Don’t Expect Popping Champagne Corks at Trump-Abbas Meeting

Posted: May 3rd, 2017

By Aaron David Miller

Aaron David Miller is Vice President for New Initiatives and a Distinguished Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He served at the State Department as an advisor to Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State and helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the Senior Advisor for Arab-Israeli Negotiations. He also served as the Deputy Special Middle East Coordinator for Arab-Israeli Negotiations.

President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, traveled to the White House on Wednesday for his first meeting with President Donald Trump. In brief comments after the meeting, both leaders expressed their hope for a future peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, with Trump promising to act as “mediator, an arbitrator, or a facilitator.”

Before this announcement, the Cipher Brief’s Bennett Seftel sat down with Aaron David Miller, former advisor to both Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State on Arab-Israeli negotiations, to discuss what could come from the meeting, the current state of Palestinian governance, and the potential for reviving Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under the Trump Administration.

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