As almost 50 delegations assembled for the Annapolis conference on Tuesday, one question stood out. Why was the Bush administration, which had once scorned Bill Clinton’s efforts to broker Middle East peace, risking a high-profile attempt of its own, despite near to rock bottom expectations?

“You can make the case that in an attempt to shoot the moon and get nothing, more violence resulted,” Ari Fleischer, then President George W. Bush’s spokesman, said in 2002 of Mr Clinton’s Camp David negotiations two years before.

In remarks he later retracted but which some saw as reflecting Mr Bush’s true thoughts, he added: “As a result of an attempt to push the parties beyond where they were willing to go, it led to expectations that were raised to such a high level that it turned into violence.”

In the run-up to Annapolis, the warnings have been very similar. “If you have a failed conference you won’t return to a status quo ante,” John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, told the Financial Times recently. “It will be worse for American influence – and for whoever shows up.”

Other commentators cite a variety of reasons for the US administration’s renewed interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – ranging from the uneasy tenure of leaders it is eager to support, such as Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister – to the rise of Iran.

Philip Zelikow, who served as one of Condoleezza Rice’s closest advisers at the state department until last December, says that Ms Rice has been eager to begin a new push on Middle East peace since 2005, after the death of Yassir Arafat, the former Palestinian leader, and redoubled her efforts to persuade Mr Bush to take up the issue in the wake of last year’s Lebanon war.

“The president saw that this was a major corollary of everything else he was trying to do in the Middle East. That was apparent to him by late last year,” Mr Zelikow says, citing arguments that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict intensified extremism in the region and distracted Arab governments from reform.

He adds that Ms Rice, whose efforts were hampered by the rise of Hamas, also came to the view that the sequential nature of the “road map” – a phased approach to achieving peace – would prevent it from ever succeeding. 

“You can’t wait for the Palestinians to get their house in order because it may never happen and it may never happen precisely because of the continuing Israeli occupation,” he says. “What Annapolis does is to break with the sequential approach and replace with the simultaneous approach.”

But as Palestinians and Israelis struggled over a joint text in the run-up to Annapolis, the US has emphasised the number of attendees as much as it has the start of negotiations. Patrick Clawson, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that the US is partly seeking to build “a coalition of moderates against radicals” – with radicals being understood as Hamas, Hizbollah and, above all, Iran.

Ahead of the meeting, Sean McCormack, state department spokesman, suggested that Annapolis essentially divided the Middle East into two: those “interested to varying degrees in a different Middle East, more open, one more based on democracy, political reform . . .  and those forces on the other side who are interested in using the forces of violence and extremism to further their own agendas”.

But one constant in the Bush administration’s approach has been its reluctance to put forward proposals of its own to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians. In terming himself a “facilitator” Mr Bush remains unwilling, in the words of Mr Fleischer, to push the parties beyond where they are willing to go.

“The US position in the region has declined because of Iraq, because of Iran, so at this point they can’t completely resist pressure from their Arab and European partners to do something on the Palestinian issue,” says Flynt Leverett, who also worked closely with Ms Rice on the Middle East at the National Security Council during Mr Bush’s first term.

“Annapolis is their version of doing something,” he says. “But if she [Ms Rice] is not prepared to be more forward-leaning on monitoring the process and defining a political horizon, this won’t go anywhere.”