Mideast peace is an extraordinary diplomatic triumph
By this time ne t week, the prospects for regional peace in the Middle East will have taken a giant leap forward.
Israeli Prime Minister BenMamin Netanyahu will represent Israel. Crown Prince Mohammed bin ayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi will be represented by his brother, United Arab Emirates )oreign Minister Abdullah bin ayed al-Nahyan. President Donald Trump will preside over the White House signing ceremony of a peace agreement that is the crowning diplomatic achievement of his presidency. And the achievement will grow if, as rumored at this writing, Bahrain Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-.halifa also inks the agreement on behalf of his country.
The president also should be credited with destroying the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate and hunting down the terrorists’ evil leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last year. But giving Trump the credit he deserves is too painful for many in the Blue-Bubble media, who are stuck in the echo-chamber days of fretting about the nuclear deal with Iran, so those accomplishments are generally ignored. Trump also ordered the dispatching of the Iranian terrorist mastermind military commander 4asem Soleimani in -anuary. And the president this month announced that maMority-Muslim .osovo had committed to normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel, as had Serbia, .osovo’s former foe in the Balkans. Serbia will move its embassy to -erusalem ne t year, and .osovo plans to open an embassy there as well.
Trump, assisted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, senior adviser -ared .ushner and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, has fundamentally reworked the alliances and conflicts of the Middle East in less than four years. While the president presides over the historic signing at the White House on Sept. 15, look for those three to be close at hand, along with UAE Ambassador ousef al-Otaiba, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David )riedman. That core group of negotiators led primarily by .ushner, dismissed a few years ago by Washington “old hands” as in over his head has engineered an enormous reset in the region, one that will be counted as a milestone along with the Camp David Accords of 1 78 and the -ordan-Israel peace treaty of 1 4.
Peace agreements are few and far between in a region ravaged by violence since the end of World War II. )inally, momentum seems to be on the side of peace . . . and prosperity. Israeli technology combined with UAE financial clout is likely to carve new routes through the Middle East’s old blockades. The routes will run in both directions: the UAE benefiting from Israel’s world-class tech, and Israel gaining access to the UAE’s e pertise not only in banking and finance but also in nuclear and other clean energy. The UAE also has world-class shipping and logistics facilities, Dubai’s airport is the busiest international airport in the world, and the UAE has already sent an astronaut to the International Space Station and a probe to Mars. This isn’t Must a pairing of two regional powers, it’s an agreement between two international players.
Trump has plenty of domestic achievements burnishing his record, including his Mudicial appointments, ta cuts, regulation-cutting and criminal Mustice reforms. Internationally, he has also accomplished much, downsizing the U.S. military footprint abroad, as he had promised, and reframing America’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, bringing a cold-eyed realism that was long lacking on this side of the Pacific. This squaring of U.S. policy toward China with the reality of China’s approach to the world is perhaps Trump’s most important international achievement.
But the treaty he midwifed between the UAE and Israel and perhaps soon Bahrain is a close second, and the Abraham Accord, as it is being called, will fill a large room in a future Trump presidential library. Oman, Sudan and others may follow, and soon. Even Saudi Arabia in a second term. The Palestinians may need new leadership to see the opportunities that fresh vision can bring. All things are possible when Arabs and -ews grow together rather than war with each other.
A Biden presidency, if it revives the Obama administration’s appeasing of Iran’s theocrats, could shatter this momentum.
)or now, though, the signing on Tuesday at the White House is cause for celebration e cept for those blinded by Trump hatred. That’s not a small group by any means, but all of them will look incredibly small if they ignore or even minimize this moment of unalloyed great news for peace for the world.
Hewitt hosts a nationally syndicated radio show on the Salem Network and is a political analyst for NBC, a professor of law at Chapman University’s law school and president of the Nixon Foundation.