The Middle Eastern Map No US President Can Escape - #0072, Gidi Grinstein

Every few years, a new American administration arrives in the Middle East convinced it can start fresh. Trump’s team was no different. They came to the problem with a clean slate and nothing but the confidence of a New York real estate mogul. They produced two documents across both his terms: the January 2020 plan and the October 2025 twenty-point Gaza framework.The result, according to my guest Gidi Grinstein, was that they landed exactly where everyone always lands.“Even Trump ends up landing very close to where Nixon landed, to where Carter landed, to where Clinton landed,” he told me. “Because there is a gravitational force that is shaping these negotiations.”Gidi Grinstein has seen the Middle East from angles most people never will. At 29, he was the secretary of Israel's negotiating delegation at Camp David and the youngest person at the 2000 Summit. He spent years inside the machinery of the peace process drafting texts, aligning teams, and managing the distance between what leaders said in public and what they were willing to accept in private. Today, he runs Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM), a global initiative using open-source 3D printing to bring affordable prosthetics to people who can't access or afford conventional ones. While we intended to speak mostly about TOM, our conversation stayed on peacebuilding, negotiation, and his view of politics today.The force, he said, traces back to “the most brilliant and American diplomat of the last hundred years”, Henry Kissinger, and the architecture he designed in the 1970s. It was a framework built not around Israeli or Palestinian interests, but around American hegemony in the Middle East. Half a century later, and it is proving so durable for Washington that no administration, however disruptive, can break from it. The 2020 Trump plan's "two nation states for two people" echoes UN Resolution 181 from 1947. The 2025 Gaza framework in places reads like a revamped version of the Oslo Declaration of Principles from 1993. “You would be stunned by the amount of similarities,” he told me.What’s interesting this time around is that both countries - Israel and the US - face impending elections mere days apart, promising to shake up not just the political makeup for both sides, but potentially the leadership of one. This creates what Grinstein calls the clock problem: Israeli and American leaders, under electoral pressure, always want a deal now. Their counterparts (Arafat then, the Iranians today) operate on an entirely different political timeline, with every incentive to wait out a weakened or transitional government.“The synchronization of the political clocks is very important in getting the deal,” he said. Trump, he suggests, may be walking into the same trap by pushing hard before November while Tehran calculates what comes after.The gravity doesn’t guarantee peace, but I realized it means the frameworks are always roughly the same so long as the Americans are involved. And so far, history is showing us that they always find their way back to them.You can catch the entire conversation above. And expect more analysis from our conversation in future newsletters. [5-minute preview: Watch Gidi explain this in a YouTube clip, “Trump Thinks He's Rewriting Middle Eastern History. He's Repeating It.”]The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe