Richard N. Haass

To be successful in the Middle East, the Obama administration will need to move beyond Iraq, find ways to deal constructively with Iran, and forge a final-status Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

The age of U.S. dominance in the Middle East has ended and a new era in the modern history of the region has begun. It will be shaped by new actors and new forces competing for influence, and to master it, Washington will have to rely more on diplomacy than on military might.

So far, the Bush administration has shown it would like to resolve its problems with North Korea and Iran the same way it did with Iraq: through regime change. It is easy to see why. But the strategy is unlikely to work, at least not quickly enough. A much broader approach -- involving talks, sanctions, and the threat of force -- is needed.

Stephen M. Walt cheers Bill Clinton for giving Americans the foreign policy they wanted. But a great president would have given them the foreign policy they needed.

Sanctions are a huge slice of the U.S. foreign policy pie -- even cities employ them. Officials like them because they see them as cheaper and cleaner than war. But in the real world, they are expensive, both diplomatically and fiscally, and seldom work. At most they starve large populations while leaving hostile leaders unscathed. If foreign corporations feel they need the ayatollah's business, slapping them with third-party sanctions only alienates their governments further. Policymakers need to think harder before they rush to push the sanctions button.

The end of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf conflict sparked the Madrid conference, formal peace between Israel and Jordan, and some autonomy for the West Bank. But those days have gone. Even if Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu had lost the election, Arab countries would still be more preoccupied with economic problems, internal political challenges, and security threats from Iraq and Iran. But the end of the era of treaties need not be the end of the peace process. The plo should discourage violence against Israel, and Israel should disrupt Syrian support for Hezbollah. The United States must maintain the principle of territory for peace.