Tom Barrack and the Misreading of Peace: How Wise for America to Task a Self-Hating Arab as an Envoy Among Arabs
On September 22, 2025, in an interview with Hadley Gamble for The National, Tom Barrack declared that “peace is an illusion” in the Middle East and suggested that real peace has never existed and probably never will. He went further: peace, he said, has always been about submission — one side imposing its will, the other accepting defeat. And, he added, “Arabs don’t understand this.”
It was an astonishing display of arrogance, bigotry, and ignorance. Another amazing interview, and another reminder of the old adage: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. In Barrack’s case, the advice should be simpler: stop speaking. Every time he opens his mouth on the Middle East, he deepens his own irrelevance and reveals the intellectual poverty of a man who mistakes a career in real estate for a license to lecture civilizations about history. While he likes to repeat that he “thinks outside the box,” he may be confusing cycles of history with building a hotel in Fresno, California. It is far too early — and far beyond his depth — for amateurs like him to issue verdicts of historical magnitude.
This is not the first time Barrack has insulted his own. On August 26, 2025, during a press appearance at Baabda Palace in Beirut following his meeting with President Joseph Aoun, he told Lebanese journalists to “act civilised” and described their behavior as “animalistic.” The reaction was immediate. Lebanon’s media unions, journalists, and civil society condemned his words as racist and humiliating. Barrack was forced to apologize, admitting that “animalistic” was inappropriate. But the mask had slipped. When pressed, his instinct was not diplomacy but contempt, the reflex of a colonial landlord scolding natives who dared to shout questions.
Now, with his latest interview, Barrack has confirmed the pattern. He poses as a realist, but he is an amateur in both history and statecraft. He speaks as though Arabs have somehow “lost” history and must accept permanent defeat, as if centuries of resilience, rebellion, and survival count for nothing. By what measure has he decided that Arabs have lost? And by what measure does he claim the United States has won? Did America win in Afghanistan, after twenty years of occupation ending in chaotic retreat? Did it win in Iraq, where trillions were wasted and Iran now dominates the political scene? The record speaks for itself: trillions spent, countless lives shattered, alliances frayed — and no victory in sight. Yet Barrack presumes to lecture Arabs about loss.
The irony is glaring. Islam itself means submission — not to another state’s diktat or a foreign empire’s bayonet, but to God. For Muslims, submission is not humiliation but dignity, a spiritual alignment that frees believers from worldly subjugation. Barrack, blinded by dealmaker’s arrogance, confuses spiritual submission with political surrender. He mistakes dignity for defiance, resistance for ignorance. A man of Arab descent should know better. Instead, he repeats the clichés of colonial administrators in Cairo and Algiers: Arabs, he says, do not understand peace; they only understand force.
There is a word for this posture: self-hatred. Barrack performs the role of the assimilated colonial subject who rises in foreign circles by sneering at his own people. History is full of such figures — the compradors of the British Raj, the évolués of the French empire, the “model minorities” in American discourse — men who are praised in the metropole for their supposed pragmatism but who serve as mouthpieces for imperial arrogance. Barrack fits the pattern exactly. He is a Lebanese-American whose grandparents came from Zahle, yet he disowns that heritage by parroting the prejudices of those who once humiliated it.
And his record in diplomacy proves the emptiness of his arrogance. His efforts to mediate between Lebanon and Israel have produced nothing but headlines. No progress, no breakthrough, not even the outline of a serious proposal. His failure is the best proof of his amateurism. For all his talk of history and peace, he has achieved none of it. This latest interview reads less like wisdom than frustration: frustration at his irrelevance, at his inability to translate real estate tricks into statecraft, at his growing exposure as a man in over his head.
Donald Trump, who prides himself on loyalty and deal-making, should be asking whether Barrack is an asset or a liability. The answer is obvious. A man who insults Arab journalists as “animalistic,” who declares that Arabs do not understand peace, who mistakes humiliation for strategy — such a man cannot serve as a credible envoy. If anything, Trump should tell him to stay in his lane. And that lane is not diplomacy.
The cycles of history are clear: peoples humiliated eventually rise. Dignity denied becomes dignity demanded. Every time submission is imposed, resistance returns. Barrack’s lecture about submission is not a roadmap to peace but a confession of his own intellectual defeat. He cannot imagine a politics of coexistence, so he falls back on the stale colonial fantasy of pacification.
The tragedy is that he does this while carrying a heritage that should have taught him otherwise. To be of Zahle, to come from a people who have survived against odds, and to turn that heritage into a sneer about Arabs not understanding peace — His contempt against his own is overwhelming. It is betrayal.
Peace is not submission. It is balance, recognition, and dignity. Tom Barrack refuses to understand any of this. And in that refusal, he exposes himself not as a realist, but as a relic — a self-hating Arab echoing the prejudices of the very empires that once humiliated his ancestors.
I'm not sure who's the writer of these words, nor its original publication, they were forwarded from a friend. This type of talk has been going on for a while, where the situation in Lebanon and its immediate neighbors including of course Israel are not improving or reaching some acceptable truce leading to some permanent peace and an end to the Israeli occupation and bombardment of Lebanon. Tom Barrack who originally gave everyone a very positive impression, is stalling big time, with him goes the US mediation, while he's coming up with different statements leading to a general stagnation and disappointment.
I'm trying to be neutral as to the statements produced by the article, but find it constructive and helpful in the shadow of what's happening on the ground. As always, my many thanks to all.
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