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Quandt: Bush May Open Door for Mideast Peace in Next Administration

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: William B. Quandt, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Professor of Politics, University of Virginia
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

January 16, 2008

William B. Quandt, a leading historian on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, says the best chance for a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is if the talks continue through the year, and the next U.S. president decides to move in energetically to try to bring about closure. Based on his analysis of past peace processes, he says that past agreements have always needed strong U.S. leadership, as well as strong Arab and Israeli leaders.

How does President Bush’s efforts compare to the efforts of other U.S. presidents? Of course, the final results are to still be determined.

Bush’s approach to the Arab-Israeli situation represents a break with his predecessors, but it is a break that stemmed very directly from the failure of the Clinton initiatives. That is, as Bush was coming into office, his gift from Bill Clinton was that Clinton had tried really, really hard and had failed to achieve a major breakthrough. He told Bush in no uncertain terms that “I failed because of Yasir Arafat [head of the Palestine Liberation Organization].”

Bush thus had very little incentive at the outset to pick up a failing project and embrace it and make it his own—and he didn’t. His very first reaction to this issue was to say, “I’m not going to take this on.” Clinton had proved that by trying too hard you can actually make things worse. When Bush’s secretary of state [Colin Powell] urged him not to turn his back on Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy, he said something to the effect that sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. That attitude was colored by the preceding failure but also reflected a deep suspicion on his part that this was not something that he wanted to take on.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.