Lawrence J. Haas
The United States is no stranger to peace-making, and in recent decades, Washington has played the vital role of an honest broker in bringing lasting peace to the Middle East, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere.
Where Washington succeeded, it did not impose peace from the outside but instead coaxed it out of warring parties that were ready for it. That was true with Israel and Egypt in 1979, Israel and Jordan in 1994, Serbia and Bosnia in 1995, Northern Ireland in 1998, and Israel and other Arab nations in 2020.
However, for different reasons in each case, the parties committed themselves to peace because they concluded that they would gain more from it than from continued bloodshed. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat sought peace to regain land lost in war and attract U.S. economic aid. The parties to the conflict in Northern Ireland were exhausted by three decades of “troubles.” The Abraham Accords came about largely because the parties involved decided to align themselves against a more dangerous foe in Tehran.
But U.S. peace-making without willing parties—as we see today with Russia and Ukraine, and with Israel and Hamas—is sure to backfire, tarnishing America’s global image while planting the seeds for more war. In fact, a Washington that seems too eager for peace, even a hollow peace that provides only a short respite before the fighting returns, could make war likelier in other places as well.
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