For nearly twenty years, Aaron David Miller was part of American efforts to broker a peace deal that would have involved Israel ceding control of the Golan Heights to Syria. He is now grateful that these efforts failed:

[H]ad we succeeded, the results might have been catastrophic for Israel and for the U.S.

What [the U.S.] failed to realize was that . . . any deal to return the Golan Heights . . . was likely to be . . . fraught precisely because Mr. Assad was so cruel in his policies and [because] his regime consisted of an Alawite minority governing a Sunni majority. Without real reform—something neither Hafez al-Assad nor his son and successor, Bashar, was ever really serious about—perhaps it would have been only a matter of time before Syria experienced real instability. . . .

[It] can be said with certainty . . . that had Israel given up the Golan, the situation today would have been much more complex. In response to the Syrian civil war and the rise of Islamic State, Israel would have faced a hot front, confronting Hizballah, Iran, and a range of Islamist jihadists. Given the Golan’s strategic importance, Israel would have had to reoccupy it and would have found itself in the middle of Syria’s civil war. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Israel’s actions would have been a unifying factor and might have actually bucked up the Assad regime as it tried to rally Syrians against the “Zionist enemy.” . . .

It’s a cautionary tale for well-intentioned U.S. and Israeli peacemakers alike.

Roger Zakheim believes the U.S. has taken the wrong approach to the Israel-Hamas war, and to the fate of the five Americans currently being held in Gaza:

For more than seven months the secretary of state and director of central intelligence, along with other senior officials, have treated the Gaza war as if it were a conflict between state actors, employing shuttle diplomacy and negotiating with both sides. They have indulged in the conceit that you can negotiate with a terrorist organization by treating it as an equal party. The Biden administration has continued to allow Qatar to give Hamas’s political leadership sanctuary in its five-star headquarters in Doha, on the theory that if they can talk with Hamas leaders, a resolution is more likely.

It is long overdue for the United States to shift the paradigm. Over the past twenty years, the United States has developed an array of intelligence, economic, and military tools and techniques that can pressure and destroy terrorist networks. They should be deployed against Hamas.

We should also unleash our military and intelligence community’s world-class targeting and strike capability that killed Osama bin Laden and Qassem Suleimani, and has rescued hundreds of hostages held by terrorists. . . . Instead of fully utilizing this exquisite capability, only a handful of military advisers are whispering advice to Israeli counterparts in Tel Aviv. . . . As one IDF special operator told me, “Your Delta forces would be a game changer.”