Politics & Power Quote by Mahmoud Abbas

Abbas frames “dialogue and persuasion” as the civilized default and “ultimatums” as a kind of diplomatic profanity, but the real craft here is how he recruits America’s self-image against America’s leverage. The line is less a plea than a mirror: the United States likes to see itself as the architect of a rules-based order, not a superpower dispensing deadlines. By praising the version of Washington that talks first, Abbas tries to narrow the acceptable range of U.S. behavior without openly confronting it.

The subtext is transactional. Abbas is speaking from the asymmetry of a weaker party that can’t credibly threaten retaliation, so he appeals to process as power. “Dialogue” becomes a protective buffer against coercive timelines, conditional aid, or forced concessions; “ultimatums” are what strong actors use when they want to skip the messy politics of legitimacy. Even the phrasing “we always have hoped” is strategic: it suggests patience and reasonableness, positioning Palestinians as consistent and Americans as the ones who might be drifting.

Context matters because Abbas’s political brand has long leaned on diplomacy over armed struggle, a posture that plays well in Western capitals but leaves him vulnerable at home to charges of impotence. This sentence reassures international audiences that he’s the responsible interlocutor, while subtly warning that pressure-driven tactics erode the very “path” he claims to prefer. It’s a bid to turn American influence from a cudgel into a constraint: if Washington wants credibility, it must behave like the mediator it claims to be.