 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to our beautiful headquarters here at 31 Bly Street for this special event with Martin Indyk. I'm Michael Fullylove, the Executive Director of the Institute. Let me begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which the Institute stands, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present. Ladies and gentlemen, looking at the world today, we're confronted with a host of problems where nearly 600 days into Russia's shocking and brutal invasion of Ukraine, geopolitical risk is rising and it's moving from the margins of the international economy to the center. And the recent heat waves, wildfires and storms across Europe and North America demonstrate the existential danger posed by unchecked climate change. It does today feel in particular like the world is on fire, although we know that's because of back burning. So the problems, we see very significant problems and yet we also see effective statecraft responding to many of these problems. After four years of President Trump, for example, the Biden administration, I would argue, has demonstrated great skill in assembling and leading a coalition of like-minded nations to support Ukraine. And in Asia, the administration has created a situation of strength in the last couple of years, consolidating key Asian alliances, bringing Japan and South Korea closer together, quickening US relations with Vietnam and India, standing up orcus and convening the Quad, even as it stabilizes the US-China relationship. So those are just two examples of how diplomacy matters and diplomacy makes a difference. Smart diplomats can solve some of the problems that we face. And today we have the opportunity to hear from an accomplished diplomat, a practitioner of diplomacy and a scholar of diplomacy, as well as a founding board member of the Lowy Institute, Martin Indyk. One of the missions that Frank Lowy gave to the Institute 20 years ago when he established the Institute was to project Australian voices abroad. And in a way, that is a description of Martin's life. Martin is a Sydney boy, born, grew up in Castle Crag, just over the bridge, studied at the University of Sydney and ANU before moving to Washington to enter the think tank world. He was talent spotted by Bill Clinton. He took US citizenship and Martin became the President's key advisor on the Middle East. He twice served as US Ambassador to Israel as well as serving in important positions in the Department of State. And later he returned to government to serve as President Obama's special envoy for Middle East peace. He is also hugely experienced in the think tank world, serving at Brookings for nearly two decades and helping to run the Brookings Institution through a purple patch in its history and now serving as a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Martin is also the author of several important books, including his memoir Innocent Abroad and most recently, Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East diplomacy. So there is literally no one in the world better qualified to address today the topic, what would Kissinger do? Please join me in welcoming Martin Indyk to the lectern. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be back at the Lower Institute. I've been at this podium. I've had the honor of being at this podium on several other occasions, but it's been a long time between COVID and everything else that's delayed our return to Australia. So I'm very glad to be here with my wife, Gail. And I'm honored that so many friends are here, too. I'm particularly honored with the presence of Prime Minister John Howard. Thank you, sir, for coming today. Michael Fully Love is someone whom I met at the, I don't even remember now how long ago it was. It must be 21 years ago, when Frank Lowey first came to Washington to scout out the idea of setting up a international relations think tank in Australia. And he came to see me. I was there at the Brookings Institution, which is the oldest think tank in the world. And he came with this young man named Michael Fully Love, whom I'd never met before. And Michael was responsible for kind of writing the prospectus, the paper, for this institution. And it's a legend now that I took Frank into this room at the front of the Brookings Institution, which is a replica of the place where the scholars first met at the turn of the century when Brookings was first established. And I pointed out to him that every wall had wood paneling on it. And I said, you know, you're setting up a new institute, Frank. You need wood paneling to make it look like it's an old institute. And lo and behold, he comes back and the first thing he does is buy this building. So I feel like not only was I present at the creation, but I have some responsibility for the fact that we are here in this beautiful building today. Michael, in the meantime, rose from being a scholar to running the Lowy Institute. And I have to say that he has taken it well beyond anything that I, or speaking for Frank, imagined was possible. And Michael, you deserve a great deal of credit for the way in which the Lowy Institute has really become such a force not only in debating international relations in this country, but so respected abroad. Tomorrow, September the 13th, you probably don't realize it, but it's the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the South Lawn of the White House back in 1993. October the 5th, a couple of weeks later, will be the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And I wanted to talk about those two anniversaries today in my opening remarks. 20 years apart, the first was a war that led to peace, and the second was a peace that led to war. And the distinction between the two is important when thinking about peacemaking diplomacy in general, but in particular, peacemaking diplomacy in the Middle East. I was involved in the second effort as a US diplomat, a member of Bill Clinton's peace team, his ambassador to Israel. And for eight years, we fought hard to try to turn the Oslo agreement into a lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and we failed. Then I was given another opportunity, a second chance, when President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry succeeded in relaunching the final status negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians in 2013. And they asked me to be the special envoy for those negotiations on behalf of the United States, and we failed again. At the end of that exercise in 2014, which by the way was the last time there's been any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations up to this date, I decided that I, instead of writing a book about why we failed, I would go back and look at why the diplomacy of peacemaking after the 1973 Yom Kippur War succeeded. And in particular, to look at the American diplomat who was responsible for that success, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is remembered for a lot of things, most of them controversial. He's not usually remembered for his peacemaking in the Middle East. But in fact, after the 1973 war, he crafted a diplomatic effort, a peace process, that led to three Arab-Israeli agreements. One between Israel and Egypt that disengaged the forces. A second one with a deeper Israeli withdrawal into the Sinai gave up the strategic passes to Egypt, and Egypt took control of the Suez Canal. And the third agreement was between Israel and Syria, known as the Golan Heights Disengagement Agreement of 1974. The Israel-Egypt agreement produced a peace between Israel and Egypt one year after Kissinger left office. Jimmy Carter at Camp David 1 produced that. But without Kissinger's diplomacy, that would have never happened. The Golan Heights Disengagement Agreement to this day governs relations between Israel and Syria and has been maintained by both sides, even as Syria descended into civil war, and has essentially made the Golan Heights the quietest of Israel's borders, save the Israel-Egypt border, which was a peace border, since then. So in looking back, you could say that Kissinger's diplomacy was highly successful. What was the secret source, as we say in America? I decided to go back and try to understand this. Even though Kissinger's written a great deal, his memoirs run to thousands of pages, you cannot find an explanation of what he's thinking was about peacemaking. There's a lot of detail about the peacemaking. But as I went through the protocols of his negotiations, which are now all open in the archives, I discovered something which I found quite curious, that every time his Arab or Israeli interlocutors would say, we're ready for peace, would tell him we're ready for the big step, we're ready to reconcile and make peace, he would back them off and say, no, no, that's too risky, that's too dangerous, we've got to go for something less. And as I look back at his writings and I came to understand something that's fundamental to his success and our subsequent failure, and that is a deep skepticism about the potential for actually ending conflict between states and people. And I believe that what was more important than peace treaties that ended conflicts was an order that maintained the peace, prevented the outbreak of war, that ameliorated conflict, and that it would eventually, if that order was maintained, lead the sides to reconcile. But that it was wrong to assume that just because leaders said they wanted to make peace, that you could actually resolve these deep-seated conflicts in one fell swoop, and that it was therefore much more important to introduce an incremental approach, a cautious, conservative incrementalism. And that's what he did when he had the opportunity to make peace between the Israelis and the Arabs. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he introduced what he called step-by-step diplomacy, one step on the Egyptian side, one step on the Syrian side, another step on the Egyptian side, but smaller steps, always eschewing the idea that you could achieve a comprehensive peace. His bosses didn't agree with him. Both Nixon and Ford wanted to go for the big deal, wanted to go for the whole enchiladas, we say, wanted to grasp the brass ring of peacemaking in the Middle East. And he always found a way to back them off, to slow them down, to convince them that it was safer and more productive to go for the smaller steps. It's not always an ideal approach. He could have, for instance, achieved an Israel-Egypt peace treaty before he left office if he had taken a more ambitious, less risk-averse approach. Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, who was Prime Minister of Israel at the time, were ready for that as the protocols show. But he wasn't, and he wasn't prepared to risk it. And that approach found resonance with Rabin. 20 years later, when Rabin decided to make peace with the Palestinians, with the PLO. As Rabin was fond of saying in those days, you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends. And the big challenge for him, recognizing that Israel had to find a way to make peace with the Palestinians, was how to move from a period of intense conflict and war to a state of peace. And so what did he do? He took a page out of Kissinger's book and introduced a step-by-step process, an incremental process called the Oslo Accords. Few people today remember what's in the Oslo Accords, so I'll tell you. There was nothing about a Palestinian state. There was nothing about Jerusalem. There was nothing about refugees. There was nothing about borders. All there was in the Oslo Accords was mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO and an incremental process of Israeli army withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza in phases. And in return, the Palestinians taking control of their own affairs through the Palestinian authority that was set up by the Oslo Accords. And that incremental approach was pursued while Rabin was alive. And it resulted in two implementation agreements. Some of you may remember Arafat coming back to Gaza and taking control of Jericho and then taking control of 27 percent of the West Bank, which happened to contain 90 percent of the Palestinian population on which the Palestinian authority was established and all of Gaza. And it was, that was in fact the high point of the Oslo process when Rabin and Arafat signed that agreement in 1995, in September of 1995. And I guess Arafat started to take control of the people, downstanding people in the West Bank and Gaza and a decent part of the territory, a third of the territory. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated two months later. And as a result, not only did his wingman, Shimon Peres, lose the next elections to BB Netanyahu, who ran against Oslo, but also the approach that Rabin had brought to building trust with the Palestinians, with Arafat in particular, also went out the window. Instead, you had Netanyahu approaching the Oslo process in a very negative way, doing his best to try to drag the process out and avoid the commitments that the previous government, the Rabin Peres government, had made. Bill Clinton and his team spent a year and a half cajoling Netanyahu to do the next phase of the Oslo process, which eventually he did in the wire agreement of 1998, and another 13% of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank came under Palestinian control to a total of 40%. And then Netanyahu's government collapsed as a result of giving up that territory. And the lesson BB took from that was never give up territory again, because you'll lose your government. And in effect, that was the last deal, the 1998 deal, there hasn't been any other agreement. But what happened then, and I'll try to collapse this quickly because we don't have enough time, is that Netanyahu lost his government and Barack became Prime Minister with a mandate to pursue Rabin's legacy, except he went to Clinton and he said, let's finish it. Let's go for an end of conflict, end of claims deal. The very opposite of what Kissinger had warned about. Barack said, I don't have enough support to do another phase, let's end it. And that's what we tried to do at Camp David in July of 2000. And we failed. Arafat told us before we went there that he wasn't ready. He was honest enough to tell us he wasn't ready to end the conflict. But Clinton didn't listen under pressure from Barack, and the two of them tried to press him, made him a generous deal, but not a deal that he could accept. And the rest essentially is history. What happened from that point on was that the intifada broke out, violence from Palestinians and Israeli retaliation for that destroyed the whole framework of peace and the trust between the people and the leaders. And try as presidents might, since then, and every one of them has tried in one way or another to do the opposite of what Kissinger wanted to try to end the conflict, including President Trump, including President Obama, each one of them has failed. And that, I think, underscores the wisdom today in a situation where the Israelis and Palestinians are mired in conflict, the wisdom of trying again an incremental approach, a much more cautious step-by-step process of trying to rebuild trust on the basis of Israeli territorial withdrawals from the West Bank in phases. Sounds far-fetched? Well, that's exactly what the United States and the Biden administration and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia are trying to do today as part of the Israeli-Saudi peace deal that you may have read about that they are now trying to negotiate. So Kissinger is not yet dead, he's 100 years old, still going strong, and perhaps it's time to revive Kissingerian approach to Middle East diplomacy. Thank you. Martin, thanks for kicking us off in such a thought-provoking way and for finishing on that point on the Saudi-Israel normalization, but just before I ask you about that, let me ask you this, what is it about Henry? You literally wrote the book on Henry Kissinger and his Middle East diplomacy, and you've talked about his caution and his incrementalist approach, but more broadly, why reflect, I know you know Henry Kissinger very well, reflect a little bit more on Kissinger as a figure in US politics and in diplomacy, why is he such a storied figure, what was beyond that particular approach, what was it about him that made him a master of the game? So I think that Kissinger stands out together with Big Brzezinski. As Europeans, I mean they were born in Europe, they grew up in Europe, they had a European understanding of history, and in particular Kissinger's understanding of history was informed by his study of order in Europe in the 19th century, when Castle Ray and Metternich, the foreign ministers of the Great Britain and Austria, put together an order after the vast destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, which incorporated post-Napoleonic France into the order and maintained the peace without formal peace treaties for almost 100 years, until it broke down in the First World War. And so Kissinger's whole approach to American foreign policy was informed by that very European experience, very different from any of the secretaries of a state that came after him. And because he had that sense of history, when he came to power, he advanced an approach which was focused on maintaining order, and order was to be maintained by producing a balance of power in favor of the status quo, in favor of the United States, of course, but this was the height of the Cold War. And that was the essence, the simple essence of his approach. It was a strategic approach based on the balance of power to produce an equilibrium that would maintain the status quo in America's favor. And that's the policy that he pursued. Of course, it was overlaid by the Soviet Union, the openings of China, but all of that was in the service of this order that he was trying to build on the model of the European order of the 19th century. And so that I think made him unique. Why he's such a storied figure at this point is partly because he's still alive, but partly because notwithstanding some of the egregious things that he did, the maintenance of that order worked very well for the United States, and particularly the openings China created a strategic environment that was very favorable to the United States for decades after. I described you earlier as both a practitioner and a scholar of diplomacy. And you had this unusual experience with Kissinger that you'd known him for many years, known him personally. And yet then you decided to write a book on him. And you went back into the archives and you were suddenly coming at Kissinger, not as a colleague or a fellow practitioner, but as a scholar. What surprised you in the archives? How did it change your mind about the Henry that you thought you knew? Well, you know, Henry, because he was a student of history, as well as a historical actor, he kept, he documented every conversation that he ever had. So in the archives, his conversation with Liza Minnelli and his other celebrity associates. But there's also great detail on all of his negotiations and every negotiation is documented there. And about 95% of those documents have now been declassified. Today, you would never be able to go back to the archives. Imagine 30 years from now you went to the archives, the Biden administration, you wouldn't find any of that. It's all done by text, it's kept out of the documents. There's all sorts of reasons why they now avoid this or destroy the emails. So it's a unique situation where he has revealed himself in all of these documents. But Kissinger is a very complicated figure. In particular, when it came to the Middle East, he was operating in an anti-Semitic White House and an anti-Israel State Department at the time. And so he obfuscated what he was doing. He always tried to convince everybody he was dealing with that in fact he was doing their bidding when in fact he was doing the exact opposite. And it's only through the protocols that you have the negotiations that you discover what he was really up to. And he would regularly flaunt Nixon's instructions, just ignore them or say that he didn't receive them. And he was subsequent when I talked to him about this. He'd say, Nixon understood that there were things that he never really intended me to implement. He said, like bombing the Brookings Institution, which was one of the things that Nixon ordered him to do. But Kissinger basically took it upon himself, especially in the days of Watergate when Nixon was really no longer in control and drunk a lot of the time, to run foreign policy for the United States. And he did that in a way that he did not want to reveal even in his memoirs. But it's there in the documents. Well, I definitely sympathize with Kissinger's instincts in not bombing a think tank. I think that was wise. Let me ask you, I interviewed Dr. Kissinger, you'll recall for the director's chair, my podcast in last December. And one of the subjects that I talked to him about was the role of individuals in making history, as opposed to vast in personal forces. And when you look back on your career in Middle East diplomacy, how much of the really crucial decisions were driven by the individual preferences of individuals versus forces over which they didn't have much control? I mean, you mentioned Arafat, for example, in Camp David. How much was that? Could Arafat have made a deal or was it beyond him? Obviously, individuals make decisions in the context of big impersonal forces. But how important in the Middle East did you find the role of individual leaders? So, Kissinger certainly puts a great deal of emphasis on the role of leaders. In fact, his last book called Leadership profiled the leaders that he most respected, like Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, of course. And he put Anwar Siddharth in there. He says it was after reading my book, but in fact, I came to understand that it was because he had to have a person of color in there these days. And I tend to take the same view that one can see in people like Siddharth and Rubin and King Hussein of Jordan. And for that matter, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, these big personalities who really took control and shaped events for better or worse. So that's obviously important. But as they say, leaders make history, but not as they please. And that's the other reality that I came across all the time, which was that so much is shaped by circumstance as well. Leadership is critically important, but the opportunity has to be there. There has to be a ripeness. Edward Barak wanted to make peace. But he, not only did he do it in, I think, the wrong way, but he didn't have partners to work with in a way that Bagan had with Saddam or Rubin had with King Hussein. And he didn't have the moment, the opportunity there was different, was missing. And my colleague, Richard House, the Council on Formulations, has introduced this concept of ripeness, that when conflicts are ripe to be settled, that's the moment in which individuals and leaders can actually make a difference. But if they're not ripe, and you can look at the Israeli-Palestinian situation today and say, it's clearly not ripe for some kind of major initiative, but it wouldn't matter if you had a leader in Israel and a leader on the Palestinian side that had the support of their people, which you don't. But if you did, it wouldn't matter in circumstances in which the parties were not ready to move, the circumstances weren't ripe, the balance of power wasn't ripe. So I think it is a combination of circumstance and leadership that can produce breakthroughs. And staying on this theme of leaders, you mentioned in your remarks some pretty significant figures, Prime Minister Rubin, King Hussein and others. Of the leaders in the Middle East that you dealt with personally in your career, was there one whose personal quality is really, really impressed you? Did you have a favourite, if I can put it that way? Yeah, actually it was Saddam. Subsequently it was Rubin, but Saddam originally. Because Saddam had a vision of peace, had the ability to lead his people to support this idea and the courage to do it and the ingenuity, I mean to go to war in order to make peace because he had to disrupt the status quo. And the way that he negotiated with Kissinger was total surprise to Kissinger and Kissinger was the first to admit he could never have succeeded without Saddam because Kissinger came in and said, let's do it this way, we can argue about a few miles here and a few miles there or you can go with me, let's do this deal and then we'll move on to the next one. And Saddam said, okay, I'll follow my friend Henry and was ready to trust in him and not to get bogged down in the details that all of his advisors were insisting upon. He did the same with Jimmy Carter at Camp David and it was that kind of statesmanship which he was prepared to take risks for the peace that he was so determined to achieve for his people. Rubin was very similar in that regard, in the end, was courageous in the way that he was prepared to take calculated risks and to break the mold, particularly by dealing with this arch-terrorist Yassar Arafa in order to try to achieve a peace. And both of them, not coincidentally, lost their lives to assassins who were opposed to peace. You mentioned that when you reflected on your own attempts to contribute to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that the presidents wanted to go for the whole enchilada. They wanted the big ambitious achievement and that perhaps they should have followed a more cautious, Kissingerian approach. But you've also introduced the idea of ripeness. Do you think when you look back on Camp David and then your later service with John Kerry for Obama's presidency, was the ripeness there? I mean, even if you had pursued a different approach, was it ripe for resolution? So the ripeness was certainly there after the 1973 war and after the first Gulf War. If you remember that George H. W. Bush and James Baker took advantage of that war to bring all of Israel's Arab neighbors and the Palestinians into a negotiation. She was launched at the Madrid Peace Conference immediately after that war. And that tells you something about the correlation between wars which disrupt the status quo and create a plasticity that diplomats can then seize on and drive towards a negotiation in the case of Bush 41. So the opportunity was there. The Soviet Union collapsed. Rabin was then elected with a mandate to make peace. The Arabs had no choice because they had no Soviet patron anymore but to make peace. Salam Hussein's army had been destroyed. And so that was clearly a ripe moment for peacemaking. That's when Clinton and I came into office. Subsequently after Camp David II and the collapse of the peace process, it really lost all its potential because the whole framework of peace was just destroyed by violence. And it's one thing to make peace. You see this in Northern Ireland to make peace agreements and to kind of struggle to implement, but both sides kind of implement and they eventually build trust and the conflict subsides and the agreement survives. But it's another thing entirely when the two sides commit themselves to peace, observe their commitments in the breach as the Palestinians did when it came to violence and terrorism and the Israelis did when it came to settlements. And then go back to conflict. So once you've gone back to conflict, neither side is going to believe in the commitments of the other side. So you simply can't put it together again. It's rotten. It's not ripe. And that's been the real challenge. And unfortunately, and I was part of this, instead of saying, wait a minute, we got to step back and try to rebuild, try to create a ripening process. We said, let's go for the whole thing, time and time again. And it was impossible to do. All right, let me talk about, let me come to where you finished your prepared remarks. The situation at the moment, and there's a little bit of plasticity, perhaps in the region. It's clear that the Biden administration is ambitious to conclude a normalization of links between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which would involve a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty and a civilian nuclear program for the Saudis. And that would also have implications for the Palestinians. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us what the state of play is, what the chances of success are, and what implications it would have for the region. So I don't know, but I guess this probably hasn't received a lot of attention in the Australian press. It's getting a little bit of attention in the American press. But what's actually going on is that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has told President Biden that he's ready for a peace deal with Israel to formally recognize Israel and have full, normal relations with Israel. Now Saudi Arabia has never been in a war with Israel, or it's not the same as what I was describing between Israel and Egypt, Israel, Syria, or Israel and Palestinians for that matter. But because Saudi Arabia, the king of Saudi Arabia is the custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, because essentially Saudi Arabia leads the Muslim world. And because in the Arab world where leadership is usually contested, the others have fallen away, whether it's Egypt or Syria or Iraq, they're all in trouble. And Saudi Arabia has emerged as this very wealthy economic powerhouse with these Muslim credentials, so that a peace deal with Israel would be, as President Biden likes to call it, a BFD. New Australians know the F part of that. And it would be. Strategically it would provide the United States with two anchors in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Israel the most powerful military state in the region and Saudi Arabia the most powerful economic state, and would enable the offshore balancing role that the United States wants to and needs to play because we don't have the resources to deal with three regions simultaneously. We've got to deal with a war in Ukraine and an aggressive Russia. We've got to deal with the rise of China in your region and its assertiveness. And for too long, we've been tied down in the Middle East with the longest wars in American history. So we have to find a way, it's called the pivot, it's been going on for some time, but essentially it is to reprioritize the American foreign policy towards China in particular and Russia, of course, and to lower the Middle East as a priority. And yet we still have strong interests there. We have to find a way to protect them by doing more with less. And this would give us the strategic platform to do that. So from the United States point of view, it's worthwhile. But it's an extremely complicated deal. First of all, the Crown Prince has his price. And the price is not from Israel, it's from the United States, as Michael said. It involves an Article 5 NATO-like defense treaty, not like the ANSAS treaty, but like the NATO treaty in which an attack on Saudi Arabia would be treated as an attack on the United States. Such a defense treaty needs two thirds of the Senate to endorse it, 67 votes. You know, Biden at best controls 51. So he's going to have to get Republican votes. The danger actually is that he'll get the Republican votes because the Republicans like the Saudis. But he'll have trouble getting the Democratic votes because they don't. They don't like MBS, they don't like his human rights policies and they don't like his war in Yemen and they don't like his oil policy. And they've got a long list of problems. So that's number one. I won't go into all the details, but there are a couple of other things he wants. And one of them is particularly problematic from another point of view. He wants a nuclear enrichment capability for his nuclear fuel cycle in Saudi Arabia. He wants the United States to provide that. He'll pay for it. And if we don't do it, he'll get it from the Chinese under lesser safeguards. So that has a potential for proliferation in the region with other countries around Saudi Arabia saying we want our own enrichment as well. And then we could face very serious problems. So third one is just he wants to buy some arms and we're happy to sell them to him. So that's part of the complication. The second part of the complication is with Israel because Netanyahu feels that he doesn't have to pay anything for this peace. He's quite happy for the United States to do it, but in his view it's peace for peace. He'll give Saudi Arabia peace and he'll take their peace. In particular he says when it comes to the Palestinians for this deal all we have to do is check the box. And in terms of his conversations that he had with the Crown Prince, Crown Prince has basically said yeah, checking the box is okay with us too. And the Saudis are engaged in talks with the Palestinian authority in which they're basically talking about buying them off, buying their consent to this agreement. But that doesn't work for Biden because he can't get the Democrats on board unless it's something substantial for the Palestinians. And that's why I said at the end of my talk we come back to the question of what does it make sense to do if there has to be a Palestinian component to this peace deal. And I would argue that without it it won't be sustainable. That if the Palestinians are left on the sidelines yet again it'll blow up and the Saudis won't be able to fulfill their commitments and we'll be the suckers having committed to all these things that they want. So the United States has a clear present interest in finding a way to build a Palestinian component into this. But what is it? Is it a commitment to go back to a comprehensive peace negotiation? No. Thankfully nobody really thinks that's worth doing. Instead there's this idea of an incremental step involving handing over territory from Israeli-controlled, Israel-controlled 60% of the West Bank to Palestinian-controlled, as I said they control 40% even at up 50-50. But it would be a signal to the Palestinian people that it's not hopeless, that it is possible over time to build a viable Palestinian state on territory in the West Bank and Gaza. And that could do a lot to jumpstart an incremental process. The problem with it is and some would say the advantage of it is that the Israeli government is presently constituted which is a government of ultra-religious and ultra-nationalists, far-right extremists in that government will not accept giving any territory to the Palestinians. They want to bring the Palestinian authority down and take over all of the West Bank. They want a Jewish state from the river Jordan River to the sea. And so Netanyahu is going to have great difficulty delivering on this demand that has already been leveled by the Biden administration. He's coming I think to see the president in a couple of weeks. That's when they'll have this discussion. But if the president insists and the president has the means to make this deal or break the deal, if the president says I can't get 67 votes without this, then Netanyahu is going to have to decide between his far-right government and a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that could transform Israel and make him again the great peacemaker. Oh I shouldn't say again for the first time, the great peacemaker. And so that is what we're facing now. I can't tell you exactly how it's going to work out, but I can tell you, going back to our discussion about leadership and ripeness, this particular deal is ripe because the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel all want to do this deal just like Sadat and Bagan and Carter. And when you have that in circumstances where the Saudis are driven by strategic concerns and the Israelis too, and the United States as well as I explained, you shouldn't write it off. It's possible that it will come about. And it will come about, if it does, within the next six months. All right. We have about 10 or 15 minutes for questions from the audience. I'm going to ask you to put your hand up, catch my eye. I'm going to ask people to ask a very short question if possible, just so we can fit as many in and please state your name and any affiliation before you do so. I see a number of hands. I'll take this lady here, madam. Thank you. Yelena Park, I'm the head of Australia for development pathways, global development consultancy. Ambassador, thank you very much for your remarks. I had a privilege of working with Dr. Kissinger for quite a number of years at the Atlantic Council. And to be honest, I didn't know about Kissinger's legacy in the Middle East, so that was a special treat. Thank you. My question is mainly about if we can take Kissinger's magic and wisdom and apply it to a slightly different context and specifically about the war in Ukraine. President Zelensky has made several statements about sort of replicating the Israeli-Palestinian model to some peace negotiation in Ukraine. Obviously, diplomacy has failed significantly, as you know. And Dr. Kissinger has made lots of comments about the conflict. I'm curious about your personal perspective as a statesman, scholar, and diplomat. What can we learn from Kissinger's approach to the Middle East? And maybe we can bring successful diplomacy back to resolve that conflict. Thank you. Thank you. Since you asked about my views, I won't go into detail about Kissinger's views, which are more interesting, actually, but maybe somebody else will ask about that. But I do think that this Kissingerian incrementalism could have some application to the settlement of the war in Ukraine. Now, of course, you've got a situation where Putin is not interested in ending the conflict. And that's very different to circumstances that Kissinger had. Kissinger moved very quickly in the 1973 war and would have moved very quickly in this war to find a way to put the pressure, in that case on Siddharth, in this case on Putin, to agree to a ceasefire. But that hasn't happened. So it's until and unless he's ready to ceasefire. It's hard for diplomats to be effective in these circumstances. Why you haven't, despite no lack of volunteers, you haven't had any serious diplomacy to try to end this conflict. Once the two sides are ready, and Ukraine will be ready when Putin's ready, if not because Zelensky's ready to end the war, but because the United States will be when Putin is ready. Which was the case with the United States and Israel back in 1973, by the way. Israel wasn't ready, but the United States said you need to stop. And at that point, but only at that point, I think there are a number of things that can be brought. First of all, this concept of incrementalism. So it's impossible for me to conceive of a situation in which Putin has withdrawn from all of the territory occupied by Russia, both in 2014 and in the recent conflict. And so what's needed is a commitment to withdraw and a phased process of withdrawal. And there's actually a very useful resolution passed by the United Nations, endorsed repeatedly. It was first introduced by the Soviet Union and the United States. Excuse me. Now, and subsequently endorsed by Russia, which is resolution 242, excuse me. And that has as a principle the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. So say something the Soviet Union introduced and the Russians have endorsed ever since. It is the basis of all Arab-Israeli diplomacy resolution 242. And that principle needs to be accepted by Putin and by Zelensky if there's to be a successful negotiation. In other words, Putin has to concede that eventually he will withdraw from all Ukrainian occupied territory. But that it will be done in phases in return for mutual recognition, security arrangements and the like, that would ensure the peace. So I do think that it will be necessary to approach it in this way. I don't see, unless there's total collapse, Putin is overthrown. There's a different leadership in Russia. I don't see circumstances in which it will be possible to get there from here. So the same problem will exist. And as long as there's a commitment to withdrawal and a phased process of withdrawal, that should be acceptable to the Ukrainians, even though it will be difficult because what's the alternative at that point to continue fighting with the great cost of the Ukrainian people? I'll take two questions at once. I'll take this gentleman here and this gentleman there. So if you can keep your questions brief and I'll ask Martin to answer both questions at once. John Roth, I'm not sure what my affiliation is other than I've known Martin since we were about something like that. In terms of rightness of the Saudi Arabia piece at the moment, you referred to the interrelationship between the three leaders, the crown prince, Biden, and Netanyahu. Isn't there a requirement for communication? And I thought, if you read the press, that there's zero communication between Netanyahu and Biden. Is that a smoke screen? And is there communication going on behind the scenes? Kyler Cronmiller, USA department. I served in the consulate general in Jerusalem under Bush and Obama administrations. Given the U.S. pivot away from the Middle East in the not too distant past, but then a little bit of the reversal that we've seen with the U.S. becoming reengaged more in regional defense issues there, I'd like to ask you if we fail to achieve a Saudi Israel deal, do you consider it worth it or possible for the U.S. to try to convince Middle Eastern leaders and the global audience of continuing U.S. commitment to the stability of the Middle East as a region and to the defense of U.S. allies in that region? Okay, thank you, John. Your point is a good one. How can Biden pull this deal together when he clearly can't stand MBS, the Saudi crown prince, and he's not talking to Netanyahu. I mean, the deal's complicated enough without those two problems. The short answer is yes, there is a lot of communication going on at a lower level. Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor and his Middle East person, Brett McGurk, moving between Israel and Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu and MBS' people are coming to Washington, so there's been a lot of intensive engagement at the lower level. But in the end, it's going to have to be decided by the leaders and the difficult decisions that are outlined are going to have to be made by them. So I do think that Biden will meet with Netanyahu in the next couple of weeks, probably in New York, that he is not meeting with Netanyahu not because of this deal or lack of it. It's because as you know, there's a major confrontation going on within Israel over its democratic future with the efforts of Netanyahu's government to curb the independence of the Supreme Court and the protest that that has generated hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. And Obama has made clear he's on the side of the Biden has made clear that he's on the side of the demonstrators, that he cares about Israel's democracy. And basically his message to Netanyahu is fix it, back off, find a way to have a consensus before you proceed. And I'm not going to meet you until you do it. So the two are in conflict. There's a great tension between his need to meet with Netanyahu to do the deal that he wants to do and his need to keep pressure on Netanyahu to get him back off from these judicial reforms. So it'll get, I mean, they will meet in September, but it's part of the complication of the deal that if he does the peace deal with this existing government in Israel and no significant Palestinian component, it will be a turbo boost to the far right in Israel. And he will have betrayed the democratic protest movement in Israel as a result. And that's playing on his mind as he considers what to do here. In terms of the question about what the United States should do in the region, you know, it kind of reminded me is not exactly an answer to your question, but something I wanted to get in before we finish, is that there is an alternative to the big enchilada, to this Israel-Saudi peace deal, which is an incremental deal, something less, less than a full defence treaty, a security framework agreement, less than full normalisation, exchange of economic offices in the two capitals, and less of an ask for the Palestinians. But the catch here is, and I should have said this earlier, you can't go from trying to make the big deal and failing to then try to put together the smaller deal. That's what we discovered at Camp David, too, when we tried for the whole deal, couldn't get it, tried for something less, but it was too late at that point. So you have to basically Biden has to make the decision now, after speaking to Devan Yahu, can he get this deal, or should he go for something less? And you can see from where I'm coming from, a bit of caution is in order in my view, but that's certainly not the view coming from the White House at the moment. Look, the United States is developing a broader strategy for the region. This doesn't depend entirely on whether there's peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. They are working together in any case. Israel is now part of CENTCOM. Israeli armed forces are exercising with the Arab armies and air forces and navies. There's a lot going on at the strategic level under U.S. sponsorship to, on the one hand, make clear that the United States is not leaving, but on the other hand, to make clear that we need our allies in the region to step up and do more. And that is already underway. And that is not going to be affected. That's not going to change as a result of whether we get this deal or not. Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time. I apologize to those who wanted to ask a question and didn't have a chance to do so. You had a taste today. If you want the full course, rather than the appetizer, this is the thing to purchase, Master of the Game Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy. It's a fabulous book. I commend it to you. The book is called Master of the Game. Today, Martin, we had a master class in explaining complicated topics. Martin told us about the wisdom of prudence and pragmatism and gave us a tour of some of the characters in the book and in his life from Sadat to Rabin to Liza Minnelli, the first time that Ms. Minnelli's name has been mentioned here at the Institute. So I want to thank you and Gail for visiting us again at the Institute and thank you, Martin, for your contribution to the Institute, your continuing contribution to the Institute over many years, including to our wood paneling. So thank you very much, Martin Nindik. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for this fabulous event and please join me in thanking Martin.