It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.

The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.

There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.

The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do. 

No, not Dwight Eisenhower (and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles), who thought of his Arabs as the Egyptians. Frankly, in 1956, nobody thought of Palestinians, including especially the Palestinians.

And, no, not even Jimmy Carter, who, while now especially entranced with the Palestinians, including Hamas, was beginning his macabre infatuation with Hafez Assad.

Then there was George Herbert Walker Bush and his sidekick James Baker, who didn't much like the Jews but wanted especially to please the Saudis. The U.S. provided arms to Saddam Hussein, who made the mistake of using them against Kuwait, which, of course, frightened "the kingdom." Hence the first Gulf war. A little simplified? Not much. Oh, yes, Baker gave Tom Friedman the White House telephone number and told him to give it to Yitzhak Shamir, who spoke only to himself. He's still alive and still mute. He once wagged his stubby little finger at me in Blair House.

That's more or less the presidential narrative except for Bill Clinton, who loved the Israelis so much that they loved him back and gave him what he wanted, even color-coding the Old City between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat told him and them to go shove it. Apparently, Bill still loves Israel. (Apparently, he still speaks for the Jews as long as the price is right.) But it's hard to imagine that Hillary loves anyone. Anyway, she's been busy in Ireland (where "the troubles" are beginning again) and in Africa (where the troubles never end) and in China (to whose leaders she said nothing about human rights) and in Russia, where she had a low-level host and visited a low-level state in the Federation and unveiled a statue to Walt Whitman but didn't know he was gay and got into trouble with gay activists who were being beaten up by the present-day version of the Cheka.

And so, back to President Obama, who's been reciting the Palestinian narrative so much that he's got it memorized by heart. Which gives rise to the suspicion that it really comes from his heart. This is difficult for me since I gave a lot of energy (and the maximum amount of money allowed) to his campaign.