Visiting Madrid’s royal palace earlier this summer, I was mildly surprised that I needed to be reminded of that building’s role in the seemingly endless search for Middle East peace. One of the first rooms on the palace tour contains a plaque noting that it was the site of the 1991 Middle East Peace Conference. If the Madrid conference is remembered at all today it is for the uncomfortable spectacle of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir berating Arab delegates and for Syria’s foreign minister replying by holding up a ‘Wanted for Terrorism’ poster of Shamir distributed by the British decades earlier.

That awkward gathering took American negotiators months to arrange and though it seemed like a huge event at the time, its actual results were modest at best. It is largely forgotten today, overshadowed by the Oslo process that followed. Oslo gave us a famous handshake on the White House lawn, Yasser Arafat’s return to Palestine and a brief, hopeful moment, even if it all ended in failure and yet another round of violence. Oslo also taught us all a lesson that is too often forgotten: That outside mediation is only really useful when the warring parties actually want to strike a deal.

Regional players

This brings us to the second oft-forgotten lesson of Madrid: That power in general, and American power in particular, has limits. Specifically, that Washington’s ability to force actions on regional players — particularly Israel — is far more limited than most people believe. There could be little better evidence of this than US Secretary of State John Kerry’s fruitless shuttle diplomacy combined with the increasingly frosty relationship of US President Barack Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Back in 1991, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker, flush with post-Gulf War popularity, were able to pressure Israel and Syria into attending a peace conference in which neither country had much interest, but they could not make them negotiate seriously with one another.

A generation later, Kerry is graciously received by Arab leaders and Netanyahu issues public statements lauding Obama’s support for Israel, but the Americans cannot get either side to concede anything of substance.

Influence meets its limits when influencees believe that their backs are against the wall. So American pressure counts for nothing? Not exactly.

Madrid is remembered as a failure. The formal part of the conference did not go well and the talks it launched quickly stagnated. The key, however, is that it launched talks. At Madrid, and in the bilateral talks that followed, Israel sat with Palestinians for the first time, albeit Palestinians who were part of a joint delegation with Jordan and whom Israel itself had more-or-less chosen.

Not long before, however, the very Israeli leaders overseeing those talks had rejected the notion of ever talking to any Palestinian in any forum. What we now remember as the Oslo talks — originally a series of secret meetings — were first conceived as an attempt to break through the barriers on both sides that more-or-less guaranteed failure at Madrid. And though Oslo, in turn, finds few supporters today on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, it is worth remembering that it is because of Oslo that Mahmoud Abbas resides today in Palestine rather than Tunis. As bleak as today’s Israeli-Palestinian landscape may look, it is at least grounded in the idea that Israelis and Palestinians ought to be talking. Those of us old enough to remember a time before Oslo, and before Madrid, remember a time when even the idea of talking was widely rejected on both sides.

All-powerful arbiter

And America? While generations of events have proven it to be far from the all-powerful arbiter of so many people’s imagination (including, at times, its own), it is worth remembering that the image we all associate with “Oslo” comes not from Norway but from Washington: Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands on the White House lawn. America had little involvement in the negotiating of the agreement that Arafat and Rabin’s subordinates — Abbas and Shimon Peres — signed that day, but both sides wanted the symbolic power of a White House ceremony, presided over by an American president, to reinforce the importance of that event.

It was a reminder that whatever its failures may be, a superpower still counts for something. That lesson is worth remembering in the weeks and months to come.

Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.