ABSTRACT
The Israeli and American public arenas have witnessed an incessant debate over the extent to which an international conference could set in motion an effective process of regional accommodation. In contrast to the global trends, the minimalist London Accords were fully patterned on regional precedents that assigned priority to the function of the subcommittees over that of the plenary, in the course of the peacemaking or armistice process. The Geneva Peace Conference, which convened on December 21, 1973, clearly approximated the minimalist type of the multilateral peacemaking process. Kissinger's minimalist vision of the Geneva forum as but a symbolic precipitant to a series of segmental bilateral negotiations was derived from his perceptions of both the Middle Eastern subsystem and the global international system. Quandt contends that the administration tended initially to view Geneva as "the umbrella under which Sadat and Begin could move forward at whatever pace they could sustain."
