Washington ? We’ve been here before and if history is a guide, we’ll be here again.

President Barack Obama is aiming for the prize that has eluded many U.S. presidents before him: a deal to form an independent Palestinian state and end six decades of conflict in one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Obama will bring the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to Washington next month for a symbolic handshake and the start, yet again, of a new round of peace talks. The ambitious goal: a peace deal inside a year.

The talks make good on an Obama campaign promise to confront the festering conflict early in his presidency, instead of deferring the peace broker’s role as former President George W. Bush did.

The negotiations also saddle Obama with one of the globe’s thorniest problems just when many other difficulties confront him, from a jobless economic recovery to probable election losses in the fall.

Every president for three decades has at least dipped a toe in the swirling currents of Mideast peace, usually with little to show for it. Peace talks have stopped and started so often that even the experts have stopped counting, or count differently. The latest round of direct talks gets under way Sept. 2.

The United States is considered an essential agent of any workable deal, if only because Washington is Israel’s closest ally and main defender.

This time, it is not clear whether the U.S. would eventually draft its own peace plan or remain primarily a referee. Also unclear is whether Obama would convene his own high-stakes peace summit, in the mold of Camp David meetings that succeeded under President Jimmy Carter but failed under President Bill Clinton.

“The enemies of peace will keep trying to defeat us and to derail these talks,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday. “But I ask the parties to persevere, to keep moving forward even through difficult times and to continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace.”

U.S. presidents have sweet-talked some Mideast leaders and tried to strong-arm others. Despite Obama’s resilient popularity abroad, there is little to suggest that these leaders will respond to either tactic. Nor is it clear that they could rally popular support for any deal they might strike.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a hawkish leader beholden to even more hawkish political elements that make up his governing coalition. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is a weak leader whose very willingness to entertain new talks further erodes his credibility among disaffected Palestinians.

The initial reaction from the PLO illustrated just how difficult keeping the talks on track could prove to be.

Yassir Abed Rabbo, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s top decision-making body said that any Israeli settlement activity during the negotiations “would threaten the continuity of these talks.”

The last direct talks were in November 2007, near the end of the Bush administration. They broke down after Israel’s 2008 military operation in Gaza and seemed even more remote upon Netanyahu’s election last year on a much tougher platform than his predecessor’s.