Top Middle East Diplomat Assesses Trump’s Trip Overseas
“You can’t make peace if nobody believes in it,” says Ambassador Dennis Ross.
Donald Trump is on his first trip overseas as president. Earlier this week, he made a swing through the Middle East, visiting Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine.
What will the trip mean for the president’s foreign policy goals going forward?
And is there any chance Donald Trump will be able to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians?
Ambassador Dennis Ross has held high-profile foreign policy positions in four presidential administrations, serving as a point person for a number of presidents on Middle East peace. He is now a distinguished fellow and counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Ross tells Detroit Today producer Jake Neher that Trump came into office during a low-point for Israel-Palestine peace negotiations.
“The reality is that there’s been no direct negotiations between the two sides for a couple of years,” he says. “The context for peacemaking is not good… The psychological gap has probably never been wider in the time that I’ve been working on this issue close to 30 years.”
But Ross says he still prefers “to see the glass half-full rather than half-empty.” He says Trump does have some unique opportunities to work toward real peace negotiations, and he says this trip overseas appears to be going relatively well for Trump.
Ross will be in town next Tuesday, May 30, to speak at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield at 7:30 p.m. He says his talk — “50 years after the Six Day War, Where are we in the Middle East?” — aims to provide some historical and modern context for the situation in the Middle East. He says it’s important to show that there are some possibilities for peace in the region, despite the daunting challenges that exist.
“One of the biggest challenges we face, certainly in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, is how do you restore a sense of possibility and belief? It doesn’t exist today,” he says. “And that’s one of the greatest challenges. You can’t make peace if nobody believes in it.”
Click on the audio player above to hear the full conversation.
