After 19 months, President Barack Obama has finally convened Arab-Israeli peace talks and set a one-year timeline for securing a final peace deal. If he is serious about this goal, he will need to establish a regional environment conducive to peace -- a step that requires rebuilding American strength in the region.
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Historically, the United States has made its most significant progress in Middle East peacemaking when it operated from a pre-eminent position in the region. That's what convinced Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to chuck the Soviets and turn to Washington to engineer his peace with Israel in the 1970s; it is also what convinced Arabs and Israelis to start the modern era of peacemaking at the Madrid peace conference, following the U.S.-led liberation of Kuwait.
But this iteration of peace talks, which will resume on Sept. 14 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, begins with many in the Middle East questioning American strength, not deferring to it. This change has potentially negative implications for our ability to help Arabs and Israelis forge peace.
Consider the contrast between the two presidents who pivoted from war-fighting in the Persian Gulf to peacemaking in the Levant. Twenty years ago, President George H.W. Bush built upon victory over Iraq in an internationally sanctioned war to organize the first all-Arab peace conference with Israel in Madrid. Yet even with the wind at his sails from a clear military success, Madrid produced no peace agreements and left little lasting imprint on the region's politics.
In contrast, Obama turned to Arab-Israeli peacemaking 36 hours after declaring the "end of combat operations in Iraq" -- a somewhat less glorious achievement than the first Gulf War. The decision to depart Iraq without even an Iraqi government in place may have been politically necessary in the U.S. domestic context, but it projects the air of retreat and irresolution throughout the region. If clear victory in the Kuwait war only gave the United States enough oomph to get the parties to the table, then what are the chances that the uncertain outcome in the Iraq war will empower us to help them cross the finish line?
The fact is that Obama has entered the fray of Arab-Israeli diplomacy with a weak hand, but it is not necessarily a losing one. If he handles the current negotiations more wisely than his first year and a half of Mideast diplomacy and rebuilds a sense of U.S. strength by dealing resolutely with the approaching crisis point over Iran's nuclear program, he can reverse this dynamic. To do so, however, he will need to resist three alluring temptations.
First, the president will need to keep his eye on the strategic prize -- a new Israeli-Palestinian agreement to replace the moribund Oslo Accords -- and not let irritants detour him from this path.
One such irritant could occur before the end of September, when Israeli domestic politics may compel its government to replace the current moratorium on West Bank settlement construction with something less categorical. In a meeting with Western diplomats on Sept. 12, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted that, though the freeze will not be extended, construction will continue at a much-reduced pace. The actual number of new homes likely to be built over the next 12 months will probably be tiny, but the decision to start building again will be powerfully symbolic, for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
If this moment comes, the president needs to resist the temptation -- to which he and his advisors succumbed on multiple occasions in their earlier forays into Mideast diplomacy -- to inflate the significance of settlement construction, to chastise Israeli action as an insurmountable obstacle to peace, and, by their actions, to deny the Palestinians any room for flexibility on the issue. When U.S. officials, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, declared that "not one more brick" for construction of Israeli settlements would be acceptable, it forced Palestinians to accept no less and pushed Israelis into a corner. The result was no peace talks, no diplomacy, and no progress toward peace. As satisfying as this course may be to some in the administration, if the president reverts to this behavior, the result will be to abort the current peace initiative.
A far wiser strategy is to focus on the potential to make headway on the fundamental issues under discussion -- like the eventual borders and sovereign powers of a Palestinian state -- and to insulate the negotiations from a possible shift in Israeli settlement policy. This includes engaging with Palestinians now to ensure that talks proceed even under a strained environment. After all, if talks eventually produce a breakthrough, no one will remember the episode, and if talks eventually fail, there will be ample opportunity for the administration to rethink its policy. To its credit, the Obama administration has reportedly begun to adopt this more strategic approach, including warning Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinians would bear a heavy cost by withdrawing from negotiations in the event the moratorium is not extended.
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