Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East Audiobook

The Trump administration’s peace agreements in the Middle East were the greatest foreign policy accomplishment in decades. Now, for the first time, his ambassador to Israel explains how they pulled it off.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. For decades, the U.S. State Department called it diplomacy.

David Friedman was an outside candidate when President Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel. He took office to find U.S.-Israel policy stuck in stalemate. For years, accepted wisdom was that extensive experience and detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture were necessary to negotiate treaties. In truth, Friedman realized, all parties played on that accepted wisdom to stall—expecting to get a better deal further down the road.

Tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector, Friedman and a small team with no prior diplomatic experience revamped American diplomacy to project “peace through strength.” He emphasized the importance of leverage, the key to any good negotiation. After painstaking, behind-the-scenes work, the Abraham Accords were signed: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations.

In Sledgehammer, Friedman tells the true story of how the Abraham Accords came about. He takes us from the Oval Office to the highest echelons of power in the Middle East, putting us at the table during the intense negotiations that led to this historic breakthrough. The inside story of arguably the greatest achievement of the Trump Administration, Sledgehammer is an important, inspiring account of the hard, hopeful work necessary to bring long overdue—and lasting—peace to one of the most turbulent and tragic regions of the globe.

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"Great book. Easy to follow and understand. David Friedman and the rest of the team accomplished alot in their 4 years. Finally, a team that stopped putting up with Arab threats and hate. They created the Abraham Accords ( peace between Israel & neighbors), moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem as mandated by the 1995 law passed by Congress, recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, recognized the Golan Hts as Israeli territory, stopped funding for the grandkids of the 1948 war, accepted Jews to live in new towns in territory captured from Jordan in 1967. Peace for peace. Peace thru strength. David Friedman, a true clear-headed brave leader."

— Sky Writer (5 out of 5 stars)