Trump is right. The Foreign Office is wrong
The President’s diplomacy is paying off in the Middle East, but the UK can’t see that the world is changing
The peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is a win for Donald Trump and a win for the world. He won’t get a Nobel Prize; no Netflix docudrama on how he did it. But it is a substantive achievement that nudges the Middle East in a whole new direction. Unfortunately, Britain lags behind. The Foreign Office does not see the potential for progress; it probably doesn’t want to. Someone at the top needs to give it a kick.
The traditional US/UK view is that everything in the Middle East begins and ends with the Palestinians: you have to fix that issue before you can do anything else. Trump was elected on a different prospectus. Israel, he thought, is the West’s one constant ally; the real challenge is Iran. America can’t withdraw its military presence from the Middle East, he reasoned, until it puts Iran back in its box.
Ergo, Trump has reversed Barack Obama’s policies: he relocated the US embassy to Jerusalem and walked away from the Iranian nuclear deal. He launched a charm offensive on the Gulf states, trying to build an anti-Iranian coalition that would include Israel. The UAE’s peace deal is, one hopes, just the first fruit; the administration predicts Saudi Arabia will be next. Sudan’s foreign minister said his own country would push for normalisation and was dismissed from office – yet this is still heady stuff. Sudan was the site of the 1967 Khartoum Resolutions which pledged no peace with Israel, no recognition and no negotiations.
Critics say Trump can’t take credit for an inevitable development. Dismissing his leadership, however, is not only unfair but dangerous. The Middle East is an arena in which the foreign policy consensus has done a lot of harm, so we need to acknowledge and learn from what the president did that was new. He was mocked for deploying his family as diplomats, but it circumvented the State Department and Arab states seemed to like it.
It was wrong, said the experts, to partner so openly with Benjamin Netanyahu, but the back-slapping paid off; and how could anyone deal with the ghastly tyrant, Mohammad bin Salman of Saudia Arabia? Ideally, no one would – but, as an Iraqi once said to me, “in this part of the world, the choice is between bad or worse”. The attempts by Europe to work with Iran have strayed into the latter category.
The US has triggered a process at the UN to reinstate sanctions on Iran. France, Germany and the UK have opposed it. The UK also lobbied against America leaving the nuclear deal, and its response to the UAE peace deal was remarkable for its leaden orthodoxy, almost damning with faint praise. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, welcomed the normalisation of relations, along with Israel’s pledge not to annex land in the West Bank, adding: “There is no substitute for direct talks between the Palestinians and Israel, which is the only way to reach a two state solution and a lasting peace.” To repeat: “There is no substitute.”
Well, there is, and this is it. The UAE’s move has shown that Arab states can be persuaded to deal with Israel if they face a greater threat, namely Iran. So why, even when the Iran nuclear deal is dead, won’t Europe accept the new dynamic and follow Trump’s lead? The other curiosity, of course, is why Brexit Britain is falling in line with the Europeans at all, and why it sticks to outdated formulas on Israel like a parrot reciting the Nicene Creed.
Lack of bandwidth is one answer: in the middle of Covid, the Government just can’t process events. Another is the Foreign Office’s prejudice against Israel, fuelled by guilt for the way we carved up the Middle East. As the foreign policy thinker Ed Husain points out, this is likely to get worse because the Department for International Development is about to be rolled into the Foreign Office, stuffing an already biased department with “Left-leaning” bureaucrats whose raison d’être is to hand out cash as penance for British imperial history.
There is a third calculation: Trump is going to lose the election, putting the Democrats – and the State Department – back in charge. But even if this is correct, why not recognise that the Trump doctrine has brought real movement to Middle East politics, that the anti-Iranian coalition could be the basis for an Arab détente with Israel and that the Palestinian question could be settled on a new, more realistic basis?
Never mind what the Foreign Office feels comfortable with, let’s start by examining what Britain wants and needs in 2020. Several Arab states like and trust us and Israel is always ready to talk, so why not make ourselves indispensable to this process as the champions of engagement? The long-term destination remains peace and it would be an act of utter madness not to walk through that door just because Donald Trump was the one who opened it.