I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs interview.
Those who still believe in a two-state solution,
the burden should be on them to see how they're going to get there.
Because at this point, they've said it enough, they keep saying there's no other outcome,
but it doesn't seem to be an outcome in and of itself.
With a ceasefire in place in Gaza after two years of war,
Donald Trump has proclaimed the arrival of peace in the Middle East.
At the moment, however, it's not even clear if the ceasefire itself will hold,
let alone whether there's a viable path to a long-term solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Fewer, more familiar with the elusiveness of peace in that conflict than Rob Malley.
He has served as a senior Middle East official in American administrations going back to the 1990s.
He has set across from Israeli and Palestinian leaders at moments of great optimism and greater disappointment.
And in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, drawn on a new book, co-authored with Hussein Aga,
Mali argues that the cause of that disappointment is Washington's dogged insistence on a two-state solution that neither Israelis nor Palestinians really want.
Years of folly, Mali and Aga argue,
have seen the United States claim success even as its efforts yielded serial disaster.
Mali offers a harsh indictment of decades of U.S.
Middle East policy,
a policy that in his assessment has been more to destabilize and inflame the region than to contribute to a lasting peace.
I spoke with him about America's record in the Middle East,