In his first term as president, Donald Trump’s successful Mideast diplomacy required him to break through the wall of stale conventional wisdom that had been constructed by a tunnel-visioned DC establishment. He may have to do so again.

Watching experienced Mideast diplomats process reality is a great way to see a person unlearning every relevant lesson in real time. The New York Times interviewed outgoing UN Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland, and the article makes for frustrating reading. Here’s how it opens:

“In September last year, the top United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process left a meeting with Hamas leaders in Gaza thinking that he had helped avert a major escalation.

“The veteran Norwegian diplomat, Tor Wennesland, said he believed that Hamas had agreed to reduce recent tensions along the Israel-Gaza border in exchange for more work permits for Gazan workers.

“But Hamas had bluffed Mr. Wennesland, along with the Israeli leadership and much of the international community. Days later, the group’s fighters attacked Israel, setting off the deadliest year in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

It’s a familiar story. Hamas fooled everybody and plunged the region into bloody chaos. So what’s the lesson that Wennesland learned from this? That focusing on steadily improving the quality of life in Gaza and making peace between Arab states and Israel were big mistakes. “Both approaches, Mr. Wennesland said, ultimately failed to solve the main issue driving the conflict in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank: the lack of a permanent settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Let’s just spell it out. The current conflict is the result, according to Wennesland himself, of negotiators and politicians in Israel and abroad falsely believing that Hamas was interested in political stability, not war. So the decade spent helping Palestinians on the ground and spreading peace and reconciliation throughout the Middle East should have, instead, been spent trying to get Hamas to agree on a political settlement?

This aversion to reality is almost comical. Wennesland thinks the mistake was trusting Hamas and so the fix would be to treat Hamas as an honest broker.

As the interview develops, it just goes further off the rails. The failure to achieve a two-state solution “was also linked to how Western leaders — distracted by the migration crisis in Europe, the coronavirus pandemic and, finally, the war in Ukraine — had stopped convincing Israelis of the need for a two-state solution and Palestinians of the need for a united front, Mr. Wennesland said.”

First of all, should we expect European leaders not to be “distracted” by a Russian invasion coming from one direction and a migration crisis from another, not to mention a global pandemic?

Is there anything the world is permitted to pay attention to besides the Palestinians?

That’s not a rhetorical question. If pandemics and land wars are distractions, everything’s a distraction. But even crazier is Wennesland’s assertion, repeated again at another point in the interview, that Hamas-Fatah unity must take priority.

Wennesland may be Norwegian, but he’s acting like he’s got Stockholm Syndrome. By his own account, Hamas is the problem—even if he won’t come right out and say it. He has described the Iranian-backed terror group as untrustworthy, uninterested in true peace, and capable of long-term deception in the service of the most horrific crimes against humanity imaginable. Let’s get these guys a state!

It’s pathological. One of the reasons Trump’s social-media post about the hostages got so much attention yesterday is that it struck a chord with the public:

“Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East – But it’s all talk, and no action! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”

While it’s bluntly spoken in classic Trumpese, it’s at least evidence of a person in dialogue with reality. Allowing the extremists to dictate policy has a perfect record of failure. To do so, as Wennesland does, after admitting that your solicitousness to the extremists is what got us here in the first place, indicates a commitment to that failure.

The Times touts Wennesland’s qualifications by noting he worked for the Norwegian government back in the heady days of the Oslo process. It’s the Times’ way of saying Wennesland was there in the ’90s. But it’s clear that, like many of his fellow peace processers, he stayed there.