November/December 2021

Volume 100 • Number 6

Order Before Peace

Kissinger’s Middle East Diplomacy and Its
Lessons for Today
Martin Indyk

The contents of Foreign Affairs are copyrighted ©2021 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction and distribution of this material is permitted only with the express written consent of Foreign
Affairs. Visit www.foreignaffairs.com/permissions for more information.

FOREIGNAFFAIRS.COM
Order Before Peace
Kissinger’s Middle East Diplomacy
and Its Lessons for Today
Martin Indyk

T
he ignominious end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan dramati-
cally underscored the complexity and volatility of the broader
Middle East. Americans may try to console themselves that at
last they can turn their backs on this troubled region since the United
States is now energy self-sufficient and thus much less dependent on
Middle Eastern oil. Washington has learned the hard way not to at-
tempt to remake the region in the United States’ image. And if Amer-
ican leaders are tempted to make war there again, they are likely to find
little public support.
Nevertheless, pivoting away from the broader Middle East is easier
said than done. If Iran continues to advance its nuclear program to the
threshold of developing a weapon, it could trigger an arms race or a
preemptive Israeli strike that would drag the United States back into
another Middle Eastern war. The region remains important because of
its geostrategic centrality, located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
Israel and Washington’s Arab allies depend on the United States for
their security. Failing states such as Syria and Yemen remain a poten-
tial breeding ground for terrorists who can strike the United States
and its allies. And although the United States no longer depends on
the free flow of oil from the Gulf, a prolonged interruption there could
send the global economy into a tailspin. Like it or not, the United
States needs to devise a post-Afghanistan strategy for promoting or-
der in the Middle East even as it shifts its focus to other priorities.
In crafting that strategy, there is a precedent that can serve as a use-
ful template. It comes from the experience of Washington’s preemi-
MARTIN INDYK is a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the
author of Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (Knopf,
2021), from which this essay is adapted.

November/December 2021 153

Martin Indyk

The incrementalist: Kissinger in his office in Washington, D.C., August 1978

nent strategist, Henry Kissinger. Although he is little remembered for
it, during the four years he served as secretary of state to U.S. Presi-
dents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger presided over a suc-
cessful effort to build a stable Middle Eastern order, one that lasted for
30 years. Kissinger managed to achieve that while the United States
was withdrawing all its troops from Vietnam and pulling back from
Southeast Asia. It was a time, like today, when diplomacy had to sub-
stitute for the use of force. It coincided with the Watergate scandal,
which plunged the United States into a deep political crisis and forced
Nixon from office, creating a potential vacuum in U.S. leadership on
W. S T E C H E / B I L D A R C H I V V I S U M / R E D U X

the world stage. And yet during this period of American malaise, in
the midst of the Cold War, Kissinger’s diplomacy managed to sideline
the Soviet Union and lay the foundations for an American-led peace
process that effectively ended the conflict between the Arab states and
Israel, even though it failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
One of the most important lessons from the Kissinger era is that an
equilibrium in the regional balance of power is insufficient for main-
taining a stable order. To legitimize that order, Washington needs to
find ways to encourage its allies and partners to address the region’s

154 F O R E I G N A F FA I R S
 Order Before Peace

grievances. Although policymakers should be circumspect in their

peacemaking efforts, prioritizing stability over end-of-conflict deals,
they should also avoid underreaching, because that can destabilize
the order, too. While there is little appetite in Washington to address the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Biden administration should resist the
temptation to neglect the issue. As Kissinger learned the hard way, con-
flicts that appear dormant can erupt into full-blown crises at unexpected
moments. Dealing with one of the central conflicts in the Middle East
by employing a Kissingerian strategy of incremental steps is the best
way to avoid yet another conflagration in this combustible region.

ORDER, NOT PEACE

It was order, not peace, that Kissinger pursued, because he believed that
peace was neither an achievable nor even a desirable objective in the
Middle East. In Kissinger’s view, preserving Middle Eastern order re-
quired the maintenance of a stable balance of power. In his doctoral
dissertation, which was subsequently published in 1957 as A World Re-
stored, Kissinger demonstrated how the Austrian diplomat Klemens von
Metternich and the Anglo-Irish statesman Lord Castlereagh produced
100 years of relative stability in Europe by artfully tending to the bal-
ance of power and skillfully manipulating those who tried to disrupt it.
Kissinger sought to replicate that approach in the Middle East when
he had the opportunity. But he understood that an equilibrium in the
balance of power was not enough. For the order to be sustainable, it
also had to be legitimate, meaning that all the major powers within the
system had to adhere to a commonly accepted set of rules. Those rules
would be respected only if they provided a sufficient sense of justice to
a sufficient number of states. It did not require the satisfaction of all
grievances, he wrote, “just an absence of the grievances that would
motivate an effort to overthrow the order.” A legitimate order, Kis-
singer argued, did not eliminate conflict, but it did limit its scope.
This conclusion also came from what he observed during World
War II, when the Wilsonian idealism that sought a peace to end all
wars had instead led to appeasement and Hitler’s conquest of Europe.
As Kissinger noted in his memoirs, “For most people in most periods
of history, peace had been a precarious state and not the millennial
disappearance of all tension.” Consequently, in his diplomatic efforts
in the Middle East, Kissinger would consistently avoid the pursuit of
peace treaties, instead seeking agreements that would give all sides a

November/December 2021 155

Martin Indyk

stake in preserving the existing order. As he told me decades later, “I

never thought there could be a moment of universal reconciliation.”
Kissinger’s skepticism first found expression in the subtitle he
chose for A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of
Peace. The fact that after years of deep research, he concluded that
peace was problematic would have a formative influence on his ap-
proach to diplomacy in the Middle East. On the first page of the in-
troduction to A World Restored, Kissinger explains why he came to this
conclusion. “The attainment of peace,” he writes, “is not as easy as the
desire for it.” Eras like the period he had studied turned out, para-
doxically, to be the most peaceful because the statesmen involved were
not preoccupied with brokering peace.
The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant was
another influence on Kissinger’s Middle East policymaking. Kant be-
lieved that peace was inevitable. But what Kissinger took away from
the philosopher’s essay “Perpetual Peace” was that conflict between
states would lead over time to the exhaustion of their powers. Eventu-
ally, they would prefer peace to the misery of war. In other words,
peacemaking was a gradual process that could not be rushed. As Kis-
singer noted, Kant understood that “the root dilemma of our time is
that if the quest for peace turns into the sole objective of policy, the
fear of war becomes a weapon in the hands of the most ruthless; it
produces moral disarmament.”
When Kissinger applied this prism to the Middle East, he assumed
that the Arabs were not ready to reconcile with the Jewish state and that
Israel was unable to make the territorial concessions they demanded
without jeopardizing its existence. So he developed a peace process that
provided for Israel to withdraw in small, incremental steps from the
Arab territory it had occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. The legitimiz-
ing principle for this approach was enshrined in UN Security Council
Resolution 242, which provided for an exchange of territory for peace.
Kissinger’s peace process, however, was designed to buy time rather
than peace: time for Israel to build its capabilities and reduce its isolation,
and time for the Arabs to tire of the conflict and recognize the advantages
of working with an increasingly powerful Israeli neighbor. In the mean-
time, he would pursue Middle East peace with caution, skepticism, and
gradualism, which is why he labeled it “step-by-step diplomacy.”
Equilibrium and legitimacy in the pursuit of order and incremen-
talism in the pursuit of peace were the basic concepts of Kissinger’s

156 F O R E I G N A F FA I R S
 Order Before Peace

strategic approach. He managed to negotiate three interim agree-

ments among Egypt, Syria, and Israel and laid the foundations for the
subsequent peace treaties that Israel forged with Egypt and Jordan.
His process began to unravel, however, when U.S. President Bill
Clinton ignored Kissinger’s emphasis on caution and tried and failed
to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And then President George W.
Bush launched his ill-fated invasion of Iraq, destabilizing Kissinger’s
order by making it possible for revolutionary Iran to challenge U.S.
dominance in the Sunni Arab world.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS

Kissinger’s approach to the Middle East is particularly relevant in the
present moment. The United States is pulling back from the region in
an obvious parallel to the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia in
Kissinger’s time. Then, as now, the aftermath of a botched, long-
running war meant there was a strict limit on Washington’s ability to
deploy force in the Middle East. Nevertheless, Kissinger knew that a
stable equilibrium depended on the United States backing up its di-
plomacy with the credible threat of military action. He squared this
circle by relying on and working with capable regional partners.
For example, in September 1970, the Palestine Liberation Organi-
zation (PLO) sought to overthrow King Hussein in Jordan. Three
Soviet-backed Syrian armored tank brigades supported the organiza-
tion’s attempt by occupying the northern Jordanian city of Irbid. Fearing
they would advance on Amman, Hussein called on Washington to
intervene. The United States, however, could not do so quickly and
risked getting stuck there if it did.
So Kissinger, on Hussein’s urging and with Nixon’s eventual sup-
port, turned to Israel to deter the Syrians. Prime Minister Golda Meir
ordered the Israel Defense Forces to mobilize on the Golan Heights
and on the Jordanian border adjacent to Irbid. Meanwhile, to deter the
Soviets, Kissinger deployed two U.S. carrier battle groups off the Leb-
anese coast and ordered a third into the Mediterranean. Emboldened
by Israeli and American backing, the Jordanian army inflicted heavy
losses on the Syrian tank brigades, and the Syrians withdrew. Within
days, the crisis was over, without one American boot on the ground.
Kissinger also harnessed the support of regional allies in dealing with
Egypt’s nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Kissinger en-
tered the White House as Nixon’s national security adviser, in 1969,

November/December 2021 157

Martin Indyk

Nasser fit the mold of a revolutionary seeking to disrupt the existing

Middle Eastern order in much the way that Napoleon had challenged
the European order at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In deal-
ing with Nasser’s Soviet-backed gambit, Kissinger eschewed regime
change, a policy pursued by France and the United Kingdom during the
1956 Suez crisis with disastrous results. Instead, he sought to contain
Nasser by promoting a balance of power tipped in favor of the regional
defenders of the status quo: Israel in the heartland of the Middle East
and Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf. The détente that Nixon
and Kissinger developed with the Soviet Union bolstered that balance
because it involved, among other things, a joint commitment by the two
superpowers to maintain stability in the region.
Kissinger recognized that Washington had to address the Arab
states’ demand for justice in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, in
which they lost significant territory to Israel. Neglecting to do so
would threaten the legitimacy of the new Middle Eastern order.
Nevertheless, he assumed that as long as the superpowers main-
tained an equilibrium in the regional balance of power, justice could
be delayed. He badly miscalculated, as the outbreak of the 1973 Yom
Kippur War demonstrated.
In the lead-up to that conflict, Kissinger relied on Israeli and U.S.
intelligence assessments that Egypt would never risk war because a
militarily superior Israel, bolstered by sophisticated U.S. weapons
systems, would rapidly defeat it. That analysis led Kissinger to ig-
nore Nasser’s successor, Anwar al-Sadat, when he warned repeatedly
that he would go to war if Egypt’s aspirations to regain the territory
it had lost were disregarded. Kissinger brushed aside Sadat’s pro-
nouncements even when they assumed an apocalyptic tone: in one
interview, for example, the Egyptian leader declared, “Everything in
this country is now being mobilized in earnest for the resumption of
the battle, which is now inevitable.”
Still, in 1973, when Egypt invaded the Sinai Peninsula and Syria
attempted to retake the Golan Heights on the holiest day on the Jew-
ish calendar, Kissinger sprang into action with the confidence that his
study of the nineteenth-century European order had provided. His
objective was to adjust the prewar arrangements in a way that the
Middle East’s major players would view as more just and equitable.
He also wanted to position the United States to play the role of the
predominant manipulator of the competing forces in the region.

158 F O R E I G N A F FA I R S
 Order Before Peace

To back his diplomacy with force, Kissinger encouraged Israeli

counteroffensives. When that military pressure helped persuade the
Egyptians and the Soviets to accept his cease-fire conditions, he de-
manded that Israel stop its assault. In particular, he prevented the Is-
rael Defense Forces from destroying the Egyptian Third Army, which
it had surrounded at the end of the war. That enabled Sadat to enter
peace negotiations with his regime—
and his dignity—intact.
Kissinger then seized on the plastic- Kissinger’s peace process
ity of the moment to launch his peace was designed to buy time
process with the aim of keeping Egypt— rather than peace.
the largest and militarily most powerful
Arab state—from joining any future
Arab war coalition. That would render another war between the Jewish
state and the Arab countries impossible. An unmistakable parallel exists
between Kissinger’s approach to Egypt and the way that Metternich and
Castlereagh handled France after Napoleon’s defeat, incorporating it into
the new order rather than punishing it—and thereby converting it from a
revolutionary, revisionist state into a status quo power.
Today, Kissinger would likely use a similar blueprint in dealing with
Iran, the country that most clearly threatens what is left of his U.S.-led
Middle Eastern order. He does not advocate the overthrow of the re-
gime. Rather, he would seek to persuade Iran to abandon its quest to
export its revolution and instead return to more state-like behavior. In
the meantime, Washington should pursue a new equilibrium in which
Iran’s revolutionary impulses are contained and balanced by an alliance
of Sunni states cooperating with Israel and the United States. Once Iran
decides to play by the rules, however, Kissinger believes the United
States needs to act as the balancer, positioning itself closer to all the
contending Middle Eastern powers than they are to one another. “Pur-
suing its own strategic objectives,” Kissinger says, “the United States can
be a crucial factor—perhaps the crucial factor—in determining whether
Iran pursues the path of revolutionary Islam or that of a great nation
legitimately and importantly lodged in the Westphalian system of states.”

BEWARE OF AIMING TOO HIGH

Because he was operating in an environment of retrenchment, Kissinger
was deeply aware of the dangers of overreach. But as he notes in A World
Restored, “It is not balance which inspires men but universality, not secu-

November/December 2021 159

Martin Indyk

rity but immortality.” And as he detailed in his monumental book Diplo-

macy, published in 1994, American statesmen rarely understand or
respect the rules of the game that his conception of international order
requires. Their idealism is often driven by a sense of divine providence,
especially when it comes to the Middle East. They imagine that pursu-
ing peace and nation building are not only desirable but achievable and
that the only problem is coming up with the right formula. Herein lies
the dilemma at the heart of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. As
Kissinger understood, the maintenance of order requires a credible ef-
fort to resolve the region’s conflicts, but the scale of the statesman’s
ambition can end up destabilizing that order.
Consider how Nixon’s first instinct was to work with the Soviet
Union to impose peace on their recalcitrant Middle Eastern clients.
In the middle of the Yom Kippur War, Kissinger flew off to Moscow
to negotiate the terms of a cease-fire with the Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev. En route, he received explicit instructions from Nixon to
“go all out” to achieve a just settlement “now” and to work with
Brezhnev to “bring the necessary pressure on our respective friends.”
This threatened to upend Kissinger’s more modest strategy for a
cease-fire followed by direct Egyptian-Israeli negotiations. Furious,
he ignored the president’s instructions. He was able to do so because
Nixon sent this message just as he was ordering the firing of Ar-
chibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. The ensuing “Satur-
day Night Massacre”—in which two top officials from the Justice
Department resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order—led con-
gressional leaders to initiate the impeachment of the president. With
all attention on U.S. domestic politics, Kissinger was able to pursue
his own priorities in the Middle East.
He managed a similar feat under Nixon’s successor, Ford. When
negotiations between Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
broke down in February 1975, Ford wanted to convene a conference in
Geneva with the Soviet Union to impose a comprehensive peace set-
tlement on Israel and its Arab neighbors. Kissinger headed that initia-
tive off in favor of a return to his shuttle diplomacy, which brought
Egypt and Israel closer to their eventual peace deal.
U.S. presidents who came after Nixon and Ford also tended to
pursue their idealistic objectives for the Middle East with insufficient
concern for maintaining the regional order that Kissinger had estab-
lished. President Jimmy Carter resurrected the idea of working with

160 F O R E I G N A F FA I R S
 Order Before Peace

the Soviet Union in reconvening the Geneva Conference to impose a

comprehensive peace. This time it was Sadat who headed off the
American president, with his trip to Jerusalem in November 1977. At
Camp David a year later, a chastened Carter pursued a separate
Egyptian-Israeli peace deal rather than a comprehensive settlement
that would have included a resolution of the Palestinian problem.
More than two decades later, however, Clinton acceded to Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s insistence on an attempt to reach a
deal to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Camp David in July
2000, abandoning the Kissingerian step-by-step process that Rabin
had introduced in the Oslo accords. The Palestinian leader Yasir
Arafat understood that Barak and Clinton intended to impose a fi-
nal resolution on the Palestinians, and he refused to go along. It was
a short step from there to the outbreak of the second Palestinian
intifada and the ensuing Israeli crackdown, a violent conflagration
that lasted for five years, led to the deaths of thousands, and de-
stroyed all trust between the two parties. Nevertheless, U.S. Presi-
dents Barack Obama and Donald Trump would later both try and
fail to produce conflict-ending agreements.
Bush resisted the siren song of comprehensive peacemaking but
succumbed to the urge for what Kissinger had long ago dubbed “im-
mortality.” After toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam
Hussein in Iraq, he announced a “freedom agenda” in the Middle
East, declaring that promoting democracy across the region “must be
a focus of American policy for decades to come.” The result was a dis-
aster, serving mostly to pave the way for an Iranian bid for domi-
nance in Iraq and across the region. Bush also shifted the U.S. objective
in Afghanistan from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency and na-
tion building. That decision, too, produced failure and humiliation.
Twenty years later, it was left to the nonagenarian Kissinger to point
out that “the military objectives [had] been too absolute and unattain-
able and the political ones too abstract and elusive.”

THE DANGER OF AIMING TOO LOW

Unlike the American policymakers who came after him, Kissinger was
determined to avoid overreaching in the Middle East. But there were
several instances when his caution and skepticism led him to under-
reach. That is the danger that President Joe Biden also faces in the
Middle East now that he has ended the war in Afghanistan.

November/December 2021 161

Martin Indyk

For Kissinger, the first instance of aiming too low came in July 1972,
when Sadat suddenly announced the expulsion of 20,000 Soviet military
advisers from Egypt. That was something Kissinger had called for two
years earlier. But when it happened, Kissinger felt no need to respond.
Sadat was disappointed. Five days before he announced the expul-
sion, he had sent a message to Kissinger expressing his desire to dis-
patch a special envoy to Washington. It would take seven months for
Kissinger to arrange a meeting with Hafez Ismail, Sadat’s national
security adviser. Ismail’s presentation captured Kissinger’s interest.
The Egyptian envoy explained that his country was ready to move
quickly, ahead of the other Arab states, and would even countenance
an Israeli security presence remaining in Sinai provided that Israel
recognized Egyptian sovereignty in the area.
Yet when Kissinger briefed Rabin, who was then Meir’s ambassa-
dor in Washington, the Israeli dismissed Ismail’s offer as “nothing
new.” Meir also rejected it, and Kissinger quietly dropped the idea.
Ismail met Kissinger again in May but came away from the meeting
believing that only a crisis would change Kissinger’s calculus. Four
months later, Sadat launched the Yom Kippur War.
Whether a more active response from Kissinger would have headed
off the war is unknowable. What is clear is that he underreached because
of his mistaken confidence in the stability of the equilibrium that he had
established. He had overlooked in practice something he had recognized
in theory: the stability of any international system depended “on the
degree to which its components feel secure and the extent to which they
agree on the ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ of existing arrangements.” That is
why, after the war, he resolved to address the justice deficit by launching
direct negotiations to produce Israeli withdrawals from Arab territory.
Justice for the Palestinians, however, was not on Kissinger’s agenda,
because they were represented by the PLO, which was then an irreden-
tist nonstate actor deploying terrorist tactics in an effort to overthrow
the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan and replace the Jewish state. He
preferred to leave the Palestinian problem to Israel and Jordan. In this
case, his caution led him to miss an opportunity that arose in 1974 to
promote Jordan’s role in addressing Palestinian claims. That was the
last moment when the Palestinian problem might have been tackled
in a state-to-state negotiation between Israel and Jordan.
At the time, Jordan had a special relationship with the West Bank
Palestinians, who were its citizens. Thanks in part to the British, the

162 F O R E I G N A F FA I R S
 Order Before Peace

Hashemite Kingdom also had functioning government institutions,

including a reliable army and an effective intelligence organization.
Unlike the PLO, which entered the peace process in 1993 with no
government institutions, Jordan could have ensured the implementa-
tion of any agreement reached with Israel, as it has done with its own
peace treaty obligations. And from there, a confederation between a
Palestinian state on the West Bank
and the Hashemite Kingdom on the
East Bank could have evolved. Kissinger was determined
To achieve that, Kissinger would to avoid overreaching in
have had to pursue a disengagement the Middle East.
agreement between Israel and Jordan
after he concluded the agreements
between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria. King Hussein was
eager to regain a foothold in the West Bank, and the Israelis were will-
ing to engage and even show some flexibility. But Kissinger repeat-
edly avoided involvement in the effort. He encouraged Hussein to
deal directly with the Israelis, which the king did. Kissinger warned
the Israelis that if they didn’t respond, they would end up having to
deal with the PLO—a prescient prediction. But then, he repeatedly
insisted that there would be no pressure from him and “no reason for
[the United States] to be an intermediary.”
Without American engagement, the Israelis and the Jordanians were
unable to reach an agreement. And in October 1974, at its summit in
Rabat, Morocco, the Arab League declared the PLO “the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people,” thereby putting an end to the
chance of resolving the Palestinian problem in a Jordanian context. Sub-
sequently, Kissinger candidly admitted he had made “a big mistake.”
He had his reasons. Although he liked the king, he didn’t view Jor-
dan as a major player in the Middle East, and he thought that meant
he did not need to make diplomatic exertions on its behalf. Instead,
he devoted himself to a second Egyptian-Israeli agreement, because
removing Egypt from the conflict with Israel was his overriding stra-
tegic objective. Pursuing a Jordanian option would have interfered
with that endeavor, would have possibly provoked conflict between
Jordan and the PLO, and would have brought up the question of who
would control Jerusalem, an extremely contentious issue that he
sought to avoid at all costs. Kissinger’s belief in a hierarchy of power
helped him establish priorities, but it also meant that he paid too lit-

November/December 2021 163

Martin Indyk

tle attention to the way less powerful states and even nonstate actors
could disrupt his hard-won order if the system he helped coax into
place could not provide them with at least a modicum of justice.

WARNING SIGNS AHEAD

Kissinger’s missteps and achievements can provide valuable lessons
for Biden as he deals with the Middle East in the aftermath of the
U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. As Biden shifts his attention to
more pressing priorities elsewhere, the goal of his Middle East diplo-
macy should be to shape an American-supported regional order in
which the United States is no longer the dominant player, even as it
remains the most influential. At its core, that order will need a balance
of power maintained through U.S. support for its regional allies,
namely Israel and the Sunni Arab states.
But Biden will also need to work with actors willing to play con-
structive roles in stabilizing the Middle Eastern order. That will make
for some strange and uncomfortable bedfellows, as it will involve co-
operating with Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Gaza, with Russian
President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo-
gan in Syria, with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman in the Gulf, and with all of them to contain Iran’s hegemonic
ambitions and advancing nuclear program.
Few of these allies and partners will comport themselves according
to U.S. values. Nevertheless, as Kissinger’s experience in the Middle
East demonstrates, the United States will need to promote a sufficient
sense of justice and fairness to legitimize the emerging order. Across
the region, people are crying out for accountable governments. The
United States cannot hope to meet those demands. That would be to
overreach again. But it cannot ignore them, either.
Similarly, promoting a peace process that ameliorates the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict will be important in addressing the region’s griev-
ances. That is far down on Biden’s list of priorities. In 2014, as vice
president, he witnessed firsthand the unwillingness of Israeli and Pales-
tinian leaders alike to take reasonable risks for peace, and he does not
imagine that he will find immortality by trying to force them to do so.
He accepts Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s argument that
Israel’s left-right coalition government could not survive a peace process
requiring the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and
Gaza. Like Kissinger in 1973, Biden assumes that the status quo is stable.

164 F O R E I G N A F FA I R S
 Order Before Peace

And like Kissinger in 1974, he sees the Palestinian problem as Israel’s to

deal with and will tend to brush aside any pressure to try to resolve it.
But the warning signs are there. The Palestinian Authority is near
collapse: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has lost all credibil-
ity among the Palestinian people, whereas Hamas—with its doctrine
of violent resistance—is gaining popularity. The Taliban victory in
Afghanistan will boost Hamas’s argument that its strategy is the only
way to liberate Palestinian territory. Moreover, Palestinian deaths
from confrontations with the Israeli army are rising at an alarming
rate, and for the first time, the Israeli government is permitting Jew-
ish prayer on what is known as the Temple Mount to Jews and Haram
al-Sharif to Muslims—a highly inflammatory move. The tinder is so
dry that even a simple jailbreak by six Palestinian prisoners in Sep-
tember risked sparking another uprising.
For years, American policymakers have warned that the Israeli-
Palestinian status quo is unsustainable—and yet it seems to sustain itself.
Experts cautioned against moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, but
when Trump did it, nothing happened. It feels just like the 1970s,
when, for years, Sadat threatened war, and nothing happened—until
one day it did. To minimize the potential for an explosion of violence,
Biden will need to encourage an incremental Israeli-Palestinian peace
process to rebuild trust and promote practical coexistence, just as
Kissinger did in his efforts to remove Egypt from the conflict with
Israel. Bennett has proposed economic changes, such as permitting
more Palestinians to work in Israel, as an initial step. Moves such as
that alone, however, will be insufficient to give credibility to a process
that has been so denigrated by past failures. The effort requires a po-
litical process, too, albeit a modest and realistic one that could include
a long-term cease-fire in Gaza and the transfer of some more territory
in stages to full Palestinian control in the West Bank.
In the aftermath of the pullout from Afghanistan, Biden is unlikely
to overreach in the Middle East. But as Kissinger could tell him, it
would also be a mistake for him to turn his back on it.∂

November/December 2021 165