The writer is a former US secretary of state and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia SIPA
There is a particular kind of diplomatic paralysis that sets in when governments decide that the perfect is the enemy of the possible. I have seen it before in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland and in the Middle East itself. And I see it again now, as Europe and many of its traditional partners approach the Board of Peace and the Trump administration’s 20-point plan for Gaza with the studied scepticism of those who believe they can afford to wait. But we cannot. None of us can.
There is no alternative framework waiting in the wings. No rival coalition is quietly preparing a more viable proposal. The 20-point plan is not the one many of us would have drafted, but it remains the only framework backed by sufficient leverage, political engagement and potential resources to move the parties towards implementation. It has been reinforced through a UN Security Council resolution and further advanced by the roadmap from Nickolay Mladenov and the Board of Peace (which seeks to link reconstruction and governance transition to the dismantling of Hamas’s military infrastructure and longer-term stabilisation in Gaza).