Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East

The Trump administration’s peace agreements in the Middle East were the greatest foreign policy accomplishment in decades. Now, for the first time, his ambassador to Israel explains how they pulled it off.Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. For decades, the U.S. State Department called it diplomacy.David Friedman was an outside candidate when President Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel. He took office to find U.S.-Israel policy stuck in stalemate. For years, accepted wisdom was that extensive experience and detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture were necessary to negotiate treaties. In truth, Friedman realized, all parties played on that accepted wisdom to stall—expecting to get a better deal further down the road.Tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector, Friedman and a small team with no prior diplomatic experience revamped American diplomacy to project “peace through strength.” He emphasized the importance of leverage, the key to any good negotiation. After painstaking, behind-the-scenes work, the Abraham Accords were signed: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations.In Sledgehammer, Friedman tells the true story of how the Abraham Accords came about. He takes us from the Oval Office to the highest echelons of power in the Middle East, putting us at the table during the intense negotiations that led to this historic breakthrough. The inside story of arguably the greatest achievement of the Trump Administration, Sledgehammer is an important, inspiring account of the hard, hopeful work necessary to bring long overdue—and lasting—peace to one of the most turbulent and tragic regions of the globe.How do you break a decades-long stalemate to achieve the impossible?Peace Through Strength: How Friedman, a negotiator with zero diplomatic experience, tossed aside the established playbook to achieve what the experts called impossible.The Jerusalem Embassy Move: The inside story of the intense Oval Office debates and bureaucratic battles that led to moving the U.S. Embassy to Israel’s eternal capital.Peace from the Outside In: The untold story of the painstaking, behind-the-scenes work that culminated in the historic Abraham Accords, forging peace between Israel and five Muslim nations.The Golan Heights: A minute-by-minute account of the phone calls and White House meetings that led to the United States recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the strategic Golan Heights.Challenging Diplomatic Orthodoxy: Friedman’s firsthand account of fighting the establishment’s “insanity” and an old playbook that had failed for decades. Read more