Bhutan is a beautiful place. High-end tourists love it.

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.

The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.'

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

What I hear from folks all the time is 'us against them.' It is a core part of what they feel is happening with our government. Investing here, but not there. Listening to some, but not nearly enough. Going into certain neighborhoods, but not others. That divide is something we have to categorically reject.

The next adventure is the government, a government of change.

Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.

Candidly, I believe most corporations actually don't mind big government.