The danger of inaction How diplomacy 'failed miserably' in Middle East

Joe Biden's high-stakes visit to the Middle East to avert an all-out war raises serious questions about the level and nature of the president's previous engagement in the region.

- Wintour Patrick

Just as Israel suffered a total intelligence breakdown over the horrific Hamas attacks, diplomats stand charged with their own collective system failure, at the heart of which was treating the Palestinian issue as best managed rather than solved.

While the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said "the world has failed miserably" in the Middle East, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was forced to deny that the Biden team took its eye off the ball, when asked about his claim three weeks ago that the region was "quieter" than it had been in two decades.

The case for the diplomats' defence will be that their hands were tied once the dominance of the Hamas military wing in Gaza came to be mirrored by the election of Israel's most rightwing government in history. Coupled with that was Donald Trump's focus on bribing Arab states to make peace with Israel while ignoring the political crisis, which only further sidelined Palestinians while emboldening their occupiers.

With hardliners in Tehran pulling the strings of its myriad proxy militias, notably Hamas, the diplomats simply had no partners for peace. Even the ineffectual 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank last night backed away from meeting Biden.

An alarmed assessment was given by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in June when Richard Haass, the departing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said he feared the region "was not that far from blowing".