Abraham Accords—Revisited

Way back in 2020, when the United States had a foreign policy team that accomplished things that actually mattered, there was a quiet breakthrough in the Middle East. Called the "Abraham Accords," part of that breakthrough came about because the United States was effectively energy independent, meaning that it no longer had to go hat-in-hand begging for middle eastern oil. And part of it came about because the foreign policy team within the Trump administration took an out-of-the-box, clear-eyed view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rejected the decades-old notion that land had to be traded for peace.

Jeff Dunetz summarizes the Accords:

On September 13, 2020,  a little more than two years ago,  President Trump announced the first of the Abraham Accords deals. The UAE agreed to recognize Israel, exchange diplomats, and begin economic cooperation. Over the next four months,  Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan were added to the list of countries making peace with the Jewish State, and we were told that other countries wanted to hop on the peace train. The Foggy Bottom rumor mill suggested that the big fish, Saudi Arabia was on the edge of joining the accords. But on January 20, 2021, the process ended as soon as Donald Trump left the White House.

Prior to the signing of the accords, Trump's foreign policy team made a few interesting moves:

In January 2020, the President [with typical trumpian overstatement] introduced the “deal of the century,” A plan designed to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians or push them into negotiating. It was more than a peace plan. It was a “setup” of the Palestinians. Trump understood the deal would have one of two results: 

The Palestinians will work with the administration and eventually adopt it with changes, which means there will be peace. 

The Palestinians will choose not to participate in the deal’s creation. The patience of moderate Arab states, already strained because the Palestinians refused to compromise in previous deals, would have their patience strained even further if Abbas declined to work with Trump on a peace proposal. Opening them up to make individual peace deals.

Trump correctly understood the moderate Arab States were tired of the Palestinians’ refusal to make peace. They were tired of carrying the Palestinians. Remember that many moderate Arab states were already dealing with Israel silently behind the scenes.

Of course, because the hated Donald Trump would be given credit for any meaningful breakthrough in the region, the main stream media downplayed the Abraham Accords, allowing this important achievement to go largely unmentioned and never emphasized. And because the Left has a pro-Palestinian fetish, the incoming Biden administration worked quickly to further diminish any effort to extend the accords.

Biden's foreign policy Team of 1s did nothing to further the effort. Mark Tapscott comments on Dunetz's article and the Biden response:

REMEMBER THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS? President Joe Biden clearly doesn’t, considering he wasted no time upon being sworn into the Oval Office in shutting down his predecessor’s historic diplomatic initiative. The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz explains why that initiative was historic:

“The peace deals that team Trump moderated took a totally different approach. Unlike previous administrations (both Democratic and Republican), the deals did not involve ‘land for peace,’ only ‘peace for peace.’

“The supposed peace experts of previous administrations had always bloviated that no Arab country would ever formalize ties with Israel before a Palestinian state was created, but the Trump team proved them wrong.”

Instead of pursuing what worked, Biden has returned to the old discredited formula. Not coincidentally, that formula includes U.S. energy dependence and the U.S. pouring millions of tax dollar down the fetid sinkhole that is the Palestinian Authority. We should hope whoever is Biden’s successor will have this Dunetz analysis at hand as a guide to how to restore hope in the Middle East.

The wreckage created by the Biden administration is astounding. Not only have they wrecked the economy, destroyed our energy independence, tamped down faith in our public health system (via absurd and ineffective Covid policies), among myriad other missteps and failures, they failed to take advantage of a significant foreign policy opening bequeathed to them by their predecessor. Instead, they now go hat-in-hand to a communist dictatorship in Venezuela, begging for more oil and continue to hope that the dictatorship in Iran will see the light and become something it is not.

Our cognitively disabled president is likely unable to grasp the enormity of his failure to extend the Abraham Accords. The leftist minions who populate his foreign policy Team of 1s would rather denigrate Israel than encourage broader peace in the Middle East.