By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Middle East Shuttle Diplomacy

Nearly a year after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, the Israeli government’s ongoing escalation of its conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon has put the Middle East on the precipice of a regional war—one that could all too easily draw in the United States. Although Israeli leaders believe that intensified military action will cause the militant group to back down, this sort of “escalate to de-escalate” strategy seldom achieves the desired results. Hezbollah has consistently tied the cessation of its attacks on Israel to a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, and that remains unlikely to change in the wake of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death in an Israeli airstrike on Friday. Even if a 21-day cease-fire were declared between Israel and Hezbollah, as U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron have called for, it would not alter the underlying reality: the best way to prevent a larger regional conflagration is a cease-fire in Gaza.

Unfortunately, negotiations between Israel and Hamas over their war in Gaza appear to be at an impasse over three months after Biden outlined a framework for a cease-fire and deal on the return of Israeli hostages. Both parties have moved the goalposts, adding new conditions or demanding new concessions. After weeks of projecting optimism, Biden administration officials reportedly now concede that “no deal is imminent.” And the window for reaching a deal is rapidly closing ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, at which point Biden’s lame-duck status will diminish his international influence.

Meanwhile, the costs of the war in Gaza continue to mount daily. The probability of securing the safe return of the remaining Israeli hostages only decreases over time. Humanitarian conditions for Palestinian civilians continue to deteriorate day to day amid active conflict, and more of them are being killed or injured in Israeli military operations. The reputational damage to the United States, as well as to Israel, is also steadily building, with negative consequences for other global priorities shared by both countries.

Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, September 2024

With time being of the essence, Washington must overhaul its diplomatic approach. It needs to undertake a much more proactive shuttle diplomacy aimed at ending the war in the next several weeks. The painstaking, patient diplomacy of the U.S. administration and its fellow mediators, Qatar and Egypt, has failed to push Israel and Hamas, and particularly their recalcitrant leaders, across the finish line. High-profile shuttle diplomacy, though risky, can concentrate and magnify pressure, increasing the likelihood that the parties will feel compelled to take difficult decisions. If accompanied by other sources of pressure, it could prove a game changer. Biden should immediately dispatch Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region to shuttle between Israel, Egypt, and Qatar for as many days as necessary to close all remaining gaps in the Gaza cease-fire deal. That goal will also require that Washington both intensify its political, diplomatic, and military pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and work with Arab partners to isolate Hamas and further squeeze its political and military leadership.

 

High Risk, High Reward

Up to this point, CIA Director Bill Burns has been presiding over the cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, which are being conducted in a low-key fashion with as much privacy as is possible. Instead of forcing decisions, the mediators prefer to call recesses and reconvene later to discuss disagreements under what they hope will be better conditions. The theory behind this approach is that by buying time and space for further discussion, the gaps will be whittled down over time and eventually present a zone of agreement. Although these methods have been effective in many contexts, they clearly have not been in this case.

By contrast, shuttle diplomacy, a term coined to describe former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s mediation between Israel and Arab countries after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, is high-stakes and high-profile. It involves a senior U.S. official flying between capitals—“shuttling” between belligerents who do not speak directly to each other—to negotiate directly with the parties until the final gaps are closed, sometimes making multiple stops in each country during a single trip. This form of diplomacy is designed to force the belligerents to choose between making difficult concessions and saying no to a cabinet-level U.S. official, with clear negative consequences.

During shuttles, the mediator seeks to maximize pressure and deprive the parties of time to temporize, defer decisions, or let the mediators down gently. U.S. officials conducting shuttle diplomacy will try to stay on the road and maintain the pressure as long as it takes to finalize an agreement; in one case, Kissinger spent 35 straight days in the Middle East. At other times, American envoys have conducted several rounds of shuttling before getting results.

Shuttle diplomacy has been most effective when clear consequences for noncompliance accompany it. The mediator wields the threat of publicly blaming the recalcitrant party or parties for the failure of talks. This is what James Baker, a successful practitioner of shuttle diplomacy as secretary of state in the George H. W. Bush administration, referred to as “leaving the dead cat” on the doorstep of the side at fault. When naming and shaming is complemented by other threats—sanctions, withholding arms shipments, the possibility that one belligerent will expand its operations—it has been possible to alter the calculus of foreign leaders.

Using these methods, Kissinger mediated two disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and one between Israel and Syria from 1974 to 1975. Former President Jimmy Carter later sealed the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt by shuttling between Jerusalem and Cairo, and Baker successfully orchestrated the 1991 Madrid peace conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict over several regional trips.

To be clear, shuttle diplomacy is not a deus ex machina. Shuttles do not always succeed. The administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President Bill Clinton both engaged in shuttle diplomacy of a sort, with decidedly uneven results. The United States also incurs a greater reputational cost when shuttle diplomacy fails.

There is also a risk that a party will be less willing to compromise on a position after it has taken a very public stand in opposition to the United States, making an issue a matter of pride and honor. Nonstate actors, particularly terrorist groups, are often less sensitive to naming and shaming than nation-states are, although Baker’s shuttle diplomacy worked with the Palestine Liberation Organization before it was recognized by Israel as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in the Oslo accords. In the current conflict, the inaccessibility of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, who would be the final decision-maker on any agreement, and the limits of direct U.S. influence on Hamas would make this task even more challenging.

 

A Question Of Will

Still, shuttle diplomacy represents the best chance for the United States and its regional partners to end the war in Gaza in the near term and thereby provide a pathway to regional de-escalation. The reported sticking points in current talks—the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released and control over the Gazan-Egyptian border—are not insurmountable. Quantitative issues, such as how many Palestinian prisoners are to be freed, are more amenable to compromise than binary choices between two extremes. On the so-called Philadelphi Corridor along the Gazan-Egyptian border, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant has reportedly challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contention that the Israel Defense Forces cannot withdraw without endangering Israeli security.

The primary barrier to an agreement between Israel and Hamas is, as Burns has said publicly, “a question of political will,” not the absence of clever formulations to bridge gaps. And the political pressure that Blinken could generate by shuttling between Egypt, Israel, and Qatar is precisely what is needed if the United States is to have any hope of breaking the impasse. With no more elections left to run in, Biden is in a better position to absorb the political costs of failed shuttle diplomacy than either of his potential successors would be.

Shuttle diplomacy is not for the faint of heart. Blinken would have to persuade Netanyahu that he has something to lose by spurning the United States. In this vein, the Biden administration could threaten to publicly label Netanyahu a danger to the U.S.-Israeli partnership or, in a major speech, clearly express a loss of faith in his handling of the war. Although Biden’s popularity in Israel has dipped since the start of 2024, 57 percent of Israelis overall and 66 percent of Jewish Israelis express confidence in the U.S. president, suggesting that a public rebuke of the divisive Netanyahu could influence Israeli officials’ and civilians’ attitudes.

Another option would be to use Executive Order 14115, issued by Biden in February, to sanction extremist ministers in the Israeli government, such as Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are stoking instability in the West Bank. U.S. sanctions would likely increase the ministers’ appeal on the far right, but the stigma of being designated by Israel’s closest ally could also generate more pressure on the government.

The administration has already suspended the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to protest military operations in the Gazan city of Rafah. If necessary to reach an agreement, Biden and Blinken should threaten to withhold additional weapons systems that have been implicated in civilian casualties in Gaza and deemed unessential to Israel’s security, such as white phosphorous shells. It is possible to strike a balance between meeting Israeli security requirements and making clear that the United States will not indefinitely support a war causing so many civilian casualties and producing diminishing security returns at best. Such threats are not unprecedented in the U.S.-Israeli relationship; in the past, they have been employed regularly. Every U.S. president since Lyndon Johnson, with the exceptions of Clinton and Donald Trump—that is, nine of the last 11 administrations—has threatened to withhold, or has actually withheld, weapons systems or other aid in order to influence Israeli policy.

 

Pressure By Proxy

Since U.S. diplomats don’t interact directly with Hamas leaders, Washington will have to work with Arab mediators to intensify pressure on Sinwar. Many Arab countries have applied pressure on Hamas, but there is much more they can do, especially publicly. By demonstrating a willingness to put pressure on Israel, the administration would be in a stronger position to demand that the United States’ other regional partners squeeze Hamas. Critically, the United States, Egypt, and Qatar should insist that Hamas’s leader delegate negotiating authority to someone outside Gaza to facilitate U.S. shuttling.

Empowering a Hamas official located in Doha or Cairo would allow Blinken to secure real-time, authoritative feedback and answers from Hamas through Qatar and Egypt. This is an admittedly complex negotiating format involving U.S. envoys shuttling between Israeli officials and their Egyptian and Qatari counterparts, who are themselves shuttling between Hamas and Israel and the United States. But it would be no more complicated than Baker’s shuttling between Israel, Jordan, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (the latter through an unofficial “advisory delegation”) in the early 1990s.

In addition to persuading Arab countries to immediately adopt a more aggressive posture on enforcing sanctions against Hamas, the Biden administration should push them to publicly call out Sinwar’s obstructionist role in the talks. Other Hamas leaders appear more willing to negotiate, and Arab criticism of Sinwar could strengthen their hand. This is particularly important, given that Israel’s killing of Ismail Haniyeh—who, even with his clear culpability for acts of terrorism, was advocating a cease-fire—may have weakened other proponents of negotiation within Hamas. Convincing Arab countries that Hamas members charged for their roles in murdering Americans must be remanded into U.S. custody will be extremely difficult, but the Biden administration has a strategic, legal, and moral obligation to try.

Although Israel and Egypt disagree about how extensive the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are, it is undeniable that Hamas has smuggled weapons through this route. Closer cooperation between the United States, Egypt, and Israel on shutting down those networks and better policing of Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline must be part of this equation. Egypt should also join Qatar in threatening to deny Hamas officials access to, and expel them from, their territory.

All of this is a heavy lift, and the United States could fail even if this approach is executed perfectly. Given the stakes, however, the administration should use every tool at its disposal. The lives of Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans depend on it.

 

 

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