Earthquake

After eight years of a feckless foreign policy by the Obama (Biden) administration that demonized the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and propped up the world's largest sponsor of Islamist terror, we have finally seen a small but still significant breakthrough negotiated by the Trump administration.

Richard Grinnell comments:

For nearly four years, Washington foreign policy experts and Obama administration alumni warned that the Trump administration was jeopardizing any prospects for Middle East peace. By withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, we were told, the U.S. would alienate itself from its allies. By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, it would inflame the anger of millions of Arab Muslims. By recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, it would estrange the Arab states. By maintaining close relations with the Israeli government, it would imperil the lives of Palestinians.

With such a grim record of prediction, Thursday’s historic announcement that the U.S. brokered a normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates — the first Gulf Arab state to announce formal relations with the Jewish State — has the D.C. establishment with its tail between its legs once again. Especially now that so many have accepted prominent roles with the Biden campaign, they might want to consider where they went wrong.

I’d recommend starting with why even the prospect of a Biden administration has been enough to push Israel and many of its Arab neighbors closer together. During the Obama-Biden years, the U.S. prioritized bringing Iran “in from the cold” over regional stability and violence reduction. It also considered Western Europe a higher authority on revolutionary changes to the Middle East balance of power than the U.S. allies who actually live there. The threat of a return to those ways of thinking, and the desire to maximize the advantages of the current administration, helped ink the deal that many saw as impossible.

The Palestinians and their Leftist supporters around the world (including many in our own Democratic Party in the United States) will do everything possible to wreck the work that Trump and the UAE have done. The Dems' trained hamsters in the mainstream media have done their best to minimize the importance of the deal, but even Trump haters like Thomas Friedman strike an optimistic tone:

For once, I am going to agree with President Trump in his use of his favorite adjective: “huge.”

The agreement brokered by the Trump administration for the United Arab Emirates to establish full normalization of relations with Israel, in return for the Jewish state forgoing, for now, any annexation of the West Bank, was exactly what Trump said it was in his tweet: a “HUGE breakthrough.”

It is not Anwar el-Sadat going to Jerusalem — nothing could match that first big opening between Arabs and Israelis. It is not Yasir Arafat shaking Yitzhak Rabin’s hand on the White House lawn — nothing could match that first moment of public reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

But it is close. Just go down the scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region — with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam, pro-ending-the-conflict-with-Israel-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.

It’s a geopolitical earthquake.

Hard-left Democrats like Rep Rashida Talib (D-MI) condemned the agreement while the adults in the party (are there any adults left?) remain silent. The media hamsters will do everything possible to minimize the achievement and to bury news about the agreement within a day or two. And the palestinians? They'll launch rockets, riot, and throw their usual tantrums in a pathetic attempt to have anyone but their leftist sympathizers pay attention to their absurd demands.

Huge? Time will tell. Earthquake? Maybe. But one thing is certain—Donald Trump accomplished something substantive in a region where substantive agreements are rare. He achieved more in 4 years than either George Bush or Barack Obama achieved in 16. That is huge, and it's also an "earthquake" for the Obama Foreign Policy Team of 2s that Biden has indicated he'll re-establish should he be elected.

UPDATE:

The editors of the New York Post discuss the domestic politics of the agreement:

Even Trump’s election-year rival admitted it’s “a historic step,” though Joe Biden’s statement didn’t mention the president who made it happen. Indeed, Biden tried to take credit himself, saying the deal “builds on the efforts of multiple administrations,” including “the Obama-Biden” team.

Well, actually he’s right — in a way: It was his administration’s ill-advised Iran nuclear deal that gave the murderous mullahs billions of dollars to spend on terrorism. The increased threat from Iran brought Israel and most Arab nations closer together in fear of their common enemy, though that isn’t exactly what Team Obama intended.

Thursday’s agreement also makes a mockery of claims by Democrats and the foreign-policy establishment who predicted dire consequences when Trump announced he was moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. What happened instead is that now a third Arab nation has agreed to make peace with the Jewish state, pushing it ever closer to its dream of universal acceptance.

How ironic: President Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize even though he emboldened nuke-seeking terror state Iran and left the Middle East in shambles. Trump isn’t progressive enough for Oslo’s Nobel elitists, but with this deal alone, he’s done more for peace in the Middle East than anything Obama ever did.

The Obama Foreign Policy Team of 2s did so much damage in the Middle East that they very well may have set the stage for Trump's success. But that's like saying that an arsonist who burns down a house set the stage for a competent architect to design a better one.