Posted on 09/17/2020 7:39:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
For decades, foreign policy expertsthe blobassumed much about the Middle East that has turned out to be completely wrong.
Its been remarkable to watch the mainstream press and official Washington try to downplay the significance of the peace deal the Trump administration brokered between Israel and two Arab states this week.
The signing of the Abraham Accords on Tuesday between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain at the White House, which for the first time normalized relations between Israel and the two Persian Gulf states, is by any measure historic. Its been 26 years since any Arab state recognized Israel, and the deal struck this week holds out hope that other Mideast countries, maybe even Saudi Arabia, will be next.
Under a Democrat president, this would have met paeons in the press and soliloquies on cable news about the historic nature of the accords. Think tankers and foreign policy experts would have marveled at the achievement. Elected leaders would have hailed the agreement as the beginning of a new era for peace in the Mideast. It would have dominated the headlines all week.
Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a distraction. MSNBCs Chuck Todd said he was uncomfortable with it because it seems transactional. NBCs Andrea Mitchell scoffed that it is not Middle East peace. CBS called it a business deal, and The Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg, never one to miss the conventional wisdom train, said the accords amount to an arms deal.
You get the idea. When pundits werent dismissing the accords as some kind of seedy Mideast business arrangement, they were deriding Trumps role in it, saying he deserves no credit because he just happened to be in office when all the pieces fell into place. Israel and the Gulf states, the thinking goes, have been working closely for years now, the result of geopolitical forces that have little to do with Trump.
All of this amounts to so much hand-wringing from “the blob”that faux-sagacious body of foreign policy experts thats been wrong about the Middle East for decades. These are the experts and officials who assured us, in lock-step with the Obama administration, that the key to stability in the Mideast was to ensure that Iran could become a regional hegemon. All we had to do, according to this theory, is get a nuclear deal with Tehranat any cost, it turns outand the United States could then leave the region more or less to the mullahs, who would replace the United States as the regions power broker.
It turns out, the region didnt like the idea of living under Irans heel. Indeed, many of the strategic shifts that have changed geopolitics in the Mideast in recent years have happened as a reaction against the Obama administrations theory of an ascendant Iran. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, along with Egypt, rightly see Iran as a threat, nuclear deal or no, and responded accordingly, building stronger ties with Israel as they realized their mutual interest.
When Trump followed through on his pledge to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, then had the nerve to kill Irans Qasem Soleiman and ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, it sent a clear message to other Mideast leaders that U.S. policy had decidedly shifted under Trump.
The conventional wisdom, that peace in the region depended on an Israeli-Palestinian deal, turned out to have been wrong. As my colleague Helen Raleigh notes, we were assured that Trump killed all chance for peace in the region when he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in December 2017. The Middle East, said Obamas former Secretary of State John Kerry, would explode. Other former Obama officials warned that the United States had squandered its chance to be a peacemaker.
In doing so, none of these people were willing to question their long-held assumptions about Mideast geopolitics or grapple with how their policies might have changed the incentives for Arab leaders. Indeed, the upheavals of the Arab Spring and the specter of ISIS served as a powerful wake-up call to the Arab statesespecially when, with the Obama administrations tacit support, the Muslim Brotherhood briefly took power in Egypt in 2012.
Trump of course had no hand in these developments, but he did have the acumen and wherewithal to recognize the opportunity that they presented, which counts for much.
Writing earlier this year in the Texas National Security Review about the Good Friday Agreement that ended Northern Irelands civil war, James B. Steinburg, a former deputy national security advisor and State Department official in the Clinton administration, noted the importance of what he calls ripeness in international diplomacy and conflict resolution. In the case of Northern Ireland, the parties adopted in 1998 what they had rejected in 1973. Changed circumstances, says Steinburg, played a major role, but so did the recognition that circumstances had changed:
While policymakers are often limited in what they can do to create the conditions that make a conflict ripe for settlement, it is a vital tool of statecraft to be able to spot an opportunity when it is emerging. It is equally important to understand when a conflict is not ripe for negotiation: It can be argued that the premature effort leading to the Sunningdale agreement in 1973 actually contributed to prolonging the conflict.
Give Trump credit, then, for recognizing the ripeness of the moment in the Middle East. Give credit as well to the leaders of Israel, UAE, and Bahrain, who recognized that a window is open right now for peace and closer regional ties that might not stay open forever.
After all, Joe Biden has promised to revive his old bosss discredited Iran policythe very thing that helped push these countries closer together. They rightly figured that if Biden wins the White House, the chance to normalize relations will have passed and the conventional Mideast wisdom will return, unfazed by reality, embodied once again by the blob that failed.
I bet Jordan signs on next, the country that took the whining Pali’s in for years, til they got sick of their crap.
But, but, Nancy Pelosi said this was a “distraction” from the virus.
And the media, were all aghast at lack of social distancing and not enough people wearing masks.
It is funny to see, the media taking note of violations of social distancing, rather than saying anything about the reason for the meeting, or anything about the significance of these agreements.
I would be surprised if it didn’t.
She’s an idiot.
“For decades, foreign policy expertsthe blob ...”
The blob! That is so apt. Trump deserves credit because he got it to happen.
People this is bad for:
Israeli leftists- Bibi gets credit. All he needs is a spray tan, and he’s #orangemanbad2 over there.
American leftists- badorangeman gets credit.
American neocons- badorangeman gets credit, prospects for war lessened.
People this is good for:
The people in the countries involved- prospects for war lessened. Prospects for stability increased.
The people of the United States- prospects for another Middle East war that does nothing for the United States lessened.
It won’t last forever, and I’m sure the Deep State is coming up with some gayops to try to ruin it, but it’s all a very positive thing. Trump should brag about it.
Trump was brilliant to avoid the turd in the punch bowl “Palestine”
He knew they were a-holes and wouldn't negotiate in good faith, so he made them an offer fast, they rejected it, and after that, they're out of the loop. The terrorists will be in a different kind of loop eventually.
..................
“If you guys don’t behave, I’m gonna kick BOTH of your @$$e$!”
Bravo Mr. President!!
The Saudi king is not on board yet.
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