Rather than being based upon the idea of mutual concessions, current US policy, including Trump’s “peace” plan, is a total embrace of Israel’s vision of Greater Israel. If this is the end of a US-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process based on mutual concessions, will US national interests suffer? While there once was a time when US interests were directly affected by the peace process, that era has passed. Israelis and Palestinians retain a deep interest in the future direction of their confrontation, but the presence or absence of peace negotiations has only a marginal impact on US national security. That underlying US indifference to the outcome was not always the case, as my archival and historical research makes clear in this paper. During and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the United States faced two crises that directly undermined US national interests in containing the Soviet Union and in maintaining the flow of oil at a reasonable price from the Persian Gulf. US officials worried that US national interests would suffer as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the Nixon administration, archival documents make clear they felt the peace process could resolve these challenges by blunting Soviet meddling and avoiding splits with Arab states. Following a period of inaction on Arab-Israeli negotiations before the 1973 war, Henry Kissinger made shepherding Arab-Israeli talks a very high priority. By the early 1990s, US adversaries had changed. With the end of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, and Arab oil exporters’ reluctance to wield the oil weapon, the factors that mattered so much in the 1970s had disappeared. New possibilities that might undermine US national interests arose but never appeared as consequential as the Soviet and oil factors. In that case, why did much of the US involvement on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating track take place only in the 1990s and thereafter? First, I contend US leaders did so only in a partial manner; they wanted a resolution but were usually unwilling to pressure Israel in material terms to compel the necessary concessions. Had a core US national interest been at stake, the United States might have pressed Israel harder. Second, I consider plausible explanations for why US administrations would lead a diplomatic process when US national interests were minimally engaged. For example, US presidents still appreciate the way big diplomatic wins could help them in domestic political terms.