Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and Israel, is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His new book (with Scott Lasensky) is Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East.

From Daniel Kurtzer

Two related questions have bothered me for many years. First, if the prospects for progress toward a Middle East peace settlement looked so promising in the early 1990s, why did the situation turn so bleak by the end of the century and even until today? Second, could/should the United States have done anything more or different in order to affect the prospects for Middle East peace during this period? Since the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000, a number of memoirs, academic studies and articles have been published in an effort to shed some light on these questions. While providing some answers to the first question, these publications, in my view, fell short in dealing with U.S. policy and diplomacy.

After retiring from the Foreign Service in 2006 and joining the faculty of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I devoted some attention to these issues. In the summer of 2006, I offered two public lectures on the subject, exploring some of the factors related to U.S. decision-making and diplomatic practice in the period after the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. During the summer of 2006, Ambassador Richard Solomon, President of the United States Institute of Peace, approached me and asked if I would chair a study group to examine U.S. involvement in the peace process since the end of the Cold War. The vehicle with which to pursue my interests was thus offered, and allowed me to do a systematic study of the issue, not a memoir.

Working closely with Scott Lasensky of USIP, who served as co-director of the Study Group, we assembled what can only be described as the “dream team” of academic/practitioner experts on U.S. policy and the Middle East peace process: William Quandt of the University of Virginia, Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, and Steven Spiegel of UCLA. Over the next year, we interviewed 100 current and former policy makers and officials from the United States and the region. We also traveled to the region to meet with Israeli and Arab officials who were not able to come to Washington. The result of these interviews and the background research associated with the interviews is the book we just published, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East.

The Study Group and I have had several target audiences for the book. Most importantly, we aimed to have the book influence the policy choices and behavior of the next U.S. Administration, in the belief that the next Administration would be looking for ways to improve upon the rather dismal peace process performance and results of its predecessors. In the meantime, the Bush ’43 Administration launched the Annapolis process, and so we shared our findings, before publication, with senior Administration officials, in the hope that the process today could benefit from our findings.

We have also had in mind a larger audience for the book, among academics and the policy community. The book focuses on the Middle East peace process, but it offers lessons that we believe have value in conducting U.S. diplomacy and negotiations elsewhere. Thus, the book is appropriate not only for university-level courses on the Middle East, but also for courses on negotiations theory and practice and on U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Early reviews of the book have been very positive and have validated our view that it has appeal for a wide policy and academic audience.

Can this book alone provide a magic key to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict? Surely not, for the primary onus for resolving the conflict continues to rest with the parties themselves. However, as we assert in the book, there is no doubting the importance of resolving the conflict for U.S. national security interests. Since we know we can do diplomacy far better than we have done during the past fifteen years, the book may make a modest contribution to a more successful U.S. approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

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