Forty Years of Camp David, Forty Years Without Peace

Forty years ago, the Camp David Accords were signed, making the US the key broker in the Middle East and sidelining the United Nations and a comprehensive approach to peace-making. In the past forty years, the US approach has focused on bilateral step-by-step negotiations which were meant gradually to weave Arab states into a web of relations gravitating around US power; it never built a comprehensive regional security architecture that could survive its own power and provide a mechanism to absorb the growing power competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran. With US President Donald Trump currently tearing down the basic parameters of the US approach, the EU should throw its weight behind international law, the United Nations, and comprehensive diplomacy again.