Israel-Hamas war: Antony Blinken had three tasks in hand during Middle East visit - none of them went well
America's chief diplomat has been engaged on a frantic bout of shuttle diplomacy across the Middle East - with little to show for it.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken visited Jerusalem, Ramallah, Amman, Baghdad and Ankara but, diplomatically speaking, seems still to be on the road to nowhere.
He has three tasks in hand - none of them going well.
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First, to persuade Israel to permit a lull in the fighting to let more aid in and hostages out. That's been rejected at least for now. Israel says hostages need to be freed first, then they can talk about pausing the fighting.
Second, to persuade Arab countries to think about long-term solutions to end the Israel-Hamas conflict.
"Are you kidding?" said his Arab hosts, this really isn't the time with Gaza being reduced to rubble.
They would also have been telling him Israel must commit to ending all settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. If it does then maybe long-term peace could be considered.
Third, his mission to stop the conflict from spreading. He preached to the choir here. No one he has met wants this conflict to expand. But they are not the ones likely to escalate it.
Hezbollah and Iran are the danger and, for obvious reasons, they were not on Blinken's itinerary.
Meanwhile, Israel's unprecedented destruction of Gaza is exacerbating geopolitical fault lines across the region, making a bigger eruption of violence ever more likely.
Israel has never done to Gaza what it is doing now. In one week, it dropped as many bombs on the small densely-populated strip of land as the US-backed coalition dropped on Mosul fighting Islamic State in two months.
It has struck civilian buildings, schools, ambulances and areas where it said people should move to be safe. It says it has good military reasons for doing so but the impact is the same.
Pictures of dead Palestinian children lined up in their death shrouds outside Gaza hospitals, and terrible scenes of destruction watched 24/7 on Arab TV news channels, are galvanising public opinion across the region and the public fury of its leaders.
Turkey's leader for instance, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made it clear Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is history to him. "We have erased him," he has said.
US support for Israel in the war in Gaza is disastrous for American standing in the region and further afield.
Developing nations looking on see double standards when it comes to Israel and Ukraine, and are consequently likely to be less sympathetic to the West's calls to support them in the war there.
Mr Blinken's diplomacy is making the US look impotent and in some ways ham-fisted. In Ramallah on the West Bank, he told the Palestinian Authority (PA), sworn enemies of Hamas, they could play a central role in Gaza once it is purged of Hamas in a remarkably tin-eared intervention.
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The PA is already regarded as a collaborator government by many Palestinians. The idea it could ride back to power in Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks will seem to them naive and absurd.
There are a couple of upsides though as Mr Blinken continues his shuttling.
The war has not escalated. Many had feared Hamas's onslaught on 7 October presaged a new kind of Holy War with Hezbollah, and Iran likely to join in.
The militant group's 7 October rampage reached a new level of barbarism, that saw 1,400 Israelis killed amid some of the worst depravities imaginable, and as many as 250 hostages taken. But it seems this was not planned as a new kind of Jihad 2.0, involving more than just Hamas.
Hezbollah has had a number of opportunities to become involved but has not done so.
It has a reported 150,000 missiles at its disposal, secreted in the hills of southern Lebanon.
The thought of that being unleashed and the Israeli-American response does not bear contemplating.
And Iran, it seems clear, does not want a conflict pitching itself against two American carrier groups in the Mediterranean and US bases in the Gulf.
The moment of danger may have passed for a wider conflict in the region.
But not for the innocents in Gaza still dying in their thousands and the hundreds of hostages being held in their midst.
