Sledgehammer

The inside story of an extraordinary, once-in-a-generation victory: the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Kosovo, and Morocco.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. For decades, the US State Department called it diplomacy.

David Friedman was an outside candidate when President Trump appointed him US ambassador to Israel. He took office to find US-Israel policy stuck in stalemate. For years, accepted wisdom was that extensive experience and detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture were necessary to negotiate treaties. In truth, Friedman realized, all parties played on that accepted wisdom to stall – expecting to get a better deal further down the road.

Tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector, Friedman and a small team with no prior diplomatic experience revamped American diplomacy to project “peace through strength.” He emphasized the importance of leverage, the key to any good negotiation. After painstaking, behind-the-scenes work, the Abraham Accords were signed: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations.