Article snippet: President Israel in the simplest of terms: “Old challenges demand new approaches.” That’s a succinct summation of Trumpian governing philosophy – the ethos of a confident dealmaker who’s willing to gamble to mix things up. What’s been done before hasn’t worked, so the president is choosing to do something new – something a bipartisan majority in Congress explicitly endorsed more than 20 years ago. But such logic begins to collapse in the morass that is the Middle East. It falls apart because of centuries of complicated history, of blood shed over spiritual and physical property, and of seven decades of American leadership that’s considered the case of modern Israel as the complex theological and geopolitical thicket that it is. Mostly, though, it collapses because the plan from here … is no plan at all. Trump’s defenders are saying that you can’t blow up a peace process that doesn’t exist; his opponents might point out that this is precisely the point of why this could prove to be the wrong move at the wrong time. Trump hailed his move as a “new approach,” and went out of his way to argue that the move does not pre-judge the outcomes of any peace negotiations. “Those questions are up to the parties involved,” the president said. “The United States remains deeply committed to helping facilitate a peace agreement that is acceptable to both sides.” Yet the U.S. role in facilitating Middle East peace – already a source of deep skepticism in ... Link to the full article to read more