Columbia International Affairs Online: Policy Briefs

CIAO DATE: 09/2008

PolicyWatch #1261: Reading Between the Lines of President Bush's July 16 Address

Robert Satloff

July 2007

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Abstract

President Bush's July 16 address on the Middle East peace process was a mix of the old and the new, offering neither an unequivocal reaffirmation of past approaches nor a thoroughly novel direction for Arab-Israeli diplomacy in the wake of Hamas's coup in Gaza.

On the one hand, Bush strongly re-emphasized the key principles of his landmark June 2002 speech, which set Palestinian internal security, rule of law, and governance reform as a critical benchmark for active American support of Palestinian statehood. On the other hand, the most important innovation in this week's speech was the shift in emphasis from the three-tiered Roadmap to Middle East peace to the speedier and more direct engagement envisioned in the pursuit of a "political horizon." Between these two approaches there is a natural tension, which the president massaged with language that was at times soothing to each of the parties.

Bush's call for an "international meeting" later this year received the most headlines from the speech. Yet a close reading suggests that this event is less likely to launch formal negotiations on the establishment of a Palestinian state than to serve as the target date by which to measure the progress of internal Palestinian Authority (PA) reform that is a necessary precondition for those negotiations. In this respect, the president's international meeting is a less ambitious, more realistic event than many commentators have suggested.