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Nothing reveals truths more effectively than patterns. If you can identify a pattern, you can see what actions conceal, what statements leave unsaid, and what agreements postpone. Peace treaties and the negotiations surrounding them are rarely analyzed in this way, even though they may exhibit patterns that recur across different circumstances. Consequently, there is often a simplification in understanding the pressures, incentives, and constraints shaping each step and each party’s choices, an exaggeration in linking the various warring factions into a single understanding without seeing the gaps, or a disregard for realities that might prevent us from truly understanding the nature and sustainability of the negotiations that ultimately lead to an agreement.
The negotiations following the 14-point interim memorandum of understanding signed by the United States and Iran on June 17 — which extended the ceasefire for 60 days, including in Lebanon, while the sides sought a permanent settlement — now bear a striking resemblance to the pattern that occurred in the Camp David Accords. That pattern has become sharper after President Donald Trump declared that the interim framework was “over,” leaving the region once again caught between negotiations, renewed escalation, and unresolved fronts. The circumstances surrounding both the negotiations and their possible breakdown call for a comparative analysis to uncover this pattern, which should be taken as a warning against repeating past mistakes.
Across these cases, the terms of peace do more than end a phase of fighting: They redistribute leverage, sovereignty, and risk across the fronts left outside the agreement. The pattern at issue is not simply the existence of several fronts. I call it “front separation”: closing — or attempting to close — the front that imposes the greatest immediate cost while detaching the unresolved fronts from the wider political and bargaining context that had linked them. Such an agreement may end a war on one front while redistributing the conditions of conflict across the others.
Let us begin with the surrounding context. The Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, later known as the Camp David Accords and managed by the Carter administration, took place amid multiple fronts opened by Israel: the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, the Golan Heights in Syria, the West Bank in Jordan, and the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian territories. There were also secondary fronts that officially intervened in the war, such as the Gulf states, who funded Egypt and Syria and used oil as a political weapon to pressure the United States.
Above all, even in the era of détente, the vestiges of the Cold War still lingered in this conflict. The United States provided Israel with military and financial support to sustain these wars, while the Soviet Union backed the Arab states in their war against Israel. This transformed the earlier Arab-Israeli wars into regional conflicts, affecting most countries in the region. In one way or another, most Arab states became battlegrounds in this war, which nearly escalated into a wider proxy war and reflected the pattern of international conflict at the time.
When considering this regional environment, one cannot help but draw parallels with the current Iran war and the fronts to which it has expanded, revealing a striking similarity. Israel has begun to engage in a preemptive, multi-front war: Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran. The new element is that the Trump administration is now a direct participant in the war, rather than merely a supporter as before.
This is the first major difference between the two moments. President Jimmy Carter led the peace process without being an explicit combatant in the war that preceded it. President Donald Trump began the war and is now seeking to lead its settlement. The Carter administration’s distance from the battlefield gave Washington greater room to act as an active manager of the peace process. The Trump administration enters the negotiations carrying the political and military consequences of direct participation.
The first pattern is not just that these wars opened on several fronts. It is that a multi-front war creates unequal bargaining power among them. It is a structural flaw left behind by these wars, and with repetition, it has become a pattern that can be exploited. Each front on such regional wars carried a different national claim, political representative, and capacity to impose costs. They therefore entered negotiations without a common mandate or equal leverage. Israel’s position in this bargaining environment rested not only on its own military strength, but also on the diplomatic and military backing it received from the United States. This gave Israel wider room than any single Arab adversary to favor bilateral and sequential bargains over a comprehensive settlement.
The result was a recurring bargaining structure: The front capable of imposing the greatest immediate cost could be settled first, while other fronts were postponed, separated, or left to later arrangements. That question first emerged most clearly on the Egyptian front.
The largest and most significant war was the war between Israel and Egypt, which began on June 5, 1967, with surprise attacks on Egyptian military airfields. This was followed by an advance of Israeli ground forces into the Gaza Strip, which had been under Egyptian administration since 1948, and then into the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied until its complete withdrawal in 1982.
My choice to describe this front as the major war is deliberate, as it was the only front truly capable of inflicting significant damage on Israel in 1973. After Egypt addressed its previous military weaknesses, developed offensive and defensive strategies during the War of Attrition, and rebuilt its armed forces, it was able to cross the Suez Canal and destroy the Bar-Lev Line, establishing a defensive line east of the canal. Its coordinated attack with Syria divided Israeli efforts across two fronts and imposed costs that made the Egyptian front impossible to leave open indefinitely.
When Israel was forced to begin ceasefire negotiations and the Carter administration began paving the way for peace talks, Egypt’s demands were enormous. Egypt was not initially negotiating solely for the Sinai Peninsula: President Anwar Sadat’s ambitions extended far beyond that. His conditions were substantial: the return of the occupied Egyptian territories under full Egyptian sovereignty, guarantees for Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza, the inclusion of Palestine in the peace negotiations, and an Israeli withdrawal from Syria. American records from the period show Sadat insisting on sovereignty over Sinai while also linking the broader settlement to the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria.
It is precisely here that the second pattern emerges: closing the most dangerous front with a peace treaty while separating the other fronts linked to it.
Egypt did not enter the peace process as an instrument of Israeli design. Recovering Sinai, ending the burdens of war, addressing Egypt’s economic pressures, and rebuilding its relationship with Washington were Egyptian objectives in their own right. But Egypt also entered the negotiations with a form of leverage that no other Arab front possessed. Its army had crossed the canal, established a position on recovered Egyptian territory, and demonstrated that the military balance could not be managed without addressing Sinai itself. The thing Egypt could threaten and the thing it sought to recover were therefore closely connected. That made its leverage directly convertible into a sovereignty-restoring agreement.
The Egyptian-Israeli track did not emerge because Egypt simply abandoned the other fronts. It emerged from overlapping constraints and choices. Egypt had its own national reasons to pursue the recovery of Sinai: Israel refused to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Jordan declined to act as a Palestinian surrogate, and the Palestine Liberation Organization later rejected the Camp David framework. Egypt could influence the wider process, but it could not negotiate on behalf of other peoples or determine their political fate.
Sadat had made this clear to the Carter administration, which understood that he could not sign a Sinai treaty without a Palestinian link. In November 1978, Sadat told U.S. officials that, without specific linkage between the first phase of Sinai withdrawal and Palestinian autonomy — at least in Gaza — he could not agree to sign the treaty. Carter’s response acknowledged the importance Sadat attached to such linkage.
Sadat’s demands proposed a five-year transitional period of Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank. He believed this would unify the Palestinian front under a legitimate representative capable of representing Palestine in its quest for an independent, recognized state after that transitional period. However, the Palestine Liberation Organization rejected this, and Egypt could not speak on behalf of a people against their will. Furthermore, Egypt believed that continuing the peace process would empower it to intervene later in support of Palestinian rights.
The final outcome cannot be treated as purely accidental. The Carter administration gave Egypt assurances that the remaining fronts would remain subject to negotiation with Egyptian participation and that the bilateral process could help produce progress on wider regional issues. Yet the earlier U.S.-Israeli memorandum on Sinai II had already stated that Egypt’s commitments stood on their own and were not conditional on developments between Israel and the other Arab states. The memorandum did not create every division among the Arab parties, but it formally ensured that the Egyptian track could advance even if the other fronts did not.
This does not mean that every later Israeli decision followed a single prearranged plan. But the separation of the fronts reinforced a settlement structure that did more than make the peace tracks bilateral. It addressed first the front that posed the most direct threat to Israel, while leaving the other fronts outside a comprehensive settlement and therefore more vulnerable to being handled separately.
The later choices and resulting consequences were not inevitable, and each had its own immediate causes. Yet the structure gave Israel greater room to act on unresolved fronts, including the formal annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981 — rejected by the U.N. Security Council — and later arrangements of limited self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank that left the central questions of sovereignty unresolved.
This pattern manifested itself again in the negotiations surrounding the Iranian memorandum and became sharper as the memorandum began to unravel. The Trump and Netanyahu administrations have entered into deep disagreements that have become public. Israel rejected the notion that the memorandum should unify the fronts within a single agreement and include Lebanon in both the ceasefire and any future settlement.
The interim agreement called for ending hostilities across all fronts, including Lebanon, while Israel said it would retain forces in southern Lebanon and maintain freedom of action against Hizballah. Israel’s position was that a ceasefire with Iran should not bind its conduct in Lebanon or treat the Lebanese front as part of a single settlement.
Israel’s position did not by itself determine Washington’s next move. But when the Trump administration opened separate negotiations on Lebanon, the result was to preserve the distinction Israel had insisted on: The Iranian track could move forward, at least temporarily, while Lebanon was dealt with on separate terms.
This time, however, the separation of fronts changed in sequence. The resemblance, then, lies not in an identical sequence, but in the function of separation: isolating — or attempting to isolate — the front that imposes the greatest cost by detaching the connected fronts that give it wider bargaining value. At Camp David, the Egyptian front was addressed first because Egypt possessed the greatest capacity to impose direct military and political costs on Israel, while the other fronts remained outside a comprehensive settlement. In the current case, Washington initially reached a ceasefire agreement with Iran. Israel then declared its refusal to withdraw from southern Lebanon, its continued freedom of action within Lebanese territory, and that it was not a party to the agreement.
Washington was thus prompted to change the sequence: to neutralize the Lebanese front from Iran, not to neutralize the Iranian front through Lebanon. The subsequent U.S.-mediated Israel-Lebanon framework tied Israel’s full withdrawal to Hizballah’s disarmament, separating the Lebanese track from the Iranian one.
This is precisely why Lebanon can be detached from an Iran-centered agreement, rather than treated as a front whose political settlement must be negotiated within it. Iran’s partners may impose costs and complicate escalation, but Tehran does not hold a sovereign Lebanese claim that it can convert into a settlement on Lebanon’s behalf. That makes Lebanon easier to separate as a distinct front and recast as a security issue — functionally closer to the Palestinian and Syrian fronts left outside the Egyptian-Israeli settlement than to Sinai itself. The danger is that, once separated, Lebanon is no longer addressed through a comprehensive political settlement but through an open-ended arrangement of disarmament, verification, and conditional withdrawal.
The difference between Egypt and Iran is not that Egypt possessed leverage while Iran does not.
Egypt’s leverage in 1973 came from the direct relationship between force, territory, and sovereignty. Its army had crossed the canal and recovered Egyptian ground. The thing Egypt could continue fighting over was the same thing it sought to recover. That gave Cairo a bargaining position that could be translated into Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, a defined timetable, and ultimately the restoration of Egyptian sovereignty.
Iran enters the current negotiations with a different kind of leverage. The strikes on its nuclear facilities weakened it, but they did not remove its capacity to impose costs by blocking the Strait of Hormuz or acting through its regional partners. Washington’s need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is therefore not a technical detail of the memorandum. It is part of the pressure Tehran can still exert. Iran is weakened, but it was not — and is not now — negotiating as a defeated party with no remaining ability to affect the settlement terms.
This also helps explain why Tehran may resist the separation of the Lebanese front. For Iran, Lebanon is not only an allied arena to be protected; it is part of the wider pressure structure that prevents the Iranian track from being reduced to an isolated bilateral bargain. Once Lebanon and the other connected fronts are detached from the negotiations, Iran’s capacity to impose costs remains, but its political leverage inside the settlement becomes narrower.
Yet Iran cannot turn this leverage into Lebanese sovereignty. Egypt could negotiate over Sinai because Sinai was Egyptian territory and because its military position was tied directly to Egypt’s national claim. Iran can threaten navigation, raise the cost of escalation, and pressure its adversaries through partners. But it cannot negotiate on Lebanon’s behalf in the way Egypt negotiated for Sinai. The Lebanese government has explicitly rejected the claim that any external sponsor can speak for Lebanon. That does not make Hizballah a merely interchangeable Iranian instrument: It means that any durable arrangement must address its Lebanese political setting through Lebanese sovereignty rather than bargain over Lebanon as an extension of Iran.
This is what makes the present arrangement more dangerous. The separation of Lebanon from Iran becomes easier precisely because Iran’s leverage cannot be converted into a Lebanese claim to sovereignty. Lebanon is then treated not as a state whose sovereignty must be restored, but as a security problem to be managed. Israeli withdrawal becomes conditional on disarmament, while verification risks becoming open-ended.
That is not the sequence that stabilized Sinai. The danger is not simply that Lebanon is being separated from Iran, but that it is being separated without a sovereign bargaining logic capable of converting security restraint into a defined settlement. It is the sequence through which peace can once again redistribute war.
The most prominent result of separating the fronts during Camp David was not that it made future conflict inevitable. It was that it made a comprehensive peace harder to achieve and deepened political divisions among Arab states at the very moment when a wider settlement would have required greater coordination. The Arab states strongly criticized Egypt, and the Arab League suspended Egypt’s membership.
This separation of fronts did not lead to more peace. It left the Palestinian and Syrian fronts searching for another force capable of carrying their historical grievances and turning them into a wider regional struggle. For decades, Egyptian influence and leadership had extended across the Arab world through the Arab nationalism led by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt did not only possess the largest Arab army: It had the political weight, historical legitimacy, and regional reach to link Sinai, Palestine, and Syria into one Arab position.
Egypt’s central role had come under severe pressure after 1967 and Nasser’s death, but Camp David gave that strategic reorientation a lasting political form. Egypt recovered Sinai, while the remaining fronts were left without the Arab state most capable of linking their grievances, military weight, and bargaining position.
This was the opportunity that Iranian ideology was able to exploit. Iran did not create the Palestinian cause, Syrian claims, or Lebanese resistance. Its revolutionary ideology, regional ambitions, and hostility toward Israel and the United States had their own roots. But the separation of the fronts gave Tehran an opportunity it could not have created alone: unresolved national causes that were no longer tied together by an Arab state capable of fighting for them and bargaining over them as one regional issue.
Iran first found its clearest opening in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982, when the weakness of the Lebanese state and the anger created by the invasion allowed Tehran to build Hizballah as a resistance force linked to its own revolutionary project. Through its enduring alliance with Syria, Iran expanded its ability to reach the Palestinian front, supporting Palestinian Islamic Jihad — and eventually Hamas — with money, weapons, training, and political support. Iran’s financial and material support to Palestinian armed factions gave Tehran an ability to operate inside the unresolved gaps left by the separation of the fronts.
Iran did not merely become another sponsor of unresolved fronts. It helped change the nature of the conflict itself. What had once been centered on Arab states capable of fighting and bargaining over national territory increasingly became a network of armed actors operating across fronts where sovereignty remained unresolved.
The road to the Oct. 7 attacks was built through a far more complicated history: Oslo, the Second Intifada, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, the blockade, Palestinian division, Hamas’s own choices, Israeli policy, and Iranian support all mattered. Those attacks then led to a wider regional war, although expanding that war to other countries was an Israeli choice, not an inevitable outcome.
Camp David did not create Iran’s regional axis, nor did it mechanically transfer Arab leadership to Tehran. But by separating Egypt from the unresolved fronts without resolving the political questions that bound those fronts together, it left a regional environment in which Tehran could enter, organize influence, and convert unresolved grievances into a wider network of pressure against Israel and the United States.
The first consequence of repeating this structure in the Iranian war will be to create the conditions for more dangerous future conflict. Even if the United States and Israel reduce the Iranian threat in the short and medium term, separating the fronts to impose settlements that compromise sovereignty — such as the one now announced in Lebanon — will give Hizballah a powerful political claim to lead a new struggle of victimhood.
The argument will be simple: The Lebanese government accepted an Israeli presence on Lebanese territory and made Lebanese sovereignty conditional on a security process imposed inside Lebanon. The publicly known framework already leaves full Israeli withdrawal conditional on Hizballah’s disarmament. Israeli withdrawal is therefore not the starting point of the agreement, but leverage to impose a new security order inside Lebanon.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in separating Lebanon from the wider settlement with Iran, it will not have resolved the underlying conflict. It will have made Lebanese sovereignty dependent on a process in which Israel retains a decisive voice over when withdrawal is complete and whether the conditions of the agreement have been met.
The problem is not that conflict will return on a fixed timetable. It is that the agreement itself may preserve the grievances, political vacuum, and unequal security conditions through which future resistance can grow.
The patterns described here do not mean that every Israeli government, every American administration, or every later conflict followed one unified design. They do show how peace becomes fragile when it closes the front that imposes the greatest immediate cost while leaving sovereignty unresolved on the others.
Peace agreements endure when they close conflict without diminishing sovereignty, as the Camp David Accords did with Egypt. The lesson for the Trump administration and Israel is not that every front can be settled in the same way. It is that a lasting agreement requires sovereignty to be defined rather than deferred. It is also the only way to deny armed movements and external sponsors the grievances and political vacuum through which they gain influence.
Instead of treating Lebanon as a security issue to be separated from Iran to preserve — or now revive — the Iranian track, the Lebanese arrangement must restore a sovereign Lebanese bargaining position. Israeli withdrawal must be part of a defined timetable, not remain conditional on an open-ended security mission imposed inside Lebanon.
That was the logic of the Egyptian-Israeli settlement: Sinai did not become stable because Egypt was placed under Israeli supervision, but because Israel withdrew according to a defined timetable, Egypt recovered full sovereignty over its territory, and both sides accepted reciprocal limits only after the question of sovereignty had been settled. The Multinational Force and Observers was created by the agreement to verify the treaty’s reciprocal security provisions. It was not designed to determine whether Israel would leave, give Israel a right to inspect Egyptian territory, or preserve Israel’s freedom of action inside Sinai. It was an international mechanism for verifying an agreement whose territorial principle had already been resolved.
The Lebanese framework reverses that logic. If Israeli withdrawal remains conditional on Hizballah’s disarmament and no fixed timetable governs further withdrawals, then the security arrangement does not protect sovereignty. It makes sovereignty conditional on an open-ended process inside Lebanon.
The Sinai analogy should not be applied mechanically: Lebanon is not Sinai. But the principle is clear. Any future security regime should be international, limited to defined areas and procedures, and based on reciprocal, verifiable restrictions on both sides of the border. No agreement can impose enduring restrictions on Lebanon while leaving Israel free of comparable obligations.
A peace agreement cannot be a mechanism for closing the front that causes Israel the greatest damage while separating the other fronts in a way that preserves an unlawful presence, diminishes sovereignty, and retains freedom of action over them. A peace agreement should be the beginning of a genuine peace in the Middle East. Peace cannot be built by reproducing the patterns that redistributed the previous war.
Ahmed Saber Abbas is a contributing analyst and Middle East consultant at New Lines Institute. His work focuses on Middle East security, proxy warfare, intelligence competition, escalation dynamics, regional security architecture, and great-power strategy. His analysis draws on ongoing engagement with political, parliamentary, and diplomatic circles across the Middle East, as well as work on post-conflict stabilization, regional alignment shifts, and conflict spillover.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
