(Ozy) John McLaughlin - A combination of fractious internal politics and Mideast regional trends may now have moved the Israeli-Palestinian problem into the category of "too hard." The regional context is entirely different than in 1993, when President Clinton presided over the signing of the Oslo Accord. Back then, Arab disputes with Israel were seen as the single most important roadblock to stability and peace in the Middle East. Now they are overshadowed by the larger drama of war in Syria and Iraq, the regionwide tensions between Sunni and Shia and the general chaos that followed the 2011 Arab Spring. The next U.S. president will have to weigh any effort to seek a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem against a much broader array of competing demands in the Middle East, so the likelihood is that this will not be as high on the U.S. priority list as in the past. The writer, deputy director and acting director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004, teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
2016-08-30 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive