This underground entrepot is now another front in the multifaceted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  After years of virtual – and sometimes actual — civil war, the Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have gotten more serious about reconciling and forming a united front, ostensibly to better achieve Palestinian national goals, more immediately to stem growing popular discontent at the abject failure of either party to do so. Yet the unity talks have also exposed a division between Hamas’ external leadership, represented by Khaled Meshaal, and the Gaza-based leadership, represented by current Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.  When Meshal and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah announced the outlines of a deal (one that would make Abbas both president and prime minister of a unity government) in Qatar  earlier this month, the Hamas leadership in Gaza strongly criticized it, saying they hadn’t been sufficiently consulted.

While tensions between the various factions within Hamas have long been rumored, until now the organization has been fairly good at managing such tensions in private. What explains the Gaza wing’s decision to so publicly disagree with its external leadership? The Rafah tunnel trade — and the considerable amount of revenue (estimates range as high as $20 million per month) that the Gaza Hamas wing derives from it — offers a clue as to why.

How the tunnels grew

The Rafah tunnels have an ancient heritage.  Mentioned in official documents as far back as 1303 BC, Rafah was an important trading center for centuries, serving as an entryway between North Africa and the Levant. After falling into decline in the Ottoman era, the town swelled in size with the influx of refugees fleeing from the war between Israel and the Arab states in 1948, after which Gaza was occupied by Egypt. After the 1967 war, the Gaza Strip came under Israeli control. The town was divided between Egypt and Israel in the Camp David Accord, which created a buffer zone between Egypt and Israeli-controlled Gaza known as the “Philadelphi corridor,” and the tunnels soon began to spring up, primarily for the transfer of drugs and other contraband, but also for other goods not easily available under Israeli occupation.

With the coming of the Second Intifada in 2000, the tunnels increasingly began to be used by violent factions like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to smuggle weapons and explosives for attacks on Israeli civilians, a problem Israel attempted to deal with by destroying homes and buildings suspected of covering tunnels. In 2003, American activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to prevent it from demolishing a Palestinian house in Rafah.

Following Israel’s 2005 withdrawal of its settlements from Gaza, which is home to 1.7 million Palestinians, the Rafah crossing came under the control of the Palestinian Authority, though according to both the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Israel retains responsibilities as an occupying power. In response to Hamas’ 2006 capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Israel enacted a strict closure on Gaza.

In 2007, Hamas took over Gaza in a short but extremely violent war with its rival, the secular nationalist Fatah, which continues to rule in the West Bank. Israel tightened its closure even more, allowing the entry only of goods “vital for the survival of the civilian population,” banning exports, and prohibiting Palestinians themselves from leaving the Gaza Strip in all but the most exceptional cases. In response, the tunnel business took off.

Under Hosni Mubarak, Egypt helped enforce the official blockade on Gaza, periodically cracking down on the tunnels, which invariably sprang back up. In May 2011, after the fall of Mubarak, in an effort to placate popular opinion, the Egypt’s transitional military government opened the Rafah crossing to Palestinians. It remains closed to materials. “Egypt is OK with it,” said Taghreed El-Khodary, a Gaza-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent. “They can’t push too hard, even during Mubarak’s time they couldn’t push too hard during the siege, and they are making money from it.”

“Prior to 2007, the tunnels functioned to smuggle contraband into Gaza, cash, weapons, and drugs,” said Sari Bashi, the executive director for Gisha, an Israeli human rights group that advocates for the freedom of movement of Gaza’s residents. “The tunnels were defined as a security issue, and Israel cracked down with little success. Beginning in 2007, Israel began restricting civilian goods, and the response was flourishing of the tunnels, on which civilians in Gaza now depend.” (In a recent report, “Scale of Control,” Gisha argued in favor of Israel’s continuing responsibility for Gaza, based on the considerable extent of Israel’s continued control of the lives of its residents.)

Based on what I’d seen reported on the tunnels before, I was expecting to see camouflaged holes in the ground guarded by guys with guns. While those smaller ones continue to exist (“There are tunnels even Hamas doesn’t know about,” one observer told me), the ones I saw were housed under tents and garages, out in the open, with trucks backing right up to them to load. The tunnels varied in size. One was a tight space reminiscent of “The Great Escape,” reinforced with scrounged plywood and not big enough to stand up in, while another had walls and ceiling reinforced with steel beams and concrete, thoughtfully decorated here and there with artificial leaves. Both used truck engine-powered pulley systems to draw sleds-full of materials the few kilometers from Egypt. Rumor has it that some tunnels are even big enough to bring cars through, and have done so.

For something that is thoroughly illegal, I was surprised at the openness of the activity. A proud worker even invited me to snap a photo of the tunnel he was currently digging. One doesn’t commit this much time, energy and resources to such an enterprise if one isn’t reasonably sure about the safety of such investment. The tunnels now represent the cutting edge of entrepreneurship in Gaza. There are estimated to be over 1,000 of them operating now in Rafah.

“The policy of civilian restrictions is what has made the tunnels basically impossible to close,” said Bashi. The tunnels also provided a source of tax revenue for the Hamas government. “Israel banned construction materials, so the Hamas government has been bringing them in through tunnels and levying taxes and operating fees. Prior to the ban the [Ramallah-based] Palestinian Authority was benefiting from the taxes, and the providers were Israeli and Palestinian business people.” Now, she said, that money goes to Hamas. “Israel, through its restrictions, has created a flourishing black market economy, and a new class of entrepreneurs, at the expense of the Gaza’s traditional business community.”

A couple of Gaza businessmen with whom I spoke confirmed this.

“I want to do business with my friend at General Electric in Tel Aviv,” not with the “gangsters” who run the tunnels, said one. Another, an Internet technology entrepreneur, noted that a Dell laptop computer was far cheaper from the tunnels than bought legally through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing, which put him in a tough spot as someone trying to run a business both legally and profitably.

“Once you have a tunnel you have to pay fees, and that goes to the municipality, which provides you electricity” for the tunnel, said El-Khodary. “Then you pay taxes on the goods you bring out. Whether it’s oranges or cement, Hamas gets its tax.” The continuing closure combined with the tunnel economy puts Hamas in a comfortable spot: They can blame the continuing Israeli blockade for their own failures of governance, while using the tunnel revenue to distribute patronage and maintain favor with key constituencies in the Gaza Strip.

 Egypt looks the other way

On the Egyptian side of the border, there’s no apparent enthusiasm for cracking down on the tunnels trade.

“There’s little Army presence, much of this area is Bedouin controlled, and it’s pretty much isolated from the central government in Cairo,” said El-Khodary. “Many Egyptians in Rafah will talk about how isolated they are, but if you go to El Arish,” a coastal city about 50 kilometers west of Rafah, “you see people making a hell of a lot of money out of the tunnels. There’s no way they’re going to let them go.”

Israel’s security concerns over threats emanating from Gaza are quite legitimate. Materials smuggled through the tunnels have been used to manufacture rockets and mortars launched against towns in Israel like nearby Sderot, and there are fears that the range of these weapons is increasing.

The result of the  policy of closure, however, has been the development of a sizable black market economy based upon illegal tunnel trade. This has been accompanied by the growth of influential constituencies in both Egypt and Gaza that oppose any effort to shut down the tunnels, and will lobby hard against  the creation of a more open, regulated border. By empowering a large new merchant class that profits from the tunnels, the closure policy has effectively created another stumbling block to normalization of relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

To repeat, the tunnels have also created a welcome source of tax revenue for the Hamas-controlled Gaza government that has both helped them to resist the impact of the closure and empowered them to challenge their external leadership when it commits to things they don’t agree with.

Hamas’ external leadership is in a more accommodating mood. In reaction to Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown, they have left Damascus, and are looking for a new home and new patrons. The Gaza leadership, on the other hand, feels more secure.  Having borne the brunt of the Israel’s operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, and feeling the wind of the Arab awakening at their back, they also seem to feel far more justified in asserting themselves against such accommodation. And skimming the cream off the tunnel trade gives them a source of revenue that makes governing easier.

In short, a policy whose ostensible goal was to weaken Hamas’ hold on Gaza has apparently strengthened it.

The closure policy has hollowed out the sectors of Gaza society with ties to Israel and the West Bank, and thus isolated those with a greater interest in a two-state solution. The policy has also empowered those with ties to Hamas and to organized crime. “If I were to write a strategic plan on how to strengthen the Hamas government,” Bashi said, “I would suggest everything Israel has done over the last four years.

Israeli, Palestinian and international rights groups have long said that Israel’s administrative detention practices are unlawful, but Adnan – whose hunger strike was the longest of any Palestinian prisoner –gained particular attention. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and members of Palestinian political factions had gone on solidarity hunger strikes, and demonstrators in the West Bank, Gaza and in Tel Aviv called for Israel to end arbitrary administrative detentions. Security forces dispersed protests outside the Ofer military jail in the West Bank with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Minutes before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear Adnan’s emergency appeal, according to a statement by his lawyer, Israel agreed to release him on April 17 unless it found new evidence of wrongdoing. Israeli authorities should immediately respect the fundamental due process rights of all administrative detainees, not just Adnan.

Today, more than 300 Palestinians are in administrative detention, some for four years or more, none of them charged with any crime. Israel says the Geneva Conventions allow it to detain Palestinians without charge for “imperative reasons of security,” but the convention’s official commentary states that “such measures can only be ordered for real and imperative reasons of security; their exceptional character must be preserved.”  In Israel’s case, the exception has become the rule.

Israel said that Adnan, for instance, is a member of Islamic Jihad, a banned Palestinian group whose armed wing has conducted deadly, illegal attacks against Israeli civilians, but no one told him or his family why armed soldiers arrested him at his home at 3:30 a.m. on December 17. “We have no idea why it happened,” his wife said.  Israel had arrested Adnan eight times over the years, but the only known “evidence” against him this time, his lawyer said, was that an interrogator accused him of participating in a graduation ceremony at a kindergarten supported by the banned group.

As of last week, Adnan’s wife estimated that he had lost a third of his body weight, and doctors said that even if he ended his hunger strike, his life could still be in doubt. The Israel Prisons Service transferred Adnan to a series of hospitals, but refused to allow him to meet in private with his doctor, lawyer or his family. His sister said that prison guards were stationed in Adnan’s hospital room and had been drinking juice and snacking in front of him, and had shackled him to his hospital bed.

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the military may not use administrative detention as punishment but only as a preventive measure against suspected security threats. Yet in practice it is impossible to determine whether that rule is followed.  Because the military does not indict them for any particular offense, detainees are unable to defend themselves against specific charges. The standard of evidence is also lower than in a criminal proceeding – not proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but merely “reasonable grounds to assume” that the detainee might pose a security risk.  That malleable standard allows the military to detain Palestinians for indefinitely-renewable periods of up to six months, without any meaningful way to know whether genuine security threats are involved.

Further, Israeli military laws allow military judges to consider evidence against the detainee without allowing him or his attorney to see it, or even disclosing to them that it exists. Military prosecutors often justify the use of secret evidence on the basis that it comes from Palestinian collaborators whose lives could be endangered if the evidence were disclosed. Yet in practice, military courts do not even entertain alternatives that would give the semblance of balancing such concerns against due process rights, such as by redaction or partial disclosure of the confidential evidence.

According to the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, which has monitored hundreds of military court trials, “In practice, in most hearings on administrative detention the detainee is not aware of the content of the evidence against him, if any, and cannot defend himself.”

Administrative detention violates Israel’s human rights obligations to inform detainees promptly of the reasons for their arrest and of any charges against them. Israel, which seems to have partly recognized its due process obligations in Adnan’s case, should end the procedure immediately.

Lana, my wife, is from Jenin in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  She has a diploma in economics from Al-Najah University in Nablus. We met and fell in love in Jenin in late 2002 after Israel’s destruction of the Jenin refugee camp during the second intifada. She moved to Israel in 2005 to live with me. We now have two children, Adnan, who is 4 and a half years old and Yosra, who is 3 and a half years old.  My family means the world to me and yet our standing in Israel is extremely tenuous because of my ongoing failed effort to secure citizenship for my wife.

Despite the might of the Israeli government arrayed against us, Lana and I persevere because love is a force far more powerful than the state.  No matter the government responsible for repression, whether in apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow South, or elsewhere, love has always been more powerful.  We knew the risks when we married after the law passed in 2003. But we were determined not to allow an apartheid state that discriminates against Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line to disrupt our love.

Lana’s residency has so far been possible only through yearly extensions of her permission to stay in Israel. Yet these have been entirely subject to the arbitrary discretion of Israel’s Interior Ministry and its security services. She has no legal or social rights, nor the possibility of obtaining health insurance or social security. She is not allowed to hold a job or drive a car. She is, by any fair reckoning, a third-class resident of Israel.

Lana used to be an independent woman – having worked for four years in the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Jenin – but today, in “modern” Israel, she is now totally dependent on me. Our home, rather than a haven, has become her prison.  She is stuck and there is no immediate prospect of release. This situation causes her and us permanent frustration. “I feel my freedom was stolen from me by this racist law,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where you live, you are always controlled and denied rights by the state of Israel, [merely] because I am Palestinian.”

We are not alone. There are tens of thousands of other Palestinian families targeted by the so-called Citizenship Law.  Originally promulgated in 2003, it prohibits Palestinians without Israeli citizenship from joining their spouses in Israel or seeking eventual rights of residence. There is no comparable prohibition against family unification for non-Palestinian citizens of Israel, i.e., the country’s present-day Jewish majority.

The law explicitly discriminates on the basis of race.  Notwithstanding this fact, the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice earlier this year rejected a final appeal against the law. As a result, my wife could well be denied the right to live with me, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, and our two children in my hometown of Akka.

As many as 30,000 Palestinian-Israeli families (approximately 130,000 individuals) are under a similar threat of separation. On either side of Israel’s unilateral line of separation, many are already living apart from their spouses and children. They have no voice in Israel and face a Supreme Court that seems to think allowing them into Israel, and upholding human rights, is akin to “national suicide.” Israel’s nonstop security emphasis has turned all members of its Palestinian minority – and their spouses – into would-be security threats.  Of course, settlers who have repeatedly employed violence from Gaza (prior to September 2005) to the West Bank to Israel face no similar restrictions on their married lives. Violence against Palestinians counts very differently in Israel.

The recent Israeli Supreme Court decision means that Lana can no longer hope, however tenuously, to acquire citizenship, or even permanent residency.  In the best case, she might obtain further extensions of her present status. Meanwhile, the threat of those extensions being suspended will hang all the more ominously over us. Each time we go to the Interior Ministry to renew her permission, and each time Lana goes to renew her permission from the Israeli military administration near Jenin, we face the possibility of being told the permit will not be renewed due to security reasons or some other excuse. It is a dreadful climate in which to raise a family. There is no certainty and stress pervades our lives.

The would-be harmony of family life is further disrupted by the fact that we cannot choose to live in Jenin. According to laws introduced after the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israeli citizens are not allowed to live in or even visit Palestinian cities in Palestinian Authority-administered areas of the Occupied Territories. We, and tens of thousands of our compatriots, are caught in a truly Kafkaesque dilemma. The fear of being torn apart as a family has become a daily part of our lives.

While many of us have since childhood suffered discrimination, dispossession and violence at the hands of the Israeli state, and have watched with dismay as the international community fails to hear and address the difficulties of Israel’s non-Jewish minority, we see the new “Citizenship Law” as marking a particularly ominous regression for Israeli society. It is clear, and explicitly acknowledged in the Israeli public arena, that the purpose of this law is to further compound the difficulties confronting the country’s Palestinian minority, to make that community ever less viable, and ultimately to secure an Israel empty of Palestinians. In recent years, and especially in this current Knesset, more that 25 laws and law proposals were passed or advanced that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel.  Many Palestinians affected are convinced that the law aims to make life so unbearable for families that they will permanently leave Israel.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who met last week with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a proponent of the legislation.  So far as I know, Secretary Clinton said not one word to him on behalf of the Palestinian families negatively affected by the “Citizenship Law” Lieberman touts. Thanks to the American silence, the United States abdicates its position as self-described “leader of the free world.”

Lieberman, who is a staunch advocate for the ethnic transfer of Palestinians out of Israel, regularly employs language that reminds Israel’s Palestinian population of the climate of violence in which our parents and grandparents were evicted from their homes in 1948, while those who remained were reduced to clear minority status.  In fact, the “Citizenship Law” has been forced upon us by a Supreme Court put in place by an Israeli democracy that holds hegemony only because over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled and never allowed to return at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948.  Such is the reality of the Middle East’s self-proclaimed “only democracy.”  It is a democracy built on ethnic cleansing that to this day is pulling apart Palestinian families from either side of the Green Line.  Meanwhile, Jewish couples from inside Israel and the illegal settlements of the West Bank face no such fears.

This Valentine’s Day I hold little hope for a steady and certain future with my wife and children.  Even venturing to share our situation – and that of thousands of other couples – endangers my family by exposing us to the whim of that faceless bureaucrat who may consequently be leaned on by an elected official unhappy that Israel is being exposed for its discriminatory laws.

This is a far cry from the Israel that Prime Minister Netanyahu described last year to Congress.  In his make-believe Israel, the one delightedly indulged by an out-of-touch Congress, Palestinians enjoy full rights equal to those of Jewish Israelis.  This is a lie as the state’s discrimination against me and my family attests.

The United States has some experience with such laws through its own miscegenation laws of previous decades.  That American racism was best addressed by the civil rights movement and its success in guaranteeing equality for all citizens without regard to their race, religion or ethnicity.  On Valentine’s Day it is long past time for Israel to address its own racism by promulgating similar laws that will promote the legal equality of Palestinians and Jews alike.

Here’s the video, via Mondoweiss:

Koppel: But there has to be a so-what at the end of it. So if you win, what does Adelson get out of it?

Gingrich. Well, he knows I’m very pro-Israel. And that’s the central value of his life. I mean, he’s very worried that Israel is going to not survive.

That’s in line with what we know about the Adelsons, who have supported Israeli settlements in the West Bank and once pulled their money out of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because of that group’s putative softness on the concept of a peace deal with Palestinians.

ABC, meanwhile, reports that “a source close to” Adelson says he wants “nothing” in exchange for his contributions. That claim doesn’t amount to much, especially coming from an anonymous source.

The latest $5 million to the pro-Newt super PAC was donated by Miriam Adelson, who is reportedly a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. And here, as reported in the New Yorker, is a small but telling example of how Miriam previously interacted with the recipients of the Adelsons’ largesse:

The Adelsons seem not to take their power for granted. Recently, Miriam told an associate, “I had a CD on Islamic jihad. I brought it to the [Bush] White House and told the chief of staff, ‘I would like the President to see this.’ It really is amazing that we have this influence.”

And here is another episode from that New Yorker article in which Sheldon personally leaned on the president:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. … A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.”

So the idea that the Adelsons expect “nothing” from the recipients of their millions is belied by their previous behavior.

Gingirch himself seems to have gone through a transformation on the Israel-Palestine question. As Wayne Barrett recently documented, Gingrich was as recently as 2005 praising the Palestinians, referring to “their ancestral lands” in historic Palestine, and, amazingly, inveighing against “the desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land.”

That’s the type of language – Gingrich even used the phrase Israeli “land grab” in that 2005 essay – one wouldn’t hear even from alleged anti-Israel radical Barack Obama.

Fast forward to the current election cycle, of course, and Gingrich has veered way to the right, famously questioning the very peoplehood of the Palestinians and blasting calls to end Jewish settlements as a “suicidal step” for Israel. (Adelson, by the way, personally praised Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”)

It’s very difficult to determine whether the Adelsons’ money prompted the shift or has simply reinforced it. In any case, you can be sure Gingrich won’t be talking about the Palestinians’ “ancestral lands” any time soon.

Such unorthodox thinking has made the Polish-born Brzezinski arguably the greatest living scholar-practitioner  in Democratic Party ranks. As a scholar, he was erratic but he also foresaw the Soviet Union’s crack-up long before it occurred. As Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, he was controversial and even reckless, but he imbued the president with strong doses of reality concerning the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Since the end of the Cold War, he stayed relevant presciently opposing the Iraq War and supporting presidential candidate Barack Obama at a crucial, early date.

In a telephone interview from his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Brzezinski has both praise and criticism for the president: “He was an improvement by a very large score over his predecessor, but he could have been better.” He thinks the Obama administration “should have stuck to its guns in promoting a fair settlement” in the Middle East. A longtime foe of Israel’s partisans in the United States, he says the Obama team “fumbled by getting outmaneuvered by the Israelis.” Then he gets blunter: “Domestic politics interceded: The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence.”

Brzezinski is still a believer in the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and is hopeful that Obama will again take up the cause if he gets a second term. “He would have time and the historical immunity to do so, because he wouldn’t be facing an election.” He also thinks space has opened up in the United States to be more critical of Israel. “The American public is becoming more discriminating, and the Jewish public in America is becoming more discriminating,” he says. “They realize that extremist sloganeering and warmongering are not the most helpful approaches.” Brzezinski is careful to note that he was never an official advisor to either candidate or President Obama but lets it be known they are still in touch: “I have a relationship where from time to time I am able to share my views with him,” he says.

The focus of “Strategic Vision” is not on the Middle East, but further to the east. Unlike other adherents to the foreign-policy school known as realism, Brzezinski does not see war between China and the United States as inevitable. Conflict, yes, but war, no. “You can have conflicts but avoid a real collision,” he says, arguing there is only a “remote possibility” of war between China and the U.S. over the next 10 to 15 years.

What makes Brzezinski relatively optimistic for the chances of Sino-American cooperation are his views on history. Many times when great powers have shifted positions in the international hierarchy, they have gone to war. Those predicting China and the United States will inevitably come to blows are relying on history and international relations theory, Brzezinski says. “That’s fine as long as there is historical continuity,” he says, but he thinks the world has changed. “I think major wars have become too prohibitively costly for both sides” for states to want to engage in them, he says.

Two things could potentially ruin the chances for good relations between China and the United States, he suggests: a technological-military revolution, and ineffective leadership. “If there are fantastic breakthroughs in military capabilities that allow one side to neutralize each other’s,” Brzezinski says, the delicate balance necessary to maintain stability would be thrown off. Fortunately, there isn’t much chance of such a technology developing in the foreseeable future, he believes.

The quality of leadership is Brzezinski’s real wild card. Prudent leaders from both countries that prepare their respective publics for the compromises that will inevitably have to be made are badly needed. But the “mindless hypocrisy” of the Republican presidential candidates gives little ground for hope. He won’t single out any of them, finding all of them deeply flawed and uninspiring. Noting the Republican names attached to the blurbs for  ”Strategic Vision” — among them former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft — Brzezinski believes there still is the “possibility for consensus.” But men like Scowcroft and Gates, who come from the center-right of the political spectrum, are no longer much welcomed in today’s Republican Party. “That is part of the problem,” he laughed, not sounding entirely amused.