10 MARTIN INDYK is a Distinguished Fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations and the author
of the forthcoming book Henry Kissinger and
the Art of the Middle East Deal. He has served as
U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Assistant U.S.
Secretary of State for Near Eastern Aairs, and
Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations.The indignation was calculated.
Guided by his boss Jared Kushner, the
president’s son-in-law and senior adviser
on the Middle East, Greenblatt was
trying to change the conversation, to “start
a new, realistic discussion” o¡ the sub-
ject. U resolutions, international law,
global consensus—all that was irrelevant.
From now on, Washington would no
longer advocate a two-state solution to the
con¥ict, with independent Jewish and
Palestinian states living alongside each
other in peace and security.
Greenblatt’s presentation was part o¡
a broader campaign by the Trump
administration to break with the past
and create a new Middle Eastern order.
To please a president who likes simple,
cost-free answers, the administration’s
strategists appear to have come up with a
clever plan. The United States can
continue to withdraw from the region
but face no adverse consequences for
doing so, because Israel and Saudi Arabia
will pick up the slack. Washington will
subcontract the job o¡ containing Iran,
the principal source o¡ regional instabil-
ity, to Israel and Saudi Arabia in the
Levant and the Persian Gulf, respec-
tively. And the two countries’ common
interest in countering Iran will improve
their bilateral relationship, on which
Israel can build a tacit alliance with the
Sunni Arab world. The proxies get broad
leeway to execute Washington’s mandate
at will, and their patron gets a new,
Trumpian order on the cheap. Unfortu-
nately, this vision is a fantasy.
In the mid-1970s, even as the United
States retrenched after its defeat in
Vietnam, U.S. Secretary o¡ State Henry
Kissinger successfully laid the founda-
tions for a new, U.S.-led Middle Eastern
order. His main tool was active diplo-Disaster in the
Desert
Why Trump’s Middle East
Plan Can’t WorkMartin Indyk
I
n July 2019, Jason Greenblatt, then
U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy
for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,
attended a routine quarterly ® Security
Council meeting about the Middle East.
Providing an update on the Trump
administration’s thinking about the peace
process, he pointedly told the surprised
audience that the United States no longer
respected the “ ̄ction” o¡ an international
consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Greenblatt went out o° his way to
attack not some extreme or obscure
measure but ® Security Council Resolu-
tion 242, the foundation o° hal¡ a century
o¡ Arab-Israeli negotiations and o¡ every
agreement Israel has achieved within
them, including the peace treaties with
Egypt and Jordan. He railed against its
ambiguous wording, which has shielded
Israel for decades against Arab demands
for a full withdrawal from occupied
territory, as “tired rhetoric designed to
prevent progress and bypass direct
negotiations” and claimed that it had hurt
rather than helped the chances for real
peace in the region.TRUMP’S MIDDLE EAST