Aaron David Miller

Opinion contributor

Sitting on the south lawn of the White House on that hot, sunny September day in 1993, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Former secretary of State James Baker — the architect of it all — had warned me two years earlier, when I was helping him negotiate, that it could be all downhill from there and it might be best to get off the train while I still could. But watching Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and President Bill Clinton that day as they agreed to the Oslo Accords, I figured Baker had been wrong. History was being made. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized each other; a Palestinian Authority had been created; an interim process had been put in place.

I concluded, in an egregious violation of common sense, logic and history, that the Middle East peace process was now irreversible, that we had reached a point of no return.

This week on the 25th anniversary of the Oslo agreement, U.S. hopes and dreams of Arab-Israeli peacemaking lie broken and shattered. The Trump administration has shed any pretense of being an honest or effective broker. Just this week, it announced it was closing the PLO mission in Washington. Yet even now, the Trump administration talks fantastically about an ultimate deal to end the conflict.

What is it we continually fail to grasp about this seemingly endless crisis and our role? Looking back over the wreckage, here are my favorite American illusions.

Myth: We are the key to a solution

It’s no coincidence that the serious breakthroughs in Arab-Israeli negotiations post-1967 occurred by the parties themselves without the knowledge of Washington. Sure, the leaders who orchestrated them — Jordan's King Hussein, Egypt's Anwar Sadat, Israel's Rabin and Menachem Begin and the PLO’s Arafat — were never free agents. Both Sadat and Rabin would pay with their lives for their peacemaking.

Even so, they were determined to exploit or react to opportunities, and in doing so were prepared to take real risks, not because of U.S. pressure but for their own reasons. We don't have those leaders today. And the Trump administration is deluding itself if it believes there’s an ultimate deal or any serious deal available now without them.

Both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lack vision and are too risk-averse, tied to their domestic politics, and more interested in keeping their jobs than in trying to fundamentally change the status quo. The Trump administration needs to understand that a willful and skillful mediator is critical, but much more important are partners willing to make decisions that allow a third party to bridge gaps. On the big issues — borders and Jerusalem — Abbas and Netanyahu are not even close.

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Myth: We are an honest broker

At times, we have been an effective (not an honest) broker in delivering agreements between Israelis and Arabs, most notably when it came to President Jimmy Carter’s brokering an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. But even here, the United States was operating off a pro-Israeli script — largely because Israel demanded a noncomprehensive deal that did not include the PLO, Sadat was willing, and Carter acquiesced.

Gaining Israel’s cooperation is critical given the reality that Israel has the territory that the Arabs want back. But we can’t abandon Washington’s capacity to assert positions in a negotiation that try to reflect the needs and requirements of both sides.

This week’s plan to close the PLO office in Washington was just the latest in a series of Trump administration moves that undermine U.S. credibility. Beyond its unqualified, uncritical support for the Netanyahu government, it has waged a systematic campaign against the Palestinians, including defunding the United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees, cutting assistance to the West Bank, and defunding Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem. Once we allow our special relationship with Israel to become an exclusive relationship, as the administration has done, you might as well hang a closed-for-the-season sign on America as a trustworthy mediator.

Myth: Arab states can save the peace process

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have a critical role to play in support of a deal but not as a substitute for one. Now that the Iran threat and jihadi terrorists have driven Israel and the Sunni Arab states closer together, there are more opportunities to get the Arabs involved to reach out to Israel and to support and even press the Palestinians. But to get Arab state buy-in, the United States and Israel would need to offer far more on issues such as Jerusalem and borders than either the Trump administration or the Netanyahu government seem willing to do.

Twenty-five years after Oslo, it seems that America, in this case the Trump administration, has learned very little about Arab-Israeli peacemaking. It has proposed an ultimate deal — a conflict-ending accord — when there’s zero chance of one. It is relying far too heavily on Arab states that are unlikely to deliver. And it has abandoned any pretense of being an honest or even an effective mediator by supporting Israel blindly while pressuring Palestinians. Indeed, a quarter-century later, we’re further than ever from any Israeli-Palestinian deal.

The peace process is clearly not ready for prime time. But after all the mistakes we made, I didn’t think any administration could make it worse. I guess I was wrong about that, too.

Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former State Department adviser, was involved in Middle East negotiations from 1989 to 2003. He is the author of "The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President." Follow him on Twitter: @aarondmiller2