by
Austin BayNovember 7, 2024
The first Trump administration gave the world the Nobel Prize-worthy Abraham Accords, an extraordinarily inventive and initially productive diplomatic framework for normalizing relations between Israel and key Arab states. Can the second Trump administration (Trump-Vance) revive it?
The Biden-Harris administration's Middle East policy destroyed the Abraham Accords promise and its genuine initial progress.
In a column written in 2021, I characterized the Biden-Harris administration's Middle East diplomacy as structurally incoherent and plagued by mixed messaging.
As the Biden-Harris administration fades into the Trump administration 2, that column had unfortunate prescience.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was operationally and tactically incoherent. The White House's gauzy yet diffident declarations didn't jibe with the disaster we witnessed.
Biden-Harris Iranian diplomacy was incoherent and repeated the worst of the Obama administration's Iran blunders: promoting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The JCPOA was the ostentatious name the Obama administration slapped on its Iran nuclear deal. Biden operatives Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan logged a lot of time and miles trying to sweet talk Iran's corrupt and violent ayatollah regime.
Yet Bidenite efforts to reshape the Middle East by paying off Iran failed as miserably as the Obama administration's (which they modeled). Iran has never halted its nuclear weapons development program. When implementing his JCPOA, Barack Obama gave Tehran's robed dictatorship billions of dollars. Biden and his retainers relaxed economic and political sanctions, which put petrodollar billions in Tehran's coffers.
In 2015 and after 2021, Iran's brutal regime used the cash to finance terror attacks and wage proxy wars. In Trump Era One, sanctions starved Tehran.
In 2023, Iran's cash hoard financed Hamas' Oct. 7 atrocious assault on Israel -- the deadliest murder of Jewish people since Adolf Hitler's Nazi Holocaust. That war threatens global peace. Israel fights three proxy armies and Iran itself. This year, Iran and Israel traded strategic attacks. Thankfully, the missiles and bombers delivered conventional munitions, not nukes -- at least not yet.
During the presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. She should be ashamed of that slur. This should shame her as well: Biden-Harris policies gave Iran a cash flow that seeded the Iran-Hamas attempted genocide of Israelis.
In 2023, U.S. security services determined that Biden's special Iran envoy Robert Malley had "helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments" (Tablet, Oct. 1, 2023). In October 2024, secret Israeli military operational documents were leaked by a U.S. government source. Whodunnit? Likely an Iranian sympathizer in the Biden-Harris administration.
Biden-Harris political and diplomatic incoherence -- and potential deceit-- has left the U.S. with minimal leverage over Israel.
The Bidenites conceded the Abraham Accords were a decent idea -- but the ugly fact is they were not pursued because they were Trump's idea.
The behavior was arrogant, self-righteous and small. In real-world policy terms, it was stupid, destructive and ultimately deadly.
Yet the idea continued to interest Israelis and Arabs. In mid-2023, Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly acknowledged someday he might be interested in Abraham Accord discussions. (See his interview with Fox News' Bret Baier.)
Then Hamas' evil attack ended diplomacy. I saw the attack as, in part, an Iranian operation to stop the Israeli-Saudi rapprochement.
Jews claim descent from the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah. Arabs claim descent from Abraham through Ishmael, son of Abraham's concubine Hagar. The biblical connection helped reframe Arab-Israeli relations as something more than 20th- and 21st-century conflicts. They share blood and cultural connections. The name (a diplomatic stroke of genius), the calculated negotiations supported by U.S. engagement, the Trump-type economic payoffs -- the entire Accords process truly deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
Pray Trump 2 can revive the initiative.