American. Simon Malley was a man with nine passports, many of them from nations he hoped to liberate from Western imperialism’s grip. The third gulf is ideological. Rob Malley, the imperial diplomat, seeks to steward wisely the global order that his father, the revolutionary journalist, sought to overthrow.
Robert Malley is the US special envoy to Iran.
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