Mick Hartley

Some three years back I wrote about the Trump Paradox: the man is clearly a narcissistic blowhard who's a disgrace to his office, but….sometimes he gets things right on foreign policy when the Washington think-tanks and the liberal media consensus completely miss the point. Currently he's being particularly tough on China and on Iran, for instance. Hard to argue with his instincts there.

And now – the Abraham Accords, where, on the White House lawn last week, Trump oversaw the signing of a document normalising relations between Israel and the Arab states of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.   

Michael Doran, in Tablet:

The Abraham Accords are the most significant development in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 25 years. Not only have the Palestinians lost their veto over normalization between Israel and other Arab states, but the entire “Resistance Alliance,” led by Iran, has revealed itself as incapable of placing obstacles in the way of Israel’s integration into the Arab state system. True, the UAE and Bahrain are small powers, but behind them looms Saudi Arabia, which is by far the most influential Arab state. Without Riyadh’s tacit support, the celebration on the White House lawn would never have materialized. If Trump wins the election in November, there is a good chance that Riyadh will normalize relations with Israel—to say nothing of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Morocco, and Sudan, who are also waiting in the wings. […]

Trump’s diplomacy posited that the best way to manage this conflict was not to blow more hot air into a punctured balloon, but to reduce it to its true geostrategic proportions. Thanks to this strategy, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seems likely in time to become the Eastern Mediterranean equivalent to the Western Sahara conflict: an insoluble but localized dilemma with a specific set of local human costs. The debilitating lock that it has placed on American strategic thinking for decades has been broken. In breaking that lock, Trump has created a process to end the Arab-Israeli conflict—which unlike the local Israeli conflict with the Palestinians, had real geostrategic significance.

It is equally notable that Trump’s masterstroke came by breaking the hold of the Washington foreign policy establishment on the Middle East peacemaking business. In denigrating his accomplishment, the leading lights of American foreign policy have also conveniently erased from memory their unblemished record of outrageously bad predictions.

Terry Glavin comments:

Trump’s campaign machine will be sure to favourably contrast Trump’s Abraham Accords accomplishment against former president Barack Obama’s contributions to Middle East peace.

This shouldn’t be particularly difficult. The Republicans will want to hang Obama’s legacy around the neck of Democratic Party contender Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice-president, like a rotting albatross. That’s because Obama’s legacy in the Greater Middle East consists mainly of two rotten things.

First was his catastrophic decision to outsource U.S. policy in Syria to Moscow and Tehran, leading to a half-million Syrian dead, roughly 10 million people bombed out of their homes and a wave of refugees greater than anything since the Second World War. Second, the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” Obama’s preposterous nuclear rapprochement with Iran’s ayatollahs, has allowed the Khomeinists to run riot and rampage across Syria and Yemen and Lebanon and back again.  […]

The conservative Hudson Institute’s formidable Michael Doran is not wrong to describe the conclusion of the Abraham Accords as “the most significant development in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 25 years.” But that’s mostly because there have been no significant developments to report. It’s been like a malignancy to be endured, rather than a pathology that might one day be cured. But Doran argues persuasively that while you can still take Trump to be a vulgarian from Queens if you like, the thing is, the argot Trump speaks is a dialect intelligible to the political language spoken by the thug regimes that dominate the Levant, the Maghreb, and the Persian Gulf.

And the happy result is that the region’s crippling stasis may well be breaking at last.

The Palestinians are furious, but the Arab states seem finally to have lost patience with them. And Tehran is furious too, of course.

It’s in Tehran’s response that the bigger story is told. The Arab states, weary enough with the Palestinian leadership’s habitual rejectionism, have had it up their eyeballs with Khomeinist mischief and mayhem in the region. So have the Americans. So have the Israelis. And at long last, something’s being done about it.

That’s what makes the Abraham Accords a big deal.