Last weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel, Jordan (to meet with Arab foreign ministers), Ramallah (located in the West Bank), Iraq, and Turkey. With the war between Israel and Hamas now entering its sixth week, U.S. diplomacy has kicked into high gear. As Blinken works to secure humanitarian relief for Gazans caught in the crossfire, he has been signaling where he and the White House would like things to go once the fighting stops: a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA) that would administer the West Bank and Gaza and a temporary international force to help provide security in the latter.
These ideas are probably the only ones that satisfy U.S. political, diplomatic, and geo-strategic concerns as well as those of some Arab governments. Yet they are likely to fail.
The Biden administration is embarking on a path that it studiously avoided during its first three years—and for good reason. It is now going to discover that, despite its efforts, when the war between Israel and Hamas ends, the region will look more like a version of the status quo that existed on Oct. 6 than a new Middle East.
