On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid. Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war — the best kind — and pushed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish line. Or so I thought. Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious. ‘Boys,’ he told a few of us aides in his suite after the news conference, ‘if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here.’ But I wasn’t listening. America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power […]