The occasion, and what it demands

According to BBC, the deaths of Senator Lindsey Graham is drawing both President Zelensky and Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington, where each will separately visit the White House to discuss the wars pressing upon their respective regions. Ceremony and statecraft rarely travel on separate roads, and that is as it should be. A funeral is not the worst occasion to remind ourselves what we owe the living — including what we have formally promised them.

The binding force of commitments

I spent a considerable portion of my public life negotiating treaties and then watching governments treat their terms as suggestions rather than obligations. The lesson I drew — and tried to build into the architecture of American foreign policy — is that a nation's word, once formally given, is the foundation of every subsequent transaction with the world. The United States has extended security assurances, military assistance frameworks, and diplomatic commitments to Ukraine since at least the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Whether that instrument carries the full legal weight of a mutual defense treaty is, I am told, a matter of continuing dispute among modern scholars of international law. That dispute does not extinguish the moral weight of the assurance. A promise made to induce another party to give up its nuclear arsenal is not a promise one may quietly shelve when honoring it becomes inconvenient.

On the shape of negotiation

I will confess — as inference, not recollection — that I suspect the conversations in the White House will involve pressure on both leaders to accept terms that serve American political convenience as much as durable regional peace. I counsel against that impulse. The Jay Treaty I negotiated with Britain in 1794 was condemned precisely because it appeared to sacrifice principle to expediency. History's verdict has been kinder than the public reaction of that moment, but only because the treaty bought time without permanently surrendering the positions that mattered. The standard, then, is this: what can be agreed to now that does not foreclose a just settlement later? Agreements made under duress, or made to silence domestic critics, tend to produce the wars they were meant to prevent.

Two conflicts, one posture

The BBC account treats Ukraine and Israel as parallel visits — and so they are, logistically. But they are not parallel conflicts, and the legal frameworks governing American obligations differ substantially between them. I would urge those conducting these conversations to resist the temptation to apply a single rhetorical template to both. The law of nations rewards precision. Conflating distinct obligations produces muddled policy, and muddled policy produces avoidable suffering.

What measured diplomacy looks like

A diplomat's task — and here I speak from long experience — is to leave a quarrel less inflamed than he found it. That means listening before speaking, and speaking in terms the other party can accept without surrender. It means resisting the language of ultimatum, which closes doors that patience might have left open. Whatever emerges from these White House meetings, the United States should ensure that its public commitments are honored, its language is precise, and its next steps are ones it can defend not merely before this week's press, but before the judgment of subsequent generations who will inherit the world these conversations help to shape.