“I cannot think of a secretary of state that did not want to get involved in the Middle East,” Gamal Helal, a translator who served at least seven of them, said in a 2019 documentary about America’s Mideast peacemaking. “And by the way, all of them think they can reinvent the wheel, and all of them think that they can sort of ignore history and start fresh. It will never happen in the Middle East.”

Everything Helal said in the documentary, which premiered at a Colorado film festival on Aug. 30, 2019, is deeply informed by decades of personal experience — his own and that of the other star diplomats featured in the film. And less than one year later, everything Helal said was rendered obsolete.