Late Dialogues Episode 2
Two former generals and statesmen, a poet, an American, an Israeli, a Lebanese-American, they bring perspective to some of the pressing issues of the day: Israel, Iran, Gaza and America...
In the new installment of the Late Dialogues, later characters who have known the moral weight of war, who have borne responsibility for it, who have built poetic bridges between the Levant and the New World, help us make sense of ever expanding conflicts, never ending suffering, and mounting distrust across Gaza, Israel, Iran and America.
A general. A statesman. A poet. Three voices return — not as they once were, but as they might be now — to grapple with the fires of our present.
As missiles fall between Iran and Israel, as Gaza bleeds, as borders harden and democracies fray, The Late Dialogues convenes Later Dwight D. Eisenhower, Later Yitzhak Rabin, and Later Khalil Gibran for a roundtable conversation on war, restraint, exile, and the moral cost of forgetting.
Together, they confront the collapse of deterrence, the ghosts of Gaza, the authoritarian drift inside the United States, and the trembling future of the nuclear order. And just as a ceasefire flickers into being, they ask: what future can still be made — and what imagination might save us?
This is not an interview. It is a reckoning.
In generating this new episode, I decided to clone the voices of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Yitzhak Rabin not to deceive, but to respect the tone, texture and solemnity of their singular voices. As always, I welcome comments and objections.
I hope you’ll learn as much as I did from these somber, yet hopeful contemporary echoes from the past.
Episode Script Below
LATER DAVID:
Welcome to The Late Dialogues — an exercise in generative fiction, a space where voices from the past return to reflect on the urgencies of the present. Through the ether of thought, and with respectful assistance from AI, we’ve rekindled the spirits of three historical minds. Not as they once were, but as they might now be — shaped by all that has unfolded since their time on Earth. These are not the original speakers. They are Later Characters — speculative continuations of thinkers who left behind questions still unresolved. They have read what came after. They have changed. They carry new ideas, new wounds, new doubts. They are not the persons they once were or the towering intellectual figures they have become, they are less and more than that, but tonight, they speak. Two former generals and statesmen, a poet, an American, an Israeli, a Lebanese-American, they bring perspective to some of the pressing issues of the day: Israel, Iran, Gaza and America, the contagion of war abroad, and at home.
We begin with the strategist who warned us once of the military-industrial complex, and now warns us again—of its algorithmic heir. Later Eisenhower is no longer just the Supreme Commander of a war fought with tanks and telegrams; he has become a statesman for a world fractured by data, distrust, and disengagement. His voice has grown sterner, his center still holds—but barely. Through decades of upheaval, he has emerged as a calm general of democratic durability. Tonight, he joins us with a plea for integrity, alliances, and the steady hand of civic responsibility.
Next, a voice resurrected from the middle of history’s unresolved conflict: Later Rabin, the general who dared to shake a foe’s hand, now returns carrying both the cost of peace deferred and the dignity of risk undertaken. He has watched new wars unfold where old hopes once bloomed. Yet he remains a soldier of peace, one who still believes that security must be just, and that moral restraint is not weakness but strategy. He enters this roundtable with clear eyes, steady sorrow, and the courage to speak what must be spoken—even if it hurts.
Finally, a poet of exile and ecstasy, reborn not as prophet but as companion. Later Gibran is no longer a solitary mystic — he arrives as a witness to fragmentation and a weaver of unseen kinships. His pen now mourns with Gaza, sings with the wind in Lebanon, and blesses even the broken circuitry of machines. He does not come with policy, but with presence. He listens for the silence between Rabin’s realism and Eisenhower’s warnings — and answers with a breath, a parable, a prayer. “Beauty,” he once wrote, “is the wound we keep tending.” Tonight, he tends it here, among us.
THEME 1: Escalating Wars with No End Goal
LATER DAVID:
The sky, once a canvas for gods and kites, now delivers fire. In recent days, missiles have crossed borders faster than questions. Between Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Washington — the air is no longer empty. I ask you now: is deterrence still possible in a world where escalation arrives before understanding?
LATER EISENHOWER:
Only if we redefine deterrence not as a threat, but as a discipline. In my time, deterrence lived in the silence between launches. Today, it drowns in noise. We rattle sabers and algorithms simultaneously. But the test of restraint isn't in what you can destroy. It's in what you choose not to. The measure of power is not its scale, but its self-restraint. Every tool of war we possess is also a mirror: it shows us who we believe ourselves to be. Now, we face a paradox. We are told these strikes are precise, intelligence-driven, "surgical". But precision in delivery does not mean precision in consequence. When an airstrike demolishes a prison wall in Tehran or a research facility in Isfahan, do we know how far the shockwave travels—not just in kilometers, but in generations? Do we know which trust is broken, which child radicalized, which moderate silenced? The battlefield has no boundaries anymore. It now includes the mind, the screen, the vote.
LATER RABIN:
When we bombed Beirut in 1982, I knew the edge of necessity. I also knew the taste of regret. We were told we had no choice. Perhaps that was true. But the truth is not a shield against the soul’s slow erosion. What is happening now — targeted prisons, nuclear sites struck at midnight — may feel surgical. But strategy isn't surgery. It bleeds memory. It stains diplomacy. The question is not whether we can win these exchanges. It is whether, by winning, we make peace impossible. And here lies the deeper danger. We used to say, "We will defend ourselves by any means necessary." But "any means" can become a blank check drawn against our future. When we strike with superiority but without humility, we inherit not victory, but resentment. Every building we flatten today becomes a monument to tomorrow's fury. And yet, I understand the fear. I have ordered strikes. I have buried soldiers. I know what it means to act under pressure. But I also know that true courage lies not in domination, but in discernment.
LATER GIBRAN:
When birds leave a burning sky, they do not ask who lit the fire. They simply vanish. The heavens above us are not ours to command. We borrowed them to dream. Now we cloud them with death. If deterrence is to mean anything, it must begin not in weapon, but in wonder. Not in silence of fear, but the silence of awe. We speak often of precision. But precision is not mercy. Mercy is what happens when a hand, though capable, does not strike. What happens when a nation powerful enough to destroy instead decides to listen? I wonder what would occur if each general, each pilot, each president, were asked to paint the sky before they pierced it. Would they choose the same coordinates?
LATER EISENHOWER:
And yet, deterrence without backbone is surrender. We must not forget that tyrannies thrive in vacuums. But I no longer believe in domination from the air. Air campaigns invite illusion: that force without footprint is moral. It is not. Moral force walks on the ground, sees the faces, counts the cost. There is something I fear even more than war: the normalization of remote war. The ease of it. The abstraction. When presidents conduct war by joystick, and citizens support it by meme, we lose the gravity of violence. And with it, the accountability. If we are to strike, let it be as the last answer, not the first reflex.
LATER RABIN:
Every drone strike today births a story tomorrow. Some of those stories wear suicide belts. Others wear suits in The Hague. What we do now is watched not only by our enemies, but by our grandchildren. And we are teaching them, by example, what power looks like when it has forgotten to imagine peace. You see, I once believed that military strength and moral clarity could coexist. I still believe this. But moral clarity is not a slogan. It is a practice. A discipline. And it begins not in weapons development but in restraint.
LATER DAVID:
Then speak to them now. Speak to the grandchildren. Not in briefings or broadcasts, but as if they were beside us. What would you say?
LATER RABIN:
I would say: do not trust those who tell you war is precise. Trust only those who tell you peace is messy. And that the mess is worth enduring.
LATER EISENHOWER:
I would say: every time you strike, ask if you're building something behind the smoke. If not, it is only fire. And fire, though sometimes necessary, consumes without discretion.
LATER GIBRAN:
And I would say: may you one day look up again, and see stars instead of sorrow. Let the sky return to its silence. Let it become, once more, a place for dreams.
LATER DAVID:
Thank you. Let us now descend from the skies to the scorched earth below.
THEME 2: Destroying Decency
LATER DAVID:
From missiles to memory. From targets to ghosts. Gaza calls us. Will we listen?
LATER RABIN:
Gaza. The name alone carries ash. In 1993, we imagined peace as a series of bridges—each built on fragile planks of hope and compromise. I remember visiting checkpoints, listening to intelligence briefings, feeling the heaviness of decision. But even then, Gaza frightened me. Not because of its people, but because of what we allowed it to become: a caged crucible of rage. What I see now—entire neighborhoods razed, children pulled from rubble, a population treated as collateral—this is not strategy. It is a spiritual failure. And worse, it is a strategic delusion. There is no victory in the starvation of civilians. No deterrence in repeated trauma. When we harden our tactics beyond recognition, we forget that war is not only about weapons. It is about the stories left behind. And Gaza’s story, as it stands, will curse our grandchildren more than any battlefield loss.
LATER EISENHOWER:
I share that burden. I spent my life believing in the principles of proportionality and precision. But when proportionality becomes a ratio of corpses, something has gone terribly wrong. What happened to restraint? What happened to the doctrine that warned us not just against our enemies, but against ourselves? The images coming from Gaza — they pierce even a soldier's armor. No amount of justification can erase the sight of a hospital wing bombed or an aid convoy turned to cinder. We used to say: avoid civilian casualties. Now, we calculate them. You cannot build legitimacy on ash. Even when your cause is righteous, your methods must be more righteous still. If Israel is to survive not only physically but morally, it must reclaim the dignity of the line it will not cross.
LATER GIBRAN:
I do not speak in maps or military codes. I speak in names. Names like Amal, who once drew butterflies on a UN school wall. Names like Sami, who asked his mother why the sky was angry. Gaza is not an abstraction. It is the sigh of a grandmother walking barefoot through dust. It is the poem half-written, buried under concrete. And in each child lifted from rubble, a verse is lost. We do not only kill bodies. We silence songs. We erase languages of hope. They say, "Do not politicize grief." But grief is already political. It is shaped by who is allowed to mourn, and who is called a martyr, and who a statistic. If we cannot listen to Gaza's ghosts now, they will return in other forms. Angrier. Louder. More desperate.
LATER RABIN:
And still, we must speak to Israelis, too. I have heard their anguish—their anger after the attacks of 2023, the fear in the south, the hostages. That pain is real. It is not to be dismissed. But pain cannot become policy. Anguish cannot be strategy. If it does, we become the very thing we once warned ourselves against. We lose the capacity to discern justice from vengeance. And when you bomb a city in retaliation, you don’t just destroy buildings—you destroy the argument for your own decency.
LATER EISENHOWER:
It is time we return to the basics of statecraft. Protect your people, yes. But never let that protection erode the soul of your republic. Every strike should be weighed not only by its immediate efficacy but by the story it tells about who we are. When your allies begin to flinch—when your own citizens raise placards in protest—do not dismiss them as naive. Listen. Perhaps they are holding the moral compass that you, in grief and fury, have dropped.
LATER GIBRAN:
I once wrote, "Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and deems the glittering conqueror as savior." But I also say now: do not pity Gaza. Listen to her. Her people are not asking for your sympathy. They are asking to live.
LATER DAVID:
Thank you. The silence you leave us with is not absence, but reckoning. Let us now shift our gaze—not outward, but inward. For even the strongest empires can collapse from within. From Gaza to Washington, the question remains: what becomes of a nation that forgets the moral weight of its own power?
THEME 3: America: A House Divided Cannot Stand
LATER DAVID:
Let us now turn to America. Once imagined as a city on a hill, now walled in its own divisions. I ask you: what happens when a republic begins to dismember itself—not with bombs, but with lies, fear, and institutional decay?
LATER EISENHOWER:
I have watched the country I once led fracture from within. When I left office, I warned of the military-industrial complex. Today, I would add others: the surveillance-industrial complex, the grievance-industrial complex. We are now a nation devouring itself with cynicism. Agencies built to protect are turned into bludgeons of ideology. Intelligence, once a shield against foreign threat, is now distorted into domestic suspicion. What strikes me most is not the fury at the fringes, but the collapse of the center. Moderation has become a slur. Compromise is equated with weakness. And so we drift—not in one direction, but in every direction at once. I never feared disagreement. But I do fear incoherence. And that is where America now stands: not in disagreement, but in dismemberment.
LATER RABIN:
In Israel, we too have flirted with the abyss. When I was assassinated, it was not by a Palestinian militant. It was by a Jew. By one of our own. That is the cruelty of internal rot: it disguises itself as patriotism. I see in America now a similar pattern. A nation no longer fights over policy, but identity. Not over solutions, but over symbols. When leaders boast of dismantling aid programs, when they vilify migrants not as people but as invaders, they are not strengthening the homeland. They are hollowing it. I spent much of my life guarding borders. But the most dangerous border is the one that forms between neighbor and neighbor—where one sees the other not as fellow citizen, but as enemy. America must decide whether it wants to be a fortress, or a home. It cannot be both.
LATER GIBRAN:
I have walked in deserts where no flag flies. I have spoken to men who carry exile in their veins. And yet, I have never seen a people more spiritually displaced than those who build walls around their hearts in their own country. The migrant is not your problem. He is your mirror. He shows you what it means to long, to risk, to begin again. When you jail him, when you erase her story, you are not defending the republic. You are amputating your soul. America, beloved and broken, was once a poem of welcome. Now it speaks in border patrols and bans. But still I believe: the wound is where the light enters. The question is, will you dress the wound with truth, or let it fester with fear?
LATER EISENHOWER:
I long for a Second Eisenhower Republicanism—center-right, reality-based, honorable. What we have now is a cacophony of cruelty dressed as populism. There is no virtue in stoking division. There is no valor in scapegoating. Governance is not theater. And freedom is not license to destroy. What we do to our institutions, we do to ourselves. If we allow truth itself to become partisan, we no longer have a republic. We have a shouting match in the ruins of one.
LATER RABIN:
And if we are to rebuild, let it be from the quiet strength of those who serve without spectacle. The teacher. The social worker. The diplomat who still believes in handshake over headline. These are your true patriots. Not those who threaten to jail their rivals or silence dissent.
LATER GIBRAN:
Let your Constitution be not only a document, but a devotion. Let your freedom be not only defended, but deserved. And remember: when love of country becomes hatred of neighbor, the anthem becomes an elegy.
LATER DAVID:
Thank you. From within the trembling frame of one republic, we turn now to the larger question facing all of us: what happens when the very treaties that kept our world from burning begin to smolder? What happens when the nuclear future becomes the nuclear present?
THEME 4: Forgetting the risk of annihilation
LATER DAVID:
The United States has struck Iranian nuclear sites. Iran speaks now of exiting the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The last restraints are fraying. Gentlemen: how close are we to forgetting what Hiroshima was meant to teach?
LATER EISENHOWER:
We have forgotten already. When I first confronted the nuclear question, I did so with awe and horror. I knew we had built a weapon that could end not only war, but history. For a time, fear served as our governor. It kept ambition in check. But fear fades. Memory fades. What replaces it? Today we speak of low-yield tactical nukes, as though miniaturizing annihilation makes it palatable. We use the language of strategy to mask the reality of madness. And now, to strike nuclear facilities directly — to test the edge of provocation — is to play chess on a minefield. No move can be trusted. Every silence may be a fuse.
LATER RABIN:
The doctrine of deterrence was always a gamble. But it was a gamble premised on rational actors and mutual stakes. What we have now is asymmetry — not only in capability, but in narrative. Iran does not fear the bomb in the same way we once did. Its leadership, insulated from consequence, speaks in terms of martyrdom and retaliation. And yet, we must engage. I do not trust them. But I trust even less the silence between missiles. Diplomacy must outpace destruction, or we will lose both. What we need is a new compact — not just of weapons limitations, but of memory restoration. The next generation does not remember Nagasaki. We must make them feel its shadow.
LATER GIBRAN:
I think of the atom not as a curse, but as a sorrow untransformed. What if we had taken its shuddering birth not as license, but as lament? What if we had encircled that mushroom cloud with candles, not contracts? Nuclear weapons do not merely threaten bodies. They deform imagination. They teach us that safety lies in terror, and that peace depends on balance sheets of apocalypse. This is no covenant. This is despair with a launch code. Let me ask you both: can a weapon that requires forgetting ever safeguard the future?
LATER EISENHOWER:
No. And yet, I believed in deterrence because I believed in discipline. But we have grown less disciplined. The safeguards are now digital, the responses automated. We trust machines to extend the ethical judgment we ourselves no longer agree upon. I once said, “Only Americans can hurt America.” Now I wonder: can humans keep humanity safe when we outsource our fear to software?
LATER RABIN:
And what of the Iranians? They stand now at a precipice. They have been sanctioned, isolated, provoked. But they have also provoked. There is no innocence here, only urgency. We must offer a path that is not capitulation but dignity. Not indulgence, but clarity. The Geneva Conventions must evolve. We must create new norms: against autonomous weapons, against targeted strikes on nuclear research sites, against the permanent logic of siege. If we do not, we are architects of our own annihilation.
LATER GIBRAN:
Then let us imagine a new ritual: each time a nation expands its arsenal, it must send poets to the site. Let them describe what cannot be undone. Let them name the children who will never be born because of that choice. The bomb is not power. It is grief deferred. And deferred grief becomes madness.
LATER DAVID:
Thank you. In your words I hear not only warning, but a call: to remember, to restrain, and perhaps even to imagine anew.
THEME 5: Where is Peace?
LATER DAVID:
As we generate the final part of this episode, we learn that Iran has apparently chosen to de-escalate the conflict with Israel and the USA, agreeing to a ceasefire. Having seen the skies burn, the cities fall, the borders harden, and the treaties tremble, what might still be salvaged? Where might we still begin again? If peace has failed us in the past, can imagination yet save us?
LATER EISENHOWER:
De-escalation is not surrender. It is strategy at its most courageous. It tells the world: we remember what war costs. But it is not enough to pause. We must repurpose the silence. I believe imagination is a form of courage. It takes bravery to envision a future better than our past, and discipline to build it. The trouble is not that we lack tools, but that we no longer believe in blueprints. We've become so accustomed to managing collapse that we’ve forgotten how to plan for renewal. But I’ve seen it before. After the war, we built alliances. We invested in strangers. We chose to rebuild what we had destroyed. It is possible.
LATER RABIN:
This moment — this ceasefire — is fragile, but it is also sacred. It is a door, however narrow. When I negotiated Oslo, we knew that every signature was written on dissolving paper. But we signed anyway. Because the alternative was another generation of funerals. Hope must be taught. And taught again. Track II diplomacy. Environmental cooperation. Regional trade rooted in justice. Even shared mourning rituals across borders. These are not naïve dreams. They are necessary scaffolds. What we cannot solve at the summit, perhaps we can sow underground. To every young diplomat, soldier, activist listening: build quietly. Even under censorship, even in exile. Build.
LATER GIBRAN:
I do not believe the world will be saved by treaties or tanks. It will be saved by tenderness. Not sentimentality, but sacred attentiveness. Imagination is not escape. It is seed. Let me tell you of a boy in Beirut who, after a bombing, gathered broken glass and made a mosaic. He did not call it art. He called it map. That is our task now: to take what is shattered and shape from it a geography of survival. To the next generation: refuse numbness. Let your grief become garden. Let your anger become architecture. Do not let them convince you the world is already lost.
LATER EISENHOWER:
And if I may add: strength must look different now. It must include softness. Resilience is not about endurance alone. It is about refusal. The refusal to mirror your enemy. The refusal to give up on deliberation. The refusal to descend into despair.
LATER RABIN:
Victory is not when your enemy kneels. It is when they stop wishing you harm.
LATER GIBRAN:
And peace is not when the guns fall silent. It is when the silence no longer frightens you.
LATER DAVID:
One final question, if I may. Each of you has lived again in this world of ours, even if only in words. If you could leave behind one thing—a map, a warning, a blessing—for those who come next, what would it be?
LATER EISENHOWER:
A warning: beware those who promise greatness without sacrifice. They do not love you. They seek only your rage.
LATER RABIN:
A map: it begins not with borders, but with faces. If you cannot imagine the other as human, you are already lost.
LATER GIBRAN:
A blessing: may your anger stay holy. May your sorrow become shelter. And may you never forget that even in ash, a garden can grow.
LATER DAVID:
Thank you. Thank you all. May this hour echo not only through history, but through conscience. May it linger where decisions are made, and where silences are kept. Until next time—may we listen more deeply, and imagine more bravely. This has been The Late Dialogues.