It's time to renegotiate the contract that put the Middle East together.

The "contract" is the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The world that document created exists now only on yellowed maps, and the issues left unsettled — primarily the need for separate Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish territories — have come home begging. War is not fixing this; diplomacy might.

In November 2014, I wrote the only solution to the Islamic State militant group was to use American peacekeepers to create a stable, tri-state solution to the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divide inside Iraq.