Strategic Assessment

After the disengagement is completed, the United States will almost certainly strive to implement the roadmap, a direction already determined when Washington decided to back the disengagement and announced that the plan was consonant with the roadmap. The intention to return to the roadmap has been reiterated over the last two years, most recently by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit to the Middle East in July 2005, and there are reasons to assume that the Americans mean to do so. The United States, the Quartet, Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the entire international community are committed to the roadmap. Even if at first the administration formulated the roadmap as lip service to the Europeans, the map has acquired the status of a sine qua non. Abandoning the roadmap would be fatal to the international credibility of the United States and the chances of progressing toward a permanent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Therefore when it approved the disengagement plan, the United States insisted that Israel reaffirm it commitment to the roadmap’s outline such that “the roadmap is the only plan on the table.”