Zbigniew Brzezinski passed away on May 26. Brzezinski served as national security adviser to Democratic President Jimmy Carter and was an active participant in the Israel-Egypt peace negotiations in the 1970s. Several days after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, The Washington Post ran an open letter written by Brzezinski, along with Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to Republican Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. The two advised Obama to quickly present a blueprint for a permanent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians rather than working to renew direct negotiations between them. Obama, as we know, rejected their suggestion.

President Donald Trump has placed the resolution of this conflict at the top of his agenda. He chose the Middle East as his first overseas trip and was quick to appoint a special envoy to the region. Trump has invested the presidential prestige before the entire world in a speculative startup stock, a stock that has for years been a source of bitter disappointment to anyone who touched it. Most importantly, Trump invested in it a huge chunk of his ego. He probably doesn’t believe a Jew (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), whose country is not even the size of New Jersey, and a Muslim (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas), who has no state at all, would dare say “no” to Donald Trump. After all, both promised him that they want peace. So, let them sit down together. Each will present his positions. One will compromise a bit, the other will budge slightly. Special envoy Jason Greenblatt will give a little push when necessary, and we have a deal. Piece (or “peace”) of cake.

This mistaken assumption was the undoing of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama. He, too, believed that direct negotiations, with a little bit of American help and management of the conflict, would resolve the conflict. He sent Secretary of State John Kerry to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from scratch, ignoring all the understandings reached by previous administrations. He abandoned the parameters presented in 2000 by President Bill Clinton with outlines for a permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and ignored the proposals laid out by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before President Abbas eight years later. Nor did Obama make use of the blueprints and roadmaps presented to him in 2011 by Brzezinski and other senior officials in previous Republican administrations (among them former defense secretaries Frank Carlucci and Chuck Hagel) and Democratic administrations (among them Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Lee Hamilton and Undersecretary of State Tom Pickering). These retired senior officials implored Obama to present the sides with the blueprint and turn it into a binding UN Security Council resolution. They warned him that bilateral negotiations, without a defined framework, were a recipe for failure and for escalation to violence.

Trump will soon find out that the principles of that outline are the only deal in the region: establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with slight, mutual adjustments; agreement on Jerusalem as the home of two capitals; compensation of Palestinian refugees as an alternative to letting them return to their pre-1948 homes in Israel; demilitarization of the Palestinian state and deployment of an international force to guard the peace along the Jordan River.