Cliff Sims

But suddenly he's confronted with

arguably the most intractable US foreign policy problem of recent decades.

Middle East peace places a total cluster.

You know that better than most, you know?

And so suddenly he's having to figure out, okay, how do I navigate the dynamic between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

How do I navigate the dynamic between the Israelis and countries in the region who are more stable,

Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et cetera, with other countries in the region that are far less stable, Syria and Iraq, and go around the globe there.

How do I balance those interests?

How do I delineate between what some of these people say publicly and what they really think privately about the Palestinians, for instance?

For decades, everyone assumed that any breakout of peace in the Middle East was gonna be predicated on the Palestinian, getting a Palestinian state.

And so every issue started with, if we don't deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue first, we can't get any other things to happen in the region.

Jared looked at this same problem set, along with the president, who also had, he had a business skillset that he was approaching these things with.

And they kind of said, you know what?

I wonder if we flip this on its head, if we can get some normalization agreements between Israel and other Arab states, that it would actually lead to momentum that might one day lead to a solution to

this Israeli-Palestinian problem.

And so they didn't, I won't say they solved, but they started making real progress in ways we had never seen before with the Abraham Accords, this series of normalization agreements with Arab states around the Middle East and Israel as kind of the starting point for peace and prosperity in the region.

So that's an example of when we got there,

None of us knew what to do with Middle East peace.

I mean, my gosh, what a giant problem to solve.

And over time, sat there and worked through those things and immersed ourselves in those issues and took the same skill set that had made us successful in the private sector and implied them with fresh eyes to these tough problems that had...