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Thirty Years After Camp David:
Reflections on U.S. Foreign Policy
A Conversation with
Shibley Telhami, Brent Scowcroft,
Dennis Ross, and William Quandt
September 18, 2008
PROF. TELHAMI: Good afternoon. On behalf of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, I welcome you to the Sadat Form at the University of Maryland.
I’m going to introduce the President of the University of Maryland, Dr. C. D. Mote, to introduce the forum. He doesn’t need any introduction with this crowd and I’m not going to go through his impressive biography, but I do want to say a couple of things. In part because as you all know one reason why we’re hosting this event is this is the thirtieth anniversary, in fact yesterday to the date, of the Camp David Accords. Ten years ago when it was the twentieth anniversary of the Camp David Accords, President C. D. Mote arrived at Maryland from Berkeley. He’s been here exactly 10 years. In fact, he came here in September 1998, one year after I had arrived, and we both shared the Berkeley-Maryland experience. Now there are two institutions in which we have spent more time than at any other institution. We are more Maryland fans than Cal fans, though, and I was happy to see the game last weekend when underdog Maryland beat the ranked Cal team here.
I contacted President Mote even before he arrived at Maryland. We were already scheduled to have the twentieth anniversary of the Camp David Accords with President Jimmy Carter giving the Sadat Lecture, which we annually hold. In fact, it was the first major university event that President Mote hosted,and President Carter delivered a moving speech and one that was actually extraordinary in terms of recounting what transpired at Camp David, Maryland, 30 years ago.
All of you have I think seen what has happened to the university in the past 10 years under President Mote. It’s a university that’s been moving for the past 20 years, but for the last 10 years it’s been accelerating rapidly. Whether you look at the ranking nationally, the rankings internationally, the quality of our undergraduate students, the quality of our graduate students, the visibility of the institution, the partnership, or the international programs, it’s really been an extraordinary accomplishment at a university that I think all of us are proud to be affiliated with, and a good deal of that goes to the leadership of President Mote. So it’s my honor to present Dr. Mote.
DR. MOTE: Thank you very much, Shibley, for what was really a little too grand of an introduction.
I’d like to welcome our presenters here, General Brent Scowcroft, Ambassador Dennis Ross, Dr. William Quandt. I will introduce you all properly in a moment. I also would like to extend my welcome to all of you to this Sadat Forum. It really gives me great pleasure to do this, since as Shibley said, my first event here was with the Sadat Chair on the twentieth anniversary of Camp David,and now here we are at the thirtieth.
The forum is named after the great statesman and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Anwar Sadat, a man of extraordinary stature. As President of Egypt he exhibited extraordinary courage and took enormous personal risks in search of peace. He was described to me by both President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as the greatest leader each had ever known, and this may be the one thing they agree on.
Anwar Sadat was a victim of the hatred that he sought to vanquish. But his dream of a world in which nations and people live without violence has not died.At the University of Maryland his vision is carried forward through the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development that Professor Telhami holds. The chair was established here in the fall of 1997 with the support of Anwar Sadat’s widow, Dr. Jehan Sadat, as a testament to her husband’s legacy of leadership for peace.
Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Camp David Accords, one of the greatest diplomatic feats in contemporary history. The importance of the Camp David Accords can be measured on multiple levels. I’d like to mention just two of them before I turn this over to our panel of experts, who really know a lot about this and have generously agreed to share their expertise and insights on the peace process.
At a basic level, the Camp David Accords transformed a relationship that had been scarred by war for decades. Israel and Egypt had lost thousands of lives in a struggle, and the two countries considered their differences irreconcilable. Against all odds, the accords brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the bargaining table in the mountains of Maryland, and the hostilities formally ended on September 17, 1978, 30 years ago yesterday. U.S. President Jimmy Carter was a key to the unprecedented negotiations. Today, peace between the countries is accepted as a new order, and this may be the greatest measure of the success of Camp David.
But the importance of the accords extends beyond the Cairo-Jerusalem reconciliation. The agreement is an allegory for the art of leadership. With strong leadership, the most intractable conflicts can be resolved. Jordan and Israel reached a peace agreement in 1994 under the leadership of King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin. Let us not forget that the Camp David success occurred in the context of three decades of Egyptian and Israeli antagonism, violent conflicts in the wider Middle East, an oil crisis, a global economic recession, and increased superpower tensions in the region. In this tumultuous world, the victory of the Camp David Accords inspires all of us to press forward for peace as we face contemporary challenges. So as we celebrate the 30year anniversary, let us remember the power of leadership, which, when coupled with courageous humility, can truly move mountains.
It is now my pleasure to welcome the three panelists, and Shibley Telhami, who is a panelist but also the moderator for the panel. First, let me start with Ambassador Dennis Ross. For more than 12 years, Ambassador Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process. A highly skilled diplomat, Ambassador Ross was instrumental in the 1995 interim agreement reached by the Israelis and the Palestinians. He also successfully brokered the Hebron Accord in 1997, facilitated the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty, and worked to bring Israel and Syria together. Ambassador Ross served as Special Middle East Coordinator under President Clinton and Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Office in the first Bush administration. Among his other significant diplomatic roles, he served as Director of Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff during the Reagan administration and as Deputy Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Ambassador Ross is a Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and he recently published an important book entitled “Statecraft: and how to Restore America’s Standing in the World.”
General Brent Scowcroft was the U.S. National Security Adviser under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and a Lieutenant General in the United States Air Force. He also served as military assistant to President Richard Nixon and as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He was Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. General Scowcroft has spoken and written extensively about issues related to the Middle East, and has a long history of involvement in national security concerns. He was given the National Medal of Freedom in 1991 by George H. W. Bush. Out of uniform he has continued in his policy capacity by serving on the President’s Advisory Committee on Arms Control, the Committee on Strategic Forces, and the President’s Special Forces Board, also known as the Tower Commission. He has a new book with Dr. Brzezinski entitled “America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy.”
Professor William Quandt also joins us today. In 1994, he joined the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia where he holds the Everett R. Stettinius Chair. From 2000 to 2003 he also served as Vice Provost for International Affairs at the university. Prior to this appointment, he was a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he conducted research on the Middle East, American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, and energy policy. While serving as a staff member on the National Security Council in the 1970s, Dr. Quandt was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of Trustees of the American University in Cairo and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. His book, “Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” is now in its third edition.
The organizer of today’s forum, Professor Shibley Telhami, is the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, and he’s served as an adviser to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Trilateral U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee, which was mandated by the Wye River Agreements. Most recently,Dr. Telhami served on the Iraq Study Group, and he has also served on the U.S. Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, which was appointed by the Department of State at the request of Congress. His book, “The Stakes: America and the Middle East,” which was by the way a freshman book the year before last, was selected by “Foreign Affairs” as a top five book on the Middle East in 2003. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of Human Rights Watch. The university is grateful for his efforts in putting together this remarkable panel of experts on this most historic occasion. Welcome to the panel; we’re looking forward to hearing your discussion on this thirtieth anniversary. Thank you very much.
PROF. TELHAMI: Thanks so much, President Mote, and welcome to all of you. I would like to make this conversation not just one that looks backward, but also one that looks forward, particularly now that we are in the middle of a change in America, with the elections coming up. I think we have a mood of change in the country and everybody wants to know where we’re headed. So what I’d like to do in this conversation is look at the Camp David Accords and our policy since, and to see what lessons we can draw for American foreign policy that might be of benefit to the next administration.
If you look at the issues that today face America, many of them have to do with the Middle East. We’re engaged in war in Iraq; we’re engaged in a war against al Qaeda, primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan; we are concerned about the direction of Iran’s nuclear activities; we are challenged both economically and in terms of national security by the rising cost and diminishing supply of petroleum resources; and we are today confronted with a stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which flared up into war in 2006 and could do so again. Thus, many of the issues facing the next president – whether it’s a Democrat or Republican – are going to have to do with the Middle East, and we have to think about what kind of approach we need to take with respect to that region.
I start with the historic moment of 30 years ago: the Camp David Accords. In particular, I want to start with you, General Scowcroft – I would like if you could share your thoughts with us on the importance of these accords from the American point of view. Why were these accords so important? I’m starting with you and not with Bill Quandt who, as you know, was at Camp David and helped President Carter negotiate that agreement, because you have some perspective on this from when you were in the Ford administration just before President Carter became president and you were facing the sort of challenges that America was facing in the context of the Cold War and the Middle East. So from your perspective having seen the challenges just before, why are these accords so important for American foreign policy historically?
GEN. SCOWCROFT: I think they’re important for a couple of reasons. First of all, I think you called on me first because in a panel of Middle East experts I’m the only one who is not.
I think they are notable for a couple of things. First, they followed on a period of American decline in perception around the world. With the end of the Vietnam War, the retrenchment at home, and Watergate, there was a period there that was very difficult for the United States. I think what the Camp David meetings did was restore the U.S. in a position of leadership.
The other thing the accords demonstrated to me was the impact of personal leadership and a risk-taking manner – primarily from President Sadat, who came there wanting to move the process forward and who was willing to risk his own position to do so, but also from President Carter, who was prepared to spend what I thought at the time to be an inordinate amount of time on this process. I can’t think of a period before or since that any American president has been so thoroughly engaged on one particular issue, and I think that both of those leaders were essential for the progress that was made.
PROF. TELHAMI: In what way did it transform American policy in the Middle East?
GEN. SCOWCROFT: It really got us permanently at the center of Middle East policy. We had been gradually moving in that direction, but it was a step forward, a half a step backwards. This got us I think irrevocably involved in the region, and from this time on the United States was the key fulcrum for progress in the region.
PROF. TELHAMI: By the way, if either one of you wants to add to any of the comments, just signal me and feel free to intervene.
AMB. ROSS:It’s very hard to improve on what Brent said.
GEN. SCOWCROFT:Oh sure…
PROF. TELHAMI: I would like to think about it from the regional perspective, and particularly for you, Bill, in terms of the consequences of Camp David for regional politics. It’s obvious that if you look at it from an historical perspective it’s changed the nature of regional politics and the nature of the relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East. Surely, the agreement has not been without criticism in the region. But the most important thing is that we haven’t had a major war between Egypt and Israel since Camp David, and we’re not likely to have one in the foreseeable future.That’s an amazing accomplishment, given how many wars were fought in the 30 years prior to that.
Yet the Arab critics of the Camp David Accords were always saying that when Egypt goes it alone, it makes it harder for everybody else to have a comprehensive peace with Israel. What’s the record on this? Are we closer to a comprehensive peace because of Camp David or are we likely to fail because of Camp David? Is the record out on this or do we have to wait? How much is dependent on what happens on the Palestinian-Israeli front? If that collapses are we back in trouble?
PROF. QUANDT: I think that at the time of Camp David, literally just 30 years ago, we knew that moving Egypt on its own toward peace with Israel was going to have a dramatic impact on the Middle East.
On the one hand, it meant no more big Arab-Israeli wars of the kind that we’d seen in 1967 and 1973. At one point in this negotiating process, Moshe Dayan said to us, if we can make peace with Egypt, it’s like taking one wheel off of a car. You can’t drive that car anymore. And it really will mean no more big existential wars confronting Israel. That may or may not be correct, but that was the perception at the time, and on the whole, we knew that that was going to happen.
We also knew that there would be a backlash in certain parts of the Arab world against what Sadat had done because he was breaking a norm – he was challenging the whole concept of the Arabs presenting a common front against Israel. While there had never been as much reality as some had hoped with respect to that common front, Sadat’s move meant that from here on out if there was going to be further progress in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, it was going to be each party on its own, and that’s how it has turned out.
Some of those parties are actually quite weak. The Lebanese would probably be happy to have peace with Israel, and they did negotiate an agreement in 1983, but it couldn’t be implemented because weak governments have a hard time acting if they’ve got stronger neighbors who disagree. So it’s been very hard to get the second act in place – that includes the Palestinians, and it included for quite a long timeJordan, which was a willing party but had a hard time moving on its own.