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Ian Explains: Why Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Camp David came close but failed in 2020
The last best chance at peace between Israel and Palestine included bowling and baseball at a wooded retreat in rural Maryland.
Twenty-three years ago at Camp David, US President Bill Clinton welcomed Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for a two-week summit in a bucolic setting. The goal: find an enduring solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis.
But as Ian Bremmer explains, as the three leaders strolled together down a leafy Camp David road, they couldn’t have been further apart in their expectations for the summit. Ehud Barak, the young, leftist Israeli Prime Minister—fresh off a series of failed negotiations with Syria—had pushed hard for the summit, arguing that it was the “pressure cooker” that would require him and Arafat to make real progress on a two-state solution. His strategy was to either secure a deal or expose Arafat as an unreliable partner.
Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat was treading water of his own. Given his constituency’s mistrust of Israel and his resentment of Barak’s recent focus on Syria, Arafat was in no hurry to reach an agreement. He had warned Clinton ahead of the summit that his side was not ready to come to the table. Nor did he trust Barak to follow through on his promises.
This is the story of what happened at those talks and why the best chance in a generation for peace in the Middle East failed.
Watch the episode: Is an Israel-Palestine two-state solution possible?
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The Camp David summit
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take on the Camp David Principles, the historic meeting taking place in Camp David today between President Biden, the Japanese Prime Minister Kishida, and South Korean President Yoon. It's historic. It's a big deal. It's worth talking about. And frankly, I consider this to be the most significant successful piece of diplomacy of the Biden administration to date. It is roughly equivalent in my mind to the Abraham Accords of the Trump administration. In that case, this was leading to direct diplomatic engagement, opening relations between Israel, America's top ally in the region and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, other American allies in the region. With the Saudis, not signing, but certainly getting closer. It's important in part because it stabilized a region that matters to the United States. It also allows for better strategic coordination long-term, and it is broadly speaking, supported by both sides.
Biden had only positive things to say about the Abraham Accords, and in indeed, if we see a Saudi breakthrough that would happen in the context of those accords. Democrats, Republicans can all agree that this was a positive move for the United States in the region. So too, that is true of this breakthrough, the Camp David principles with the most important US ally in Asia, Japan, and South Korea. Another very important ally of the United States, probably the second most important, certainly when you look at the troops that the Americans have positioned there. The level of regular engagement of certainly of the exercises that occur, the level of economic, of military aid and technology transfer that occurs, all of that is pretty significant. Here you have a relationship that really should have been much better between Japan and South Korea, and hasn't been for a long time, improved in part because the South Korea-China relationship got so much worse when the South Koreans decided they needed their THAAD missile defense system from the United States to defend them against North Korea.
The Chinese took vigorous exception and put sanctions against the South Koreans and there was economic damage. The Communist Party supported major demonstrations against South Korea and that really changed the view on the ground. And since then, we now have an election with a South Korean president that is much more oriented towards the west, much more hawkish towards North Korea and China. And a Japanese prime minister that is much more willing to take risks internationally that may not play as well at home. A much softer and willingness to engage with the South Koreans than, for example, Prime Minister Abe had been. Put all of that together and Biden takes advantage of an opportunity in front of him. And what we now see will be annual summits going forward, a commitment to consult on any security threat, which is not the same as a commitment to defend, but a recognition that there will be coordination stepping up regular military exercises as well as the first ever trilateral security hotline being created.
Clearly this is all of a piece with growing US-led security architecture in Asia. We see it with AUKUS and the submarine deal with the Australians. We see it with the Quad and India becoming much closer with the United States and its allies, especially on national security related issues. We also see it with the routine and regular participation of Japan and South Korea in NATO summits. And indeed, going forward, I expect that there will be more willingness on the basis of Japan's working with South Korea now through these Camp David principles to open the Quad to South Korea participation. Canada may well be very interested in that too. All of which bodes well for America's reach and alignment of its standards and values with other countries. And something that I believe would also last beyond the Biden administration. I don't expect that Trump is going to have anything nice to say about Biden here.
It's not his style, but I do think that he would uphold if he were to become president these regular trilateral meetings. In other words, something as opposed to the Iranian nuclear deal as opposed to the failed effort to get the transpacific partnership, the Paris Climate Accord that is bounced around from one administration to the next. This is a piece of foundational architecture that can be built upon over time, in large part because the Japanese and South Koreans are themselves so deeply committed to it. The problem of course, is China. So much of the reason why you have the willingness to form this architecture around Asia is because of greater concerns that China is a national security threat. Some of that is driven by greater decoupling of national security related elements of the global economy away from China. When you're talking about the US and its allies, some of that is greater military confrontation over Taiwan in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea.
And that's happening at a time when the Chinese economy is performing very badly. Now, there's a big question in how Xi Jinping is going to react to all of this. It's a bad time economically for him to be getting into a bigger fight with the Americans and others. He needs as much economic stability and growth as he can get, but that doesn't mean that he's going to sit and take it. There are political stability issues. He doesn't want to be seen as weak. He and his advisors all believe that the Americans are trying to contain Chinese growth and they see all sorts of policies that are being put in place, particularly by the Americans that lend support to that belief. And as a consequence of that, I think we are likely to see at least some level of Chinese response and reaction. We'll see how much of that plays out at the BRICS summit up coming in South Africa.
We'll watch the Chinese statements very carefully there. But certainly all of this puts a very big focus on what is expected to be a Biden-Xi Jinping summit at APEC in San Francisco in November. I'm certainly planning on spending the week out there, assuming it happens. And at this point I do believe it's very likely. It is the one chance to see if you can try to stabilize a relationship that continues to deteriorate, despite all stated efforts by Biden and Xi Jinping otherwise. And the fact is that Xi Jinping has different expectations of that meeting than Biden does. I think the Chinese expect this is all but a state visit. Biden expects a very important working level meeting with none of the pomp and circumstance. Can that circle be squared? And if it can't, does that mean that the meeting is off? We'll see. We'll see. I'm still optimistic, but all of the news that we're seeing is only making it both more important and more challenging to pull that summit meeting off.
Anyway, that's it for me and I'll talk to you all real soon.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Biden brings South Korea and Japan together
Nestled in the woods of Maryland outside Washington, DC, the Camp David estate -- the president's country retreat -- looms large in international diplomacy as a place where serious business gets done.
On Friday, President Joe Biden will host South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for a summit at the famous campsite where, in 1978, Jimmy Carter helped broker peace between Egypt and Israel.
While it might not seem like a big deal for Washington to facilitate a summit with America’s two closest Asian partners, it is monumental that South Korea, in particular, appears ready and willing to enlist in a new US-led trilateral alliance with Japan.
Despite a rapprochement, relations between the two East Asian giants have remained strained since Japan ended its 35-year occupation of the Korean peninsula in 1945.
So, what’s on the agenda at Camp David and why is South Korea, long aggrieved by its former colonial power, willing to create this bloc?
The three states will reportedly announce publicly that they will respond collectively to security threats in the Asia Pacific – a big deal considering that Seoul and Tokyo do not have an official security alliance. Trilateral military drills will likely be annualized, while they’ll also announce closer coordination on ballistic-missile defense and cybersecurity.
Clearly, the summit aims to send a powerful message to China and North Korea that these three advanced economies are prepared to combine their military and tech bonafides to protect their collective interests.
Why is this happening now?
Changing of the guard in Seoul. Only two years ago, such a meeting would have seemed nearly unthinkable. Yoon’s predecessor, President Moon Jae-in, broadly seen as left of center, went to painstaking lengths to engage with Pyongyang.
He also oversaw a period of worsening ties with Tokyo over compensation for Japan’s use of Korean forced labor during the occupation. Relations reached a nadir in 2019 when Tokyo placed restrictions on exports bound for South Korea needed to make crucial tech.
But this approach to regional politics took a sharp turn when Yoon, a conservative, came to power in March 2022, vowing to get tougher on China and the North, and to bolster ties with the US. And that’s exactly what he’s done.
But how much of this shift reflects Yoon’s hawkish brand of politics -- or is this a symptom of a broader anti-China shift in Korean society?
“Trilateral cooperation, and the bilateral rapprochement with Japan that have enabled it, would have been unthinkable under former president Moon or Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the center-left opposition whom Yoon narrowly defeated in 2022,” says Jeremy Chan, a China and Northeast Asia consultant at Eurasia Group.
“The big right-left divide in Korean politics is about policy towards North Korea, and the conservatives take a far more hawkish line toward Pyongyang and their backers in Beijing,” he says.
The China angle. China’s increasingly bellicose behavior in the South China Sea has indeed helped the US bring Japan and South Korea together under a joint security umbrella. After all, nothing unites a former colonial power and former colonial subject like mutual fears of a regional superpower.
Crucially, increasingly negative attitudes towards Beijing at home have also given Yoon an opening to deepen security ties with Japan and the US.
Indeed, South Koreans have soured on China since 2016, when Beijing enforced punitive economic measures on Seoul after the US deployed THAAD anti-missile systems on the Korean Peninsula. The US’ aim was to offer a bulwark against Pyongyang’s missile activities, but China said the move constituted a threat to its national security.
Still, it’s a balancing act, as Japan and South Korea’s economies are tightly interwoven with China’s, and neither wants to risk alienating Beijing too much.
What Washington wants. Getting Tokyo and Seoul to act in lockstep has been a key foreign policy priority for the Biden administration as it looks to contain China’s growth. Together, the two Asian states host 80,000 US troops, and South Korea also hosts the largest US overseas military base in the world.
Politically, the bringing together of Japan and Korea can certainly be cast as a win for President Joe Biden, who has aptly capitalized on growing fear in the region to unite two important US allies with a contentious past.
China’s fear: Asian NATO. “China is watching for how far trilateral cooperation moves forward after the summit, particularly in terms of defense and security,” Chan says, adding that, “Beijing’s greatest fear is the emergence of a trilateral military alliance akin to an Asian NATO on its border.”
What’s more, Beijing will be looking to see whether there are any new agreements on tech that might give an indication, Chan says, of just “how far each country is willing to go in moving away from China economically.”
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