Click here to read Steven A. Cook on why we should expect the Palestinians to launch a third intifada.

Israeli officials and experts were initially reacting to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's promise not to seek re-election in one of three ways: They believed him and didn’t really care; they believed him and worried about the possible vacuum following his disappearance from the political scene; or they didn’t believe him. Last week, the third option seemed to be the most common read in Jerusalem. Abbas is bluffing, the reasoning goes, in the hope of getting more sympathy from the international community, making Israel more prone to concessions, and forcing a nervous American administration to pressure Israel some more.

Despite contentions that his "decision is not for negotiation or maneuver," there were numerous signs that is precisely what he is doing. Abbas hasn’t said he is going to resign his role as chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or as the head of the Fatah movement. If he keeps these positions for himself, the position of president becomes of less importance--even in the case that someone else gets it. And since Palestinian elections aren't likely to happen any time soon, Abbas doesn't have to be "re-elected" to stay in charge. It’s revealing that Fatah is not even looking for substitutes yet. "We won't search for replacements for President Abbas," Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said last week.

But recent days’ events have caused some Israelis observers to scratch their heads. Can he seriously mean it? With every passing day, with every added combative statement, with every blow to his stated goal--not even Europe agreed to endorse the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state--they’ve realized that if Abbas didn’t initially mean it, he might be reaching a point where there’s no turning back.

Abbas has certainly succeeded in attracting sympathy. Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Palestinian cities calling him to stay, as have dignitaries such as Quartet Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair and Israeli President Shimon Peres. Such pleas don’t come because Abbas is such a brilliant leader, but because of fear of the expected void in the unlikely case he really goes. It’s a serious concern: The collapse of the Palestinian Authority would definitely pose a problem to Israel and the international community.

But Abbas’s promise not to run is unlikely to solve his underlying challenges--and he largely has himself to blame. While the Americans and Israelis were finally reaching an agreement on a partial settlement freeze at the trilateral meeting this past September in New York, Abbas refused to admit that a total freeze was no longer a viable option. He continued his intransigence in a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton two weeks ago in Abu Dhabi. And this past Wednesday, in a public appearance marking the five years that have passed since the death of Yasser Arafat, Abbas vowed, yet again, that he will not go back to negotiating with Israel "without a full cessation of settlement construction, including Jerusalem and natural growth."

That is one tall tree he has climbed. Abbas is now committed to a stance that cannot be acceptable to an American administration that prides itself on engagement with friend and foe, and dialogue without preconditions. If Obama is willing to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, how can Abbas get away with refusing to talk to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu? On the other hand, with every bombastic statement, Abbas seems to be limiting his domestic options. How can he go back to negotiations while saving face with his own people after repeatedly promising not to do so unless Israel freezes all settlement construction?

He can't--and the frustrated Obama administration has finally realized that the negotiations are unlikely to happen any time soon. Netanyahu, quick to sense the changing mood in the Obama administration, has turned to an old Israeli trick: When Palestinians stumble, rekindle negotiations with Syria. Israeli prime minister Yitzak Rabin did the same thing in the early '90s, as he was "not averse to the notion of playing Syria and the Palestinians against each other," as Efraim Inbar explained in his book on Rabin and Israel's national security. Now Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak--another master of zigzagging between the two tracks--are playing the same game, with rumblings emerging over the past few days from the supposedly deep-freezed Israeli-Syrian negotiations. 

All this presents Abbas with new challenges and few options. He can cave and return to the negotiating table--but this will weaken him domestically even more than he is now. He can try the unilateral course proposed by his prime minister, Salam Fayyad--or go even further, as some statements this past week seem to suggest--and establish a state without the benefit of Israeli-Palestinian agreements, hoping that the “world” will come around to recognizing it. Or he can disappoint all the cynics and actually quit with his tail between his legs, with very little to show, having lost Gaza to Hamas and gained nothing through negotiations.

When Abbas was first appointed in 2004, Israeli expert Danny Rubinstein described him as "the default leader, the person one dates on the rebound, a 'consolation lover' for a time after a hard separation, until true love appears." Five years later, not much has changed. And until a more nimble paramour enters the dating pool, Israel will be relegated to spinsterhood for the foreseeable future.

Shmuel Rosner, an editor and columnist based in Tel Aviv, blogs daily at Rosner’s Domain.

Thomas Omestad covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague for the December 25, 1989, issue of TNR. Read his piece here.

The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful triumph of the people over a stifling authoritarian system--seem certain. For those on the streets of Prague on the evening of Friday, November 17, 1989, it was easy to imagine a tragedy-in-the-making and perhaps a reprieve, of sorts, for a dying regime. The rosy glow of hindsight with which we remember the Velvet Revolution had not yet formed.

When Barack Obama tapped Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state, the typical reaction came in two stages. The first was to think it was nuts. How could two blood rivals possibly make good foreign policy together? The second, a reconsideration, was to think it a stroke of genius. Secretary of state is a job that demands extreme dedication and diligence, requiring its occupant to learn the fine details of everything from the Kashmir dispute to Taiwanese independence--and to articulate U.S. policy with flawless precision. Who could be better for this task than Clinton? As a senator, after all, she had made her name as a policy wonk who actually enjoyed reading to the end of her briefing books--and one who, moreover, was known for an almost animatronic ability to stay on message. Barack Obama is said to have marveled at her relentless message discipline over two dozen Democratic primary debates. In selecting her a year ago, The New York Times reported, aides said he “recognized that Clinton had far more discipline and focus than her husband.”

The Palestinian territories are descending into chaos, but many in Washington seem unconcerned. The Palestinians in the West Bank have too much to lose from a new uprising, some are arguing, given the recent moderate improvements in their daily lives. Others assert that the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, trained under American supervision, will prevent the Palestinians from making the mistakes of 1987 and 2000. Yet the dynamics of Palestinian politics indicate that a third intifada is likely to erupt in the near future. If history is any guide, the Palestinian leadership of the West Bank--whether it includes Mahmoud Abbas or not--may again look to a violence to improve its sagging domestic popularity.

Twenty years ago, I was there when the Berlin Wall was coming down. What I witnessed about human aspiration in those magic November days in 1989 thrills me even now. But what it showed me about politics may be even more important.

“What is freedom?” I began asking people as I waded through the crowd gathered at the Brandenburg Gate.  

To a middle-aged nurse it meant the flight of her co-workers to the West. There were 17 nurses left on her floor. There had been 50. “It’s bleeding us to death.”

Last week’s U.S.-EU annual summit differed from its predecessors in ways that fuel the perception on the other side of the Atlantic that Barack Obama is just not that interested in Europe. First, there was the venue of the opening lunch: Blair House, the government’s official guest house, not the usual White House. Then, there was the luncheon’s host: Vice-President Joe Biden, not the president himself. And, finally, there was the time frame for discussion: European leaders only got 90 minutes of direct talks with the president instead of the customary two hours (minimum), plus a press conference.

In our collective memory of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht occupies a central but ambiguous place. If you look simply at the statistics, there is little reason why the events of November 9-10, 1938, should loom so large. According to the Nazis themselves, 91 Jews were killed in the nationwide pogrom that became known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” That figure, as Alan Steinweis points out in his illuminating new study Kristallnacht 1938, “included neither Jewish suicides nor the significantly larger number of Jews who were arrested in connection with the pogrom and would die in concentration camps in the following weeks and months.” But even when we remember that 30,000 Jewish men were arrested--about 10 percent of the entire Jewish population of Germany--Kristallnacht pales in comparison with later Nazi crimes. Why do Jews--and, as Steinweis points out, Germans--continue to remember Kristallnacht as a uniquely terrible event, even though the broken glass was followed, within a few years, by gas chambers and death camps?

When President Obama arrives in Tokyo on Friday, he will confront a country that seeks to be an ally of the United States. For Japan has never been an American ally. It was first a rival, then an enemy, and finally, after it lost the war it foolishly started with the U.S., it became a protectorate, not an ally.  

The distinction matters. An alliance is an institution negotiated between two sovereign governments in which each agrees to a series of reciprocal obligations that have the force of law. A protectorate arrangement, by contrast, sees the protectorate retaining a degree of control of its internal affairs, but surrendering authority to manage external relations--most crucially, in the area of military decision-making. In return for the protectorate's ceding of this key aspect of sovereignty, the dominant partner in the arrangement agrees to provide for the defense of the protectorate. 

Monday marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is worth pausing to recall just how momentous, and unanticipated, this event and those that followed were. My students today have no memory of the cold war; to them, Prague and Budapest, just like Paris and Madrid, are simply places to visit or study in Europe. For the people who lived under communism, however, the system's collapse ushered in an economic transformation unlike any the modern world had ever seen: inflation wiped out the savings of millions of people; unemployment went from being (officially) non-existent to a chronic problem; and homes, businesses, and entire industries passed from state hands to private ownership. At the same time, consumers suddenly had access to goods and services that hadn't been available behind the Iron Curtain, and, for the first time in decades, entrepreneurs were able to start their own companies. Along with these economic changes--at least, in most of the countries--came elections and the potential for democracy, so long denied to citizens in the communist world.

However, the success of democratization in the post-communist states has varied considerably. The chart below represents the Freedom House rankings of how democratic these countries are, as of 2008. The scores vary from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 12, and the bars are colored-coded by region: former Soviet republics, excluding the Baltic states (blue); the Baltic states (purple); and Eastern Europe (orange), excluding the countries in former Yugoslavia (red).

The geographic patterns are unmistakable. The highest Freedom House scores are in Eastern European countries and the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia); the lowest scores are all in the former Soviet Union. The only former Soviet state (outside of the Baltics) with a relatively high score is Ukraine. The war-torn republics of the former Yugoslavia make up much of the middle ground.

What might explain these patterns? The seemingly obvious answer--the experience of having been part of the former Soviet Union--is belied by the fact that the Baltic states have very high scores. Another potential explanation is religious culture; some experts have suggested that Catholic and Protestant countries are likely to be more successful at democratization than Eastern Orthodox or Muslim countries. While there is some correlation here, religion cannot explain why Orthodox Bulgaria has a much higher Freedom House score than Orthodox Russia, or why Muslim Albania has a much higher score than Muslim Turkmenistan. Similarly, while war undoubtedly undermines democratization, we do not find Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Russia, and Tajikistan--the five post-communist countries most affected by war in the 1990s--anchoring the left-hand side of chart.

Rather, the factor with the most explanatory power seems to be a country’s relative chances (largely dependent on geography) of being granted membership in the European Union. Consider the eleven post-communist countries, including East Germany, that have entered the EU: Their average Freedom House score is 11.5, and no country has a score lower than ten (the score of newest EU members Romania and Bulgaria). Conversely, the mean score is only 4.7 for the 16 post-communist countries that have neither joined the EU nor ascended to candidate-country status. Moreover, the states in former Yugoslavia, which continue to have long-term options for joining the EU because they are located right next door, are found in the middle of the scale, despite the fact that they've waged bloody and costly wars over the last 20 years.

The simple answer for why the EU has had such a profound impact on post-communist states' political development is that it requires countries to meet numerous membership criteria, one of which is a democratic system. But, more complexly, this is probably what social scientists refer to as an endogenous relationship: Yes, the EU is more likely to admit democracies, but countries with a realistic chance of getting into the EU are also more likely to build and maintain a democratic system, precisely because it eases entry into the EU. The key here is that EU membership provides (or, at least, is perceived as providing) a host of benefits to its new member states. These benefits--which are extended over time, not necessarily right when a country enters the EU--include unfettered access to European markets, the opportunity for a country’s citizens to travel and work in other member states, and generous amounts of development aid. And, beyond these tangible economic benefits, for countries that spent the post-WWII era on the “outside” of Europe looking in, the chance to finally be on the "inside" may be too good to pass up.

The irony is that the EU--unlike many international organizations--was never intended to function as an instrument of international democracy promotion. Rather, the EU was meant to provide economic benefits to its members; if there was a larger political goal, it was to contain potential conflict between France and Germany and to keep Germany firmly anchored in Europe. Instead, as Professor Milada Vachudova of the University of North Carolina has argued, the EU may have become the most effective, inadvertent democracy promotion organization the world has ever known. This is perhaps one of the greatest surprises of the post-communist experience.

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As the United States continues to push democratization as a foreign policy goal, there are lessons it can learn from the EU's influence over the old Eastern Bloc. As in other parts of the world, we have evidence that it is harder for democracy to take root in some countries than in others. But the explanation in the post-communist context is not because democracy works where the people demand it and not where outside forces impose it, as has been suggested in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both Russia and Poland, for example, featured eager populations and crowded, multiparty elections in the 1990s, but today, the latter is a fully functioning democracy while the former clearly is not.

Instead, the post-communist experience highlights the important lesson that democratization may be more likely to succeed when there is a regional organization of states offering valuable incentives for other countries to join its ranks. This is not to say that people need to be bought off, but rather, that incentives (such as the benefits of EU membership) can help transition countries clear the early hurdles on the road to democracy.

Unfortunately, it's an open question whether there are any international institutions comparable to the EU, in terms of the inducements they can provide. "Most favored nation" status is nice, but it might not compare to the tangible advantages of being in an organization like the EU, which offers the opportunity for visa-free travel and work, the chance to sit at the table (and, occasionally, even at the head of that table) in regional policymaking discussions, and access to the world’s single biggest economy. To the extent that analogous institutions do not exist, for example, in the Middle East or Africa, perhaps one of the long-term goals of U.S. foreign policy should be thinking about how to help create them.

Joshua A. Tucker is Associate Professor of Politics at New York University, a National Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a co-author of the political science and policy blog The Monkey Cage.

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In 2000, I was asked by the Israel Defense Forces to join a group of philosophers, lawyers, and generals for the purpose of drafting the army’s ethics code. Since then, I have been deeply involved in the analysis of the moral issues that Israel faces in its war on terrorism. I have spent many hours in discussions with soldiers and officers in order to better grasp the dilemmas that they tackle in the field, and in an attempt to help facilitate the internalization of the code of ethics in war. It was no wonder that, when the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war was published, I was keen to read it, with some hope of getting a perspective on Israeli successes or failures in this effort to comprehend war, and to fight it, morally. Unlike many who responded to the report, in praise or in blame, I gave this immensely long document a careful reading.

Almost three decades ago, a group of radical Islamist students, dressed in army fatigues or covered in scarves and black chadors, forced their way into the American embassy in Tehran. According to some accounts, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then a student at a second-tier technical college in Tehran, was invited to join the hostage takers. He declined, saying he would join only if they would also occupy the Soviet embassy in Tehran. “No to the West, No to the East” was in those days the much-touted slogan of the regime.

Yitzchak Newman is in the market for his first house. For now, the young IT project manager lives with his wife and toddler in a rented basement apartment. Space is limited and the family yearns to attain the middle class ideal of owning their own home.

But unlike most aspiring home-owners, the Newmans are determined to enter the real estate market in what may be the world’s most politically sensitive strip of land. Whether to fulfill a religious prophecy or to live in blissful suburbia, the Newmans and thousands like them are eager to live in one of the dozens of Jewish enclaves in the West Bank. While the Israeli government has long offered subsidies to woo families to the contentious neighborhoods, demand has skyrocketed over the past few months. And realtors may have Barack Obama to thank for the recent boom.