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money -- all of these factors swirling around in a kind of Brownian motion. Certainly one of the forces behind peace in both the Middle East and South Africa was what one observer called ''a biological compulsion'' in all four men to reach a settlement. Mandela is 75, De Klerk 57, Rabin 71 and Arafat 64. ''They were aware they did not have much time left,'' says William Quandt, who was at the National Security Council during the 1978 Camp David negotiations. ''And if they waited, history would write about them as people who had missed a chance to end their careers with a capstone achievement.'' Beyond that, they were impelled, or at least strongly encouraged, by new historical realities. The cold war left Arafat without a Soviet patron; backing the wrong side in the Gulf War cost him his wealthy oil-state sponsors. The Israelis were growing weary of the economic and moral costs of the endless occupation. In South Africa the white minority faced a catastrophe: a main achievement of apartheid had been to inflict fatal damage on the country's economy. As for Mandela's African National Congress, it foresaw a descent into chaos and civil war that might destroy any nation worth its inheriting. And so on. Some thought that South Africa and the Middle East proved what might be called the Exhaustion Theory of Peacemaking -- which arises from the cynical, and accurate, observation that peace is the last resort when all else has failed. True: if either side had been able to conquer, it would have let victory dictate the peace. All that said, the settlements-in-the-making in the Middle East and South Africa were hardly involuntary, and they were far from inevitable. Without Rabin and Arafat, the Israelis and Palestinians would have continued down the same bleak, violent road they have followed since 1948. Without Mandela and De Klerk, blacks and whites would have descended into the bloodiest race war in history. In 1993 Rabin and Arafat, Mandela and De Klerk all rose to the occasion before them. Their common genius was that they saw in the convergence of circumstances a ripeness of moment -- and that they acted. They worked in pairs at their two separate projects, even though something inside each man came to the rendezvous reluctantly, uncomfortably -- faute de mieux, as if history had given him no choice. Each needed his other, absolutely, in order to succeed -- and each knew it. Each of the men was putting himself at enormous personal risk in the enterprise -- not now from his long-sworn enemy but from those on his own side who would cry betrayal. But each had the armor of his record in the struggle. Just as only a longtime anticommunist like Richard Nixon could convincingly make the opening to China, so only men with the longevity in their conflicts of Rabin, Arafat, De Klerk and Mandela had the credibility to make peace. None of the men much liked his partner. They were bound together, two by two, as if in an impossible combination: they became each other's steptwins. Their negotiations at times resembled nothing so much as the conflict they were trying to resolve. Mandela and De Klerk were at each other's throats even as they accepted the Nobel Peace Prize together. Rabin could barely stand to shake Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. Each of the settlements-in- progress shows that peacemaking is often as difficult and dirty, in its own way, as warmaking. The Men of the Year sometimes seemed to be elaborating a variation on Churchill's
