After the defeat, the administration embraced former secretary of state James Baker's foreign policyparadigm, which is based on the belief that it is possible and desirable to reach a stable balance of power in the Middle East.
In the four years of Mikhail Gorbachev's rule (including in recent months), there have been a number of features of Soviet foreign and defense policy that are difficult to reconcile with the optimistic Western paradigm for explaining Gorbachev's rule and future Soviet behavior.
The guiding notion behind this paradigm, which has been the prominent goal of U.S. Middle East policy since the 1970s is that it is possible to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole by Israeli appeasement of the Palestinians.
That is, Netanyahu's conditional acceptance of Obama's false and ideologically motivated two-state paradigm damns Israel to the position of foot dragger in relation to someone else's policy rather than trailblazer for its own policy.