The recent near-collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts unleashed the characteristic wave of criticism that predictably follows in the wake of such setbacks. Yet indulging in finger-pointing, wishing that the parties had different positions, or throwing up our hands and walking away will lead nowhere.

Secretary Kerry was not wrong to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace — doing so is in our interest and is an important element of American leadership in the region. Yet he should not seek to reconstitute the process as it previously stood. It was tactically flawed, insofar as it required both leaders to take political risks for a scant payoff, namely the promulgation of an American “framework document” and the continuation of talks whose odds seemed bleak.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, facing a public enamored of the false hope of unilateral statehood via accumulated U.N. agency memberships, never engaged enthusiastically in the talks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged with vigor but, facing the likelihood that Abbas would reject the framework document and thus doom it to immediate irrelevance, had little incentive to incur the political cost of releasing Palestinian prisoners or blocking housing tenders.

Secretary Kerry has argued that it is better to try and fail at peace than not to try at all, but failure has a cost. The majority of both Israelis and Palestinians, according to a recent poll by Shibley Telhami, support a two-state solution, but nearly half of both publics do not believe it can be achieved and only a quarter on either side have confidence in their own negotiators or the American mediators. A high-profile failure deepens that pessimism and feeds enthusiasm for counterproductive alternatives.

The question, therefore, is not whether to have a peace process, but what approach can stabilize the peace talks and increase long-term chances for producing an agreement. There are four elements that the Obama administration should incorporate going forward.

Read the article in full at Foreign Policy.