The Middle East Quartet: A Post-Mortem

If the Quartet’s greatest strength was its ability to marshal the collective resources of its members and speak with one authoritative voice, its principal weaknesses was its tendency to be all things to all people. The malleability of the Quartet allowed its most powerful member, the United States, to dominate the mechanism so completely as to effectively transform it in virtually every way. Once conceived as a multilateral framework for resolving the conflict, the group was now little more than a tool of American foreign policy.