Secretary of State Clinton's announcement last week that direct
Israeli-Palestinian talks will recommence next month poses considerable
risk for the United States. The odds are high these negotiations will fail.
If so, and combined with U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq, President Obama's commitment to begin withdrawing NATO forces from Afghanistan next summer and Iran's continuing progress toward nuclear weapons, failure means that Washington's Middle East influence will decline.
The conventional wisdom is that it never hurts to talk, and that the United States loses nothing by pursuing an active "peace process," even without concrete results. This is badly wrong, because negotiations are never cost-free. In fact, diplomacy, like all human activity, has both costs and benefits, and the issue in any specific case is whether the benefits of negotiating outweigh the risks. And for Obama, acting as a facilitator or mediator, the key risk is that failure brings the perception of weakness and incompetence.
Clinton stressed her hope that the negotiations could resolve all contentious issues between the parties in one year. Of course, the talks could easily head into a ditch well before then, but the arbitrary time limits, as in earlier failed efforts - including by the Bush administration, of which I was a part - show how artificial the entire negotiating framework actually is. There is simply no evidence that any behind-the-scenes progress has been made on key "final status" issues (borders, Jerusalem, the Palestinians' "right of return" to Israel) that have sunk innumerable prior peace processes.
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