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The US is not an indispensable peacemaker
America needs to accept more peacemakers in the world
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Over the years, as America’s foreign policy became more militarised, America appears to have given up on the virtues of honest peacemaking.
PHOTO: AFP
Trita Parsi
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There was a time when all roads to peace went through Washington. From the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt brokered by president Jimmy Carter, to the 1993 Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn, to senator George Mitchell’s Good Friday Agreement that ended the fighting in Northern Ireland in 1998, America was the indispensable nation for peacemaking. To Mr Paul Nitze, a long-time diplomat and Washington insider, “making evident its qualifications as an honest broker” was central to America’s influence after the end of the Cold War.
But over the years, as America’s foreign policy became more militarised and as sustaining the so-called rules-based order increasingly meant that the United States put itself above all rules, America appears to have given up on the virtues of honest peacemaking.
