The Bush administration has inherited a far different world than that inhabited by the architects of the Madrid and Oslo diplomatic frameworks. For the latter final status talks were a future objective. For George W. Bush they are a historical failure. His administration is determined not to make the errors of its predecessor--to become so consumed by the process of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy that the most frequent visitor to the White House is Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Intent upon revolutionizing the international strategic environment by consigning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to the diplomatic scrap yard, Bush strategists have found a willing partner in the Sharon government and also in Turkey and India. U.S. concerns about defending against the non-conventional and missile capabilities of Iran and Iraq are today more than ever at the leading edge of the Pentagon's weapon, doctrine, and technology efforts. With the demise of the Madrid assumptions about the effectiveness of an Israeli-Arab regional alliance, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has an avid interest in participating in this effort and sharing its fruits.

Leading members of the Bush administration--from the vice president's office to the highest political echelons in the Pentagon--view Israel as first and foremost a strategic ally, a principal partner in confronting what U.S. strategists have identified as the most pressing contemporary challenge to U.S. interests, not just in the Middle East but internationally--"rogue nations" wielding missiles aimed against the United States and its allies.

"We are without a so-called peer competitor in the world," explained Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently. "We're not without threats or worries or concerns or risks in the world. We know it's still a dangerous and untidy world, the weapons are more powerful. The weapons of mass destruction are more widely disbursed. And they're in the hands of people who are different than the people who had them 25 years ago. So that's a big change.

"Therefore, one has to ask the question, in the 21st century, given the changed nature of the world, and the evolving threat that exists, what are the deterrents that would be most helpful? What are the things that will help this country be best able to contribute to peace and stability in the world?"

Sharon, who was one of the first Israeli leaders to publicly declare that Israel's strategic interests ranged from Morocco to Pakistan, has found a receptive audience in George W. Bush's Washington. Vice President Richard Cheney has spoken favorably toward Israel's destruction of Iraq's Osiraq reactor, and Paul Wolfowitz, a top Pentagon appointee, is an Israeli partisan who was dispatched to the Jewish state in order to keep Israel out of the Gulf War. Rumsfeld has pointedly endorsed Israel's Arrow missile defense system. The Republican enthusiasm for missile defense against Iran and Iraq--Rumsfeld authored the most influential study on missile defense--will no doubt increase the political impetus to enhance strategic cooperation with Israel.

Top foreign policy advisers to the Bush administration have an intimate familiarity with the Middle East. Rumsfeld served as a special Middle East envoy under Ronald Reagan. When they look at a map of the Middle East, however, their eyes are drawn to the Gulf and the Mashriq. Only reluctantly have they been compelled to focus on Palestine and its interminably warring parties, not because they have any hopes for rapprochement between Sharon and Arafat but because of their concern that the violence between Israel and the Palestinians will "spill over" to Israel's eastern front, engaging Iraq and Jordan as well as Syria and Lebanon and complicating a U.S. strike against Baghdad. For them the Arab-Israeli conflict is not amenable to American power. Rather it is a black hole of frustrated expectations that the Bush administration has, without success, attempted to avoid.

Since coming to power, the Bush administration has fashioned a view of the Palestinian dimension of the conflict based upon these impressions. Its principled intention not to take a leading role, however, has not resulted in a lower American profile and less high level attention devoted to the issue. Instead the continuing intifada has forced itself upon the reluctant attentions of top foreign policy officials in Washington, most notably Secretary of State Colin Powell, and CIA director George Tenet and more recently special envoy Anthony Zinni and Vice President Richard Cheney. Their involvement, however, has been characterized by crisis management of increasing intimacy rather than by any sense of strategic policy direction. If there is such a dimension to current U.S. actions it can best be characterized by increasing calls for the Palestinian Authority to force an end to the Palestinian rebellion, by forces under its nominal control as well as those fielded by opposition elements.

As Powell explained on May 22, 2001, when he was officially presented with the report of the international commission headed by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, appointed in October 2000 by President Bill Clinton, "I don't think that our policy has changed. It remains in the same sequence. The United States is not putting forward a peace plan today; the United States is not convening a meeting for the purpose of going over various final status issues. What we are doing today is very simple and very direct, calling once again for an unconditional end to the violence."

The Bush administration has yet to articulate its own strategic direction on the next stage of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. Possible parameters of such intervention, however, have been most clearly articulated by Edward Djerejian, an administration intimate who remains in the private sector and who does not speak formally for Washington. Djerejian's long and continuing association with James Baker, his continuing access to top administration officials, and his presence "at the creation" of the Madrid era lend a particular prominence to his views.

Djerejian, in a speech on April 12, 2001, offered the most comprehensive "Republican" look at the post-Oslo era. U.S. leadership of the kind exhibited by the Nixon White House after the October 1973 war, by the Carter administration at Camp David, and by George Bush at Madrid remain the preferable paradigm for U.S. leadership, Djerejian argued. His call to "reassess U.S. policy towards the region as a whole" cannot but have set off alarm bells in Israel, where memories have yet to fade of Henry Kissinger's "agonizing reassessment" of U.S. policy included the temporary embargo on some arms transfers and forced Israel into an second disengagement agreement with Egypt in 1975.

Djerejian observed that the power of "pan-Arab nationalism as a united front against Israel" is enjoying a political renaissance despite the "decisive setback" this idea suffered by the creation of the coalition against Iraq in the Gulf War. He criticized the Oslo process, with its focus on interim agreements, as "too protracted, without enough tangible results on the ground." In contrast to the failed experiences of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Djerejian noted that Hizballah's success in forcing an Israeli evacuation from Lebanon has fired the popular Palestinian imagination, "including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and even groups within Fateh, such as the Tanzim, who see violence and confrontation as a necessary concomitant to negotiations." He noted that Israel's Jewish majority, as a consequence of the intifada and the unrest among Israel's Arab minority in October 2000, now feels threatened "both from within its borders and from outside."

As befitting one of the architects of Madrid, Djerejian lamented the failure to reach an Israeli-Syrian agreement, which "would have had important strategic implications for the region as a whole and could have enhanced the prospects for a final status agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis." Djerejian pointed to this track--"the forgotten agenda of the Madrid peace process"--as ripe for success, if the political will in Israel, Syria, and the United States can be mustered. In March 2002, Djerejian announced that he will lead a "Track Two" U.S.-Syrian dialogue.

On the Palestinian track, Djerejian noted that the intifada has not altered the basic equation governing relations between the parties--Israel must accommodate the Palestinians "as a distinct national and political entity." Palestinians require Israeli consent to achieve their national and political goals. He advised "making haste slowly" in contrast to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's attempt to end the conflict. "This failed effort altered the very process at the heart of the Oslo agreement--trying to obtain what is obtainable as interim goals."

Djerejian supports disaggregating the basket of final status issues--for example, reaching partial agreements on land (including the consolidation of major settlements), water, security, and economic relations, while placing the end of the conflict, refugees, and Jerusalem in "separate but continuing negotiating tracks to explore compromise solutions."

Such a process, he believes, would accommodate the creation of a Palestinian state not as an expression of a final status agreement that would end the conflict but rather as an indication of the renewed vitality of incremental progress toward a comprehensive agreement.

The mission of Anthony Zinni is to establish the security basis (through the Tenet and Mitchell plans) for an as yet to be agreed upon political dialogue. But if the Bush administration decides, or is compelled, to focus upon a U.S. plan to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Djerejian's views offer as informed a view as any as to what it might comprise.