Diplomatic Challenges in the Middle East : หน้า 24/52

be recognized, but nobody should expect them to move beyond reactive diplomacy any time soon. Paradoxically, the Bush administration decided to refocus on the peace process just as conditions had become nearly impossible. Pushed by so-called moderate Arab governments that made it clear that the United States was more likely to get their support on Iraq if it relanced the peace process, the administration took some steps to revive negotiations. When it did so, it followed a different approach from that of its predecessors, pushing for a quick agreement on final status issues. Since 1967, the United States has been very hesitant to spell out what the details of a final settlement should look like. While limited forays were occasionally made to describe the terms of a settlement, no American leader was willing to pursue such a vision in the face of Israeli opposition. Instead, the United States tended to identify the issues and facilitate negotiations. The Clinton administration followed this path in almost unadulterated form, leaving the negotiation of final status issues until the year before it left office—and then avoiding a public stand on those issues until a few days before departing. When the Bush administration did finally devote sustained, high-level attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning in the summer of 2007 with preparations for what became the Annapolis conference, the administration showed an enthusiasm for addressing those issues that previous administrations had postponed for so long: it urged that Israelis and Palestinians negotiate a final peace agreement and has weighed in (albeit with fairly general language, at least in public) on what that agreement should look like. The Bush conception of a settlement is not remarkable for its content (which does not appear to differ significantly in general outline from the parameters enunciated by President Clinton immediately before leaving office). Rather, what is remarkable is that Bush has come to accept the urgency of a settlement and is willing to involve himself personally in a series of initiatives designed to push the process along. Yet these initiatives do not take into consideration how much the situation has changed. Rather, they appear to assume that it is possible to revive a process leading to a two-state solution as if Hamas and Fatah were not at war, the West Bank and Gaza were not divided from each other, and the West Bank were not partitioned into a checkerboard of Palestinian and Israeli enclaves increasingly entrenched and difficult to undo. The implicit assumption of the Bush administration seems to be that the prospect of a settlement and improved conditions on the West Bank, coupled with draconian sanctions against the population of any territory governed by Hamas, will present Palestinians with a choice sufficiently stark to convince them to rally behind Fatah. The Problem of Nuclear Proliferation Among the non-country-specific issues that the United States confronts in the new Middle East, that of nuclear proliferation appears the most urgent and most alarming to the United States. The issue has been discussed in Washington mostly vis-à-vis Iran and, after the Sep-