Michael S. Doran28 “Assad told me in late February 2011 that
he would sever all anti-Israel relationships
with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas and
abstain from all behavior posing threats to
the State o Israel, provided all land lost
by Syria to Israel in the 1967 war—all o
it—was returned.”FACING FACTS
For 70 years now, many American (and
European) policymakers have seen it as
their mission to stabilize the Middle East
by constraining Israel’s power and
getting the country to give back at the
negotiating table what it has taken on the
battleeld. Over the decades, however,
Israel has grown ever stronger and more
able to resist such impositions. It has
become a modern industrial power
center, with a thriving economy and a
fearsome military backed by nuclear
weapons—even as the Palestinians have
remained impoverished wards o the
international community, with threats
o terror their chie negotiating tool.
Most Arab states moved on long ago.
They now treat Israel as a normal
player in the eternal great game o
regional power balancing. So now has
the Trump administration. And for
that, it has been excoriated.
The administration’s approach is a
disaster, critics say, because it concedes
so much to Israel upfront that the
Palestinians will never agree to negoti-
ate. The critics are correct about the
unlikely prospects for a deal anytime
soon. But that makes the Trump admin-
istration dierent from its predecessors
how? U.S. Secretary o State John
Kerry squandered more than a year o
the Obama administration trying in
vain to jump-start peace talks, a quixotic
eort that even his own negotiatorsIn retrospect, the ultimate failure o
the Oslo process should not have been
surprising. The successes o the peace
process have come not from Carteresque
dreams but from Kissingerian realpoli-
tik. Egypt made a private side deal with
Israel in the 1970s, and Jordan did so in
the 1990s, but both were hardheaded,
materialistic transactions: Egypt made
peace to get back the Sinai and a place
within the American system, and Jordan
did it to keep its place in that system
and insulate itsel from the vicissitudes
o the peace process. Both sought to
extricate themselves from the Palestinian
problem, not solve it.
Since 1994, the main parties without
a deal have been the Palestinians and
the Syrians, and it is di ̈cult to say
whether they were ever serious about
making peace. They certainly convinced
their U.S. interlocutors that they were,
and they parlayed that success into
decades o continued power, status, and
international largess. And yet somehow
the nal settlement was always six
months away—and always would be.
Thus did the Palestinian leader Yasir
Arafat start the 1990s exiled in Tunis yet
end them as a king in Ramallah. And
thus did the Assad dynasty in Syria
survive down the decades.
When the peaceful democratic
revolutions o the Arab Spring broke
out in late 2010, the Assad regime came
under re just as its counterparts
elsewhere did. But instead o increasing
pressure on the Syrian dictator, Wash-
ington cut Bashar al-Assad a lot o slack.
Why? In part because he yet again
dangled before them visions o the elusive
Israeli-Syrian peace. As Frederic Hof, the
o ̈cial then handling Syria policy at the
U.S. State Department, would later write,05_Doran_Blues.indd 28 9/23/19 3:13 PM