Telling the story of the last-week Camp David negotiations — a friend of his, then the senior director for Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council, watched Vice President Gore and Yasser Arafat divide Jerusalem block by block with a marker, only for Arafat to walk out — John Kiriakou added a coda about what else the Clinton administration was doing that week.[1]
The memoir
Clinton wrote in his first memoir, in Kiriakou’s account, that he wished he had spent that final week not trying to negotiate peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis but instead trying to open diplomatic relations with the North Koreans.[1]
The absent Secretary of State
Kiriakou’s point is that the administration was in fact already trying to do both, and had split itself to do so. Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, was not at the Arab-Israeli talks, he says, because she was in Pyongyang, working to persuade the North Koreans to open diplomatic relations.[2]
His summary of the result is blunt. Rather than abandoning one track to strengthen the other and coming away with a victory, “we ended up with two failures.”[2]
The use he makes of it
The anecdote is not offered as diplomatic history for its own sake. Kiriakou raised it while arguing that Donald Trump would not be the president to negotiate a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, on the ground that Trump is not a detail man. Gore and Clinton were detail men, in his telling, and the detail men could not work out the details.[1] The Pyongyang half of the story sharpens that: even a detail-minded administration, spread across two hard problems in the same week, closed out with nothing on either.